TOP OF THE WORLD
ZIP-LINE TO THE HIGHEST TREEHOUSES ON EARTH IN LAOS
During our honeymoon, my wife strapped herself to a steel cable, kissed me goodbye and threw herself off the side of a mountain. I watched as she disappeared into the jungle mist, leaving only her scream. Then it was my turn. I clipped my roller to the zip-line, took a running start and flew high above the canopy as the forest plummeted below. It felt like horizontal BASE jumping. The adrenaline rush turned into wide- eyed wonder as I burst through the fog and glided gently through the open window of a childhood fantasy: a towering threestory treehouse built 45 metres up in the branches of a mammoth strangler fig tree overlooking the rain forest.
“Welcome home,” said my smiling wife.
Were Tarzan to dream up an ecotourism adventure, it would probably look a lot like the Gibbon Experience in northwest Laos.
During a three- day, two- night journey, you’re led deep into the remote jungle of the Bokeo Nature Reserve by guides from the surrounding hill tribes. After climbing up a series of twisting mountain trails, you “fly” over the rain forest on a heart- stopping network of zip- lines — some of which are suspended 150 metres above the forest floor and span more than six football fields. At the far end, you hike up again to continue crisscrossing the canopy on this sky-high superhighway.
At night, you sleep in some of the tallest treehouses in the world – thatched, open-air observatories surrounded by panoramic views of the forest and a symphony of birds. The only way in and out of your airborne abode is via zip- line: You run off a ridge in the forest and gain enough momentum to soar in on one line, then jump out and let gravity carry you on another. Women from nearby Hmong and Lamet villages fly in your fire- cooked meals each night. Every morning, you wake up, slide on a harness and essentially toss yourself out of a 15-storey building.
Not only is this exhilarating ad- venture one of the most unforgettable experiences in Southeast Asia, it’s also one of its most effective conservation concepts. As people from all over the planet swoop in to sleep and play high up in the trees, they’re helping to protect a critically endangered primate: the Laotian blackcrested gibbon.
Due to decades of deforestation and illegal hunting, this sprawling nature reserve between Burma (also known as Myanmar) and Thailand is home to one of the last remaining populations of this rare creature. In fact, the subspecies was long believed to be on the road to extinction when Jean- Francois Reumaux, a French teacher with a passion for forest preservation, traveled from the Laotian capital, Vientiane, to the Bokeo region about 20 years ago. He spent a month living in the jungle and climbing trees to search for the elusive animals.
“I finally got close enough to film them, and when I showed the footage to anthropologists in Europe, they didn’t think it was real,” Reumaux told me over the phone. “So I told them they should come to the canopy and see the gibbons for themselves.”
Thus the idea for a sustainable monkey business was born.
Over t he next several years, Reumaux and a small team of local carpenters and climbers began building seven vertiginously tall treehouses linked by narrow footpaths and a 15- kilometre network of ziplines — all within earshot of the gibbons’ haunting hoots. As backpackers started flying in, the organization convinced the Laos National Assembly to set aside the surrounding 1,350 square kilometres of rain forest as a federally protected nature preserve — an expanse that’s nearly twice times as large as Toronto.
Today, the project employs 142 canopy guides, cooks and treehouse builders. By offering villagers a morelucrative alternative to poaching, logging and slash-and-burn farming, the organization has turned some of the gibbons’ former predators into their full-time protectors. The Gibbon Experience pays 25 armed forest guards — the only ones in Laos’s national parks — to patrol the rain forest and protect it against poachers.
Reumaux says Bokeo’s gibbon population has risen to its highest level in decades. Clouded leopards and Asiatic black bears are making a big comeback, too, he said.
I’m glad I didn’t know that last detail as my wife and I began our adventure by bumping along dirt roads in the back of a pickup truck with five other backpackers. After a two- hour drive through the jungle from the Gibbon Experience’s headquarters in Houayxay, we arrived at the Hmong hill tribe village of Ban Toup, where we met our guides, Phad and Si, who gave each of us a safety harness and zip-lining gloves.
We hiked into the mountains and were quickly engulfed in a riot of twisting vines, studded palm leaves and massive banyan trees. Two hours and one banana- leaf- wrapped baguette lunch later, we couldn’t climb any higher. “Who wants to fly?” Phad asked. My wife shot up her hand. After a crash course in how to zip — legs up, lean back and squeeze the strip of worn bicycle tire that serves as a brake — she was gone, tearing at 64 km/hr through the canopy and losing her baseball hat in the process.
Just as I strapped in and prepared for my first flight, Phad whispered one more helpful hint to me: “Don’t look down.” It turns out that, despite five years of professionally soaring through the sky while dangling on a wire, Phad is terrified of heights.
“I always close my eyes,” he admitted. “But you should be OK!”
Ten 500-metre trust falls later, our group was perched in the branches of our nest for the night, each quietly admiring the architectural marvel. Never mind the rooftop solar panels, suspended bedroom balconies and sweeping 360- degree views, the highlight of our sky- high home was hidden behind a curtain in the bathroom: an open-air shower where cool rainwater shoots down from the ceiling, washes over you and then drains through wooden floor slats and falls into the rain forest below.
About two hours later, as the sun was beginning to set, we heard a faint howl in the forest and perked up. Gibbons? Nope — room service.
Long after the feathered chorus of bulbuls, drongos and kingfishers had quieted and there were no more card games to play, we retired into our net-covered mattresses for the night to listen to the chirping cicadas and mysterious squawking that lay just beyond the reach of our flashlights.
On our final day in the forest, our patience paid off. With dawn burning off the early- morning mist, an eerie, ascending whooping sound echoed through the canopy and jolted us out of our mosquito nets. We leaned over the treehouse railing, quietly scanning through the clouds to find the source of the distant siren call.
Finally, there was a response. Somewhere, deep in the jungle, a second gibbon started hooting back to the first. We listened, completely captivated, as the back- and- forth notes blossomed into a duet.
“They’re singing to each other,” Phad said. “Husband and wife.”
Just as soon as the song started, it fell away. We never did catch sight of the gibbons. By the time the mist cleared, they were long gone, swinging away together through the trees.
WERE TARZAN TO DREAM UP AN ECO-TOURISM ADVENTURE, IT WOULD PROBABLY LOOK LIKE THIS.