Our time here in Chiang Mai is running short, and our last planned activity for here is to go up into the mountains and take a zip-line adventure called Flight of the Gibbon.  The Gibbon is a member of the primate family, and in times past the jungle around here would have had many of them flying through the tree tops, so we will go and do our best monkey impressions leaping from tree to tree.

Laurie originally stumbled across this activity while she was doing research on things for us to do in Thailand – to be honest I was a little skeptical about the whole thing as I could not initially see how sliding across a few zip lines seemed like a good use of my $65 USD.  If I wanted to fly across a zip line I could just do it over in Vic’s yard for free 🙂

I am happy to say that in this case I was wrong, as the experience was well worth the admission price, and given the chance I would definitely do it again.

For your package price they pick you up at your hotel in the city and then take you about an hour out into the jungle and up into an isolated valley to the east of the city.  The jungle canopy is so dense that my GPS receiver has trouble tracking the satellites us as we climb up the hillside in the van.  In fact, as we make our way upwards I wonder who would even bother to cut a road up into this place it seems so remote.  Well it turns out there is a small village up there (not hill tribe people), and it is one of the areas that a number of eco-tourist hotels are and some of the homestay places you an find in the Chiang Mai area.

The actual tour starts out at the main office where, after signing our injury waivers (Vic, you need to have some of these for your place), we meet our skyguides Mr. B and Ken, and get suited up into our harnesses.  The skyguides are there to assist you along, and enforce the safety procedures, but also to make you at ease and add some ‘flavor’ to the adventure and make the trip more enjoyable.  Our guides are fantastic at their job, and all through the trip they are cracking little jokes or taking about the area and how the attraction was built, or what the locals do in the valley, etc.

The adventure itself begins when you step off the road and onto a trail into the jungle – the rain forest here is about 1500 years old, and the size of some of the trees is overwhelming.  The course criss-crosses a sharp valley going back and forth as we descend a total of about 400 meters from start to finish.  There are 12 zip lines covering a total of over 2000 meters in length, along with 2 sky bridges, and 3 repels – 7 meters, 14 meters, and the final drop of 45 meters at the finish.

The entire time you are literally right in the canopy of the jungle with fig trees, palm trees, banana trees, etc. all around you, and when you stop to look down the jungle floor seems like a long way down.  Part of the procedure they run you through at the start is to secure all of your stuff to your person (like your glasses for example), as they carefully point out that anything that falls off would be lost in the jungle forever.

The whole course takes about 3 hours to complete (we are a small group of 8 people), and each zip line offers some different variant of speed and/or length and different surroundings so that you never feel like you have repeated yourself.  The last platform comes what seems like far too early, and they give us a drink to re-hydrate and then load us up in a van to go back up to the office where we get a light dinner before we have to head back to the city.

Words and pictures cannot really do the whole trip justice, but suffice it to say that it was a very tranquil adventure, and I would recommend it to anyone without hesitation.

This is our last adventure for Chiang Mai – we have one more day here, and I’m sure the girls will hit the market, and we will all just unwind a little before flying back to Bangkok and getting ready to head home.  I will of course make sure to allocate some time to get a massage before we leave, as I am not certain if we can find a reputable massage spot in Bangkok 😉

Actually I should take a second to give a little shout out to Sopa an the Sopa Salon – this was a little shop we found across the street from our hotel in Chiang Mai where Laurie first went to get her hair done.  It turns out that she also owns the massage shop next door, and has the reasonable price of 120 baht for a 1 hour massage 🙂  We make several trips here over the 8 days we are here, and Sopa becomes quite friendly with us, offering information about the area and things to do, and even hooking us up with samples of food items the locals eat (that we don’t normally see on restaurant menus).  If you are even in Chiang Mai you should definitely stop by, it is fantastic value, and some real friendly folks.

After taking a day off to relax and get a massage, our next adventure has us going north to Chiang Rai.

Chiang Rai is in the next mountain valley east of where we currently are and is about 250km away.  The roads here are not quite the same as back home, so this amounts to about a 3+ hour drive by car, so we are getting up at O-dark hundred hours (6am) so that we can still get some sightseeing done and not just spend the day in the van.  We set the tour up with our friend Riam from the Elephant trip and her and her husband pick us up in the morning and off we go.

Our first stop is about an hour or so outside of Chiang Mai at a natural hot spring – this must be a frequent stop for tours going through because in addition to the hot springs, there is a collection of shops for tourists to buy things and a few small spots to get something to eat.  The water from the hot springs bubbles up in a few different pools and then also jets upward from one pool in sort of a small geyser.  There is a pool where they say you can soak your feet, but the water is soooo hot that I cannot see how anyone could keep their feet in there for more than a few seconds.  In fact at one of the pools there is a Thai lady with a basket of chicken eggs, and for a few baht she will cook one for you in the pool – she says it takes about 5 mins to cook in that water.  Of course even if you could find a pool that hot in the USA, you could never serve cooked eggs from it without permission from the FDA, a certificate from the local health department, and a food service permit.

From there it is back into the van and a few hours to our next stop – just outside of Chiang Rai we stop at a temple.  Again I am thinking that once you have seen one temple you have seen them all, but once again I am surprised to see something completely different.  This temple (Wat Rong Khun) was built to commemorate the King’s 60th brithday, and is completely white in color.  The entire temple is made out of bricks and mortar, and everything in the complex was built by hand.  They have spent the last 20 years adding new structures and the work is on-going, perhaps to celebrate the kings 85th birthday or something.  Our guide tells us that this is the only temple in Thailand that is completely white like this, and that it holds a world record for the largest, most intricate hand made structure.

Just outside of Chiang Rai is an area that historically has been called the Golden Triangle – this referred to the opium drug trade that used to funnel large amounts of opium from Northern Thailand, Laos and Burma into Europe and North America.  The area now is more commonly used by the locals to refer to the spot in Northern Thailand where Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar (Burma) all connect – in theory you could stand in one spot and be in all 3 places at the same time.  In reality that particular spot is in the middle of the Mekong River, but part of our excursion includes a trip by boat up the river and to the junction of the 3 countries.  We journey up the river a little way along the Burma side (we are not allowed to stop and land in Burma) and then cross over to Laos and down to a small market on the Laos side where we are able to get out and shop for half an hour or so.  The ‘entry’ into Laos does not seem as restrictive, as we merely give some guy 20 baht per person and walk on in.  The boat takes us back to the Thai side, and it is back into the van to journey onwards.

Not far from the river there is a museum that provides some background about the opium trade and the history of the area, but we don’t stop here as we are pressed for time a bit, and have to decide between the opium museum and stopping to see the hill tribes later in the day – Mrs. Columbus wants to see the hill peoples, so we move onwards.

We head farther north to a city called Mae Sai – it borders onto a city in Myanmar called Tachileik, sort of like San Diego and Tijuana does.  There is a river that runs through the center of the city and that forms the border here between the two countries.  Just on the Thai side of the border there is a large maze of shops, and keen on finding a bargain we do our bit to support the locals.  Fortunately for the shoppers in the group we have Riam on our side to help haggle with the vendors – she has clearly done this a number of times, and will not be talked into over-paying for something.  After an hour or so in the market, and a quick late lunch, it is back on the road again to head for the hill tribes.

The hill tribes are sort of like refuges – they are not Thai citizens, and are nomadic peoples that have left Myanmar and Laos to find better spots to live.  The Thai government allows them to stay ‘illegally’ in the country, but does not give them any of the protections it offers to the Thai people.  Each of the hill tribes has it’s own customs and heritage and because they essentially live outside ot the population, the heritage is old and reasonably preserved.  In theory we are off to see a collection of villages where some of these people live and make their hand-crafted goods that they sell to the tourists to support the tribe.  To call this authentic would be like slapping a Mickey Mouse shirt on me and calling me a Mousketeer – I think that most of the whole thing is very staged for the tourists, and for the first time since we got here, I feel a little ‘clipped’.  They charge us 500 baht per person to wander around the village and put on a few simple ‘shows’ of music or dancing.  However when I see one of the long-neck ladies talking on a cell phone, it strikes me that these people are not too far removed from civilization.  The ‘tour’ (which is basically a little kid leading us through the village) takes all of about 20 minutes, and I bemoan the fact that we paid 1/2 as much for this as we did for the entire afternoon of elephant trekking a couple of days ago.  At any rate I guess we can cross it off our list, but I would certainly not recommend anyone wasting their time or money on one of these side trips.

From there is it back in the van for the long ride back to Chiang Mai.  It is dark by the time we get back, and it was a long day for everyone.  The hill tribes aside the trip was definitely well worth it, and once again our guide Riam and her husband made the trip so much better with all the extra help they gave us with talking to the locals, and knowing where to go and what was worth stopping for.