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.