Indochina Highlands

Indochina? Embarrassingly at one point we were checking in for a flight and we didn't know that mainland Southeast Asia is also called Indochina. If you knew that, bravo to you! If you didn't, you can save yourself the embarrassment.

Suiting up for the main event: ziplining!

Anyway, our SEA adventure wrapped up with some fun in the "highlands" of Laos and Thailand. The intent was to fly from Bangkok to Luang Prabang in Laos but I (Bill) ran out of pages in my passport and the airline refused to let me board... after they already checked our bags, after we'd already shuffled through security and customs...

This was pretty irritating especially considering I signed a form saying I would take responsibility for whatever the Laotian authorities did with me (meaning if they decided not to let me into Laos I would pay for a flight out, spend a night in jail whatever). Kenzi thought this foul up was on us and so we shouldn't have been entitled to a refund. While yes, the oversight was ours, I cheerfully said I would be happy to take responsibility for whatever happened, it was them that denied me boarding when I was ready to go for a flight I paid for. They eventually agreed to this logic and fully refunded our flights, which was the only silver lining to this since those flights were expensive.

The other fallout from missing our flight to Laos was that we missed a Mekong river boat cruise we wanted to take and lost about $75 in non refundable hotels. It could have been worse...

Instead, we flew the next day to Chiang Rai, northern Thailand, a couple hour bus ride from a land crossing into Laos, where, oh big surprise, I had absolutely no trouble getting into Laos.

Sunset over the Mekong from Laos, across the river is Thailand

Northern Thailand isn't what I'd call mountainous but it is hilly for sure. The highest peaks we saw were around 8000 feet, the valleys are as low as 1500 feet. The temps are notably cooler and the mosquitoes not nearly as plentiful but still out in enough force to make us reach for the bug spray.

Cool dragon banister in Laos

Hanging out with some Buddhist monks in training (novices) in Laos

The entire purpose of going to Laos was to do the Gibbon Experience. We randomly got seated in a Kathmandu restaurant with another gap year couple and they couldn't say enough good things about the Gibbon Experience, so we added Laos to our list of countries to visit.

In short, the Gibbon Experience means ziplining through the jungle to tree houses, yes: you even zipline into the tree houses. The longer explanation is that they have 336,000 acres of land that they work to conserve. They built an elaborate zipline course with tree houses where they feed you and you spend the night. With the income from the zipline course they are able to pay for people to patrol the area to prevent animal and timber poachers. When they find poachers they try to convince them to grow crops instead and then they buy the crops whether or not they need them. Pretty cool.

They offer two trips, 2- and 3-day. We did the 2-day trip. Day one you hike for a couple hours before you get to the zip lines and from there you are hiking and zipping across rugged valleys. After Slovenia and Nepal we know how arduous it is to cross mountain valleys and it's just amazing to take a zipline across an expanse that would take hours to cross by foot. The ziplines range in length from 150 feet to almost 1800 feet. It is of course spectacular fun. On several of them they let people go two at a time if you like. For us this makes for an experience a lot like riding in our plane back in the US where we are seated tandem style (one in front of the other). We got some video and it came out pretty well:

The idea of the gibbon experience is to see gibbons (monkeys) but we really didn't see much wildlife other than this scary, and evidently poisonous centipede:

Centipede seen on the trail! He's about 8 inches long. 

We saw a few spiders but otherwise our treehouse/forest excursion was relatively wildlife free.

Heading off into the jungle!

Cute, happy kids we saw while hiking

Before heading to the jungle they showed a video about what to expect and what the rules were. In the video, they said as long as the sun was up we could zip as much as we wanted... so after checking in to the tree house, I headed off with some other travelers and did about 40 zip line rides... and arrived back well after dark. I got scolded a bit, but what fun!

The jungle view from the tree house

Hanging out in the tree house

The whole Gibbon Experience was very well run. They do a great job of making everything about the experience wonderful.

Walking out of the Jungle through a very dense bamboo stand

From there we took a long bus ride back in to Thailand and spent three nights in Chiang Mai (beyond Chiang Rai), a city that is host to lots of adventure travel, but our target was the Elephant Nature Park (ENP).

ENP is a world renowned organization that rescues elephants from generally crappy circumstances in Thailand and Myanmar. They have about 70 elephants, most of which have some sort of abuse in their background although a few are natively born within the park.

One of the few elephants born in the park

I really didn't know about this but every elephant that gives rides, works in a circus or hauls logs from the forest goes through a nasty "breaking" or "crushing" process where the elephants are chained up in a massive structure and basically treated badly until they behave the way a trainer wants them to behave. They are starved, beaten, and sustain wounds, among other awful things. Some of the rescues are older elephants that just weren't able to perform any longer for their previous owners because of blindness or old age, and so the park takes them in. The park also has many elephants that stepped on land mines laid on the border between Thailand and Myanmar, some of them still have bandages on their legs from this:

Elephant with a bandaged leg from a landmine

Each of the elephants has a "mahout", a person that reads their body language and generally makes sure the elephant is well cared for.

After the floods in 2007 many dogs were abandoned and the park took in 300 of them, and they are just sort of everywhere lazing about and very docile.

Baby elephant and a dog enjoying a nice day

As if 70 elephants and 300 dogs weren't enough, they have a herd of water buffalo roaming around too (saved from the slaughterhouse), we got to see them cross the river where half way across they all would lay down for a bit and enjoy the water:

Water buffalo enjoying the river

All in all the place was very special, I struggle a lot with finding balance between taking care of animals and taking care of people, and for sure there are people suffering in Thailand but its good to see that some work is being done to save these beautiful massive helpless creatures from suffering. At the same time the park employs a tremendous number of locals so in some respects it is a win-win.

We had a spare day and so we took a very docile kayaking trip through the jungle outside of Chiang Mai. Really nice time:

Kayaking in the jungle outside of Chiang Mai 

Next up: Hong Kong, thanks for reading!