Bokeo Province - Laos
Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress
In the movie Return of the Jedi the forest moon of Endor was portrayed as the home of the Ewoks. Relatively small creatures, not particularly technically advanced, they lived high amongst the trees in tree houses built on relatively large platforms. Whilst the Ewoks were considered to be cute, there was always a small component that lay hidden inside of most people that wanted to kick the living shit out of these fur balls because their adorable and charming aspect quickly ran its course. So to when Jai Lee and Sa Va announced their presence online via that distinctive zip line hum, well, I felt like picking up these two Lao Ewoks and throwing them 60mtrs into forest below. The Lao super bug that had gone 12 rounds with me during the course of that night and morning had raised its hands in victory in time to watch the sun rise over the valley and now these almost ignorant dingbats, who knew full well that 80% of us were struggling, were already pushing us to get cracking in order to make a timely rendezvous with the Gibbon Express parked at base camp.
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I may have mentioned earlier, we cottoned on to the fact that Jai Lee was a bullshit merchant from day one. When we advised him of the situation, (the fact that four to six people were really struggling this morning), and questioned him on the duration of the walk and the quickest escape route, this is the dimwitted and none to sympathetic response we received,'We walking, then we zipping, and zipping, 20 min walk up, then zipping, the down maybe 30 min and then zipping’. Dude, just give us a timeframe we all chorused. He laughs and says ‘I don’t know’/ No mate, you do this all the time, how long does it take to get out!? ’We walking slowly, maybe 2.5-3hrs’. Let me just hit this early, this response was a complete fallacy! Complete and utter bullshit really. This walk actually took us somewhere between 5-6hrs, in fairly warm temperatures and in a physical condition that for most of us could be considered to be bordering on somewhere between delirious and that extremely hung over feel, only in a very sickly type of way.
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I guess I don’t need to go through a blow by blow detailed account of the walk out, aside from a few critical moments that remain clear through that sickly, fuzz filled head of mine. The first zips in the walk, for me at least, were torturous. I didn’t care much for the surroundings and was only concerned about being one of the first online so that I could give myself more recovery time on the other side , which in turn was basically just sitting down on the ground, breathing in slowly and hoping that I didn’t need to throw up any time within next 30 seconds. The second critical point was a climb that we did about a third of the duration into the morning, it was physically exhausting, the sun was cutting through the canopy, the Lao dingbats were driving us on for reasons unbeknownst to me and it was then that Jason started to waver. Obviously Jase had been hit harder than any of us by the Lao hell bug and this walk was beating the living crap out of him, but it was only at the point that he fainted on the path that it clicked in my head that this was turning into a very serious situation. A couple of things happened at this point, our Lao guides for their part offered nothing. No support, no sympathy, no advice, other than staring at us in a perplexed, dumbass type of fashion that made several of us want to crush their craniums with a well struck blow from our zipl ine trolleys. For the rest of us, the thought was, ‘what the hell do we do for Jason now?’. Believing that he wouldn’t be able to walk out and having no other form of transport in to pick him up, my thinking at least was that we’d need to get some sort of stretcher in so as to allow us to carry him out. I can only say that after resting for 15-20 mins and allowing Jase to cool down and get his faculties about him, we all breathed a little easier when he got back up again and started walking , a pretty ballsy thing to do in the situation, even more so when you consider that at the point we stopped we were still three hours away from the village. I also remember a relatively long zip later on when JJ yielded to the destructive power of the Lao parasite and looked like she was in the hot zone as she ran for the shelter of some forest undergrowth and trees. It was either this zip or the following one that had a deathly transition from one high long zip via a rather precarious platform, down a few stairs, and onto another zip that was 30mtrs above the ground. I wish I had had the gumption or the awareness at the time to have filmed it or at least to have taken a few photos. Even in absolute health I would have thought, ‘Hey, you need to be alert here, your well being kind of depends on it', but in the current state we were all in it was verging on being moderately reckless. I don’t have any of the stats on the numbers of injuries that take place at the Gibbon Experience but you’ve got to think that at some point along the line serious damage has been done. It reminded me of an instant early on the second day when I was unclipping from the zipline and took a step back to where I thought the platform was only to be warned by a few people watching that the next step would back would have assured me a fall to a torturous ending. If I was on my own or people hadn’t been watching me at that time I’m sure there’s many a bone that would have been broken.
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Approximately 4-4.5 hours in to the walk we arrived at what appeared to be the living quarters for the guides. Most of us were completely wrecked by the time we got there. Resting on the benches outside of this hut we didn’t say much, we didn't really need to. We kind of all looked off into space and thought of it ending or imagined what it would be like to pick up a Coke or Fanta from the village when we eventually got there.
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Another memory I have is of one of the guides telling us that ‘many foreigners’ drink when they’re in the tree houses and thus their illness is obviously derived from the impending doom of the hangover that appears on route the next day. It appeared however that no matter how many times we explained that we had not been drinking and that it was the food that triggered the path to destruction within this group, they just didn’t believe us. Again, I think at that point in time we all felt like attacking the guy and making him feel a piece of the pain that we were all enduring at that point.
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Another memory I have is of one of the guides telling us that ‘many foreigners’ drink when they’re in the tree houses and thus their illness is obviously derived from the impending doom of the hangover that appears on route the next day. It appeared however that no matter how many times we explained that we had not been drinking and that it was the food that triggered the path to destruction within this group, they just didn’t believe us. Again, I think at that point in time we all felt like attacking the guy and making him feel a piece of the pain that we were all enduring at that point.
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From the point that we left this little guide outpost back to the village it was mostly easy walking. Along the way we did run into what appeared to be an overly boisterous, overly excited and ambitious group that was raring to get into their own personalised Gibbon Experience , oh yeah, I remember that time and place, that feeling, that was us two days ago. Look at them, they’ve got no idea as to what they're about to encounter!.We're the stalwarts, we’ve been in the shit, we know the reality of the Experience. The looks on their faces gave them away however, that fear of the unknown creeping initial expressions of intrigue and exhiliration when they saw our pain and anguish, retelling stories of what they shouldn’t be doing or eating, oh and yeah, be wary of those bats in tree house one, they’ll be out to get the rats that will running past your feet all night!
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Once we were out of the hills and onto the flats then we finally realised that this was actually the last leg om this hell day. It was a relatively easy walk back to the village at that moment but by this point we had been beaten from pillar to post. I don’t recall a more unpleasant day hiking since my Year 8 ‘Rambo Camp’ , (seriously, that's what it was called), at Patrician Brothers where for some reason I developed such severe chafing between my legs that I had to walk the last 2kms looking like I had severe elephantitis. Finally, and thankfully we made our way across that crappy little creek that two days ago had looked so quaint, and as we entered the village we all made our way to the only place in the world that mattered at that point in time, the small crappy shop that sold Coke and Fanta. I don’t know where they had imported the stuff from, and not that it really mattered because it certainly didn’t taste like Coke, but those first long sips were the stuff that dreams are made of! Also, to be duly noted, at the side of the shop was a little box that read ‘tips for guides’, or something along those lines - 'So you want a tip do you? Here's one? Get the f*** out of my way and I'll do my best not to smack you across the face!'.
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Once we were out of the hills and onto the flats then we finally realised that this was actually the last leg om this hell day. It was a relatively easy walk back to the village at that moment but by this point we had been beaten from pillar to post. I don’t recall a more unpleasant day hiking since my Year 8 ‘Rambo Camp’ , (seriously, that's what it was called), at Patrician Brothers where for some reason I developed such severe chafing between my legs that I had to walk the last 2kms looking like I had severe elephantitis. Finally, and thankfully we made our way across that crappy little creek that two days ago had looked so quaint, and as we entered the village we all made our way to the only place in the world that mattered at that point in time, the small crappy shop that sold Coke and Fanta. I don’t know where they had imported the stuff from, and not that it really mattered because it certainly didn’t taste like Coke, but those first long sips were the stuff that dreams are made of! Also, to be duly noted, at the side of the shop was a little box that read ‘tips for guides’, or something along those lines - 'So you want a tip do you? Here's one? Get the f*** out of my way and I'll do my best not to smack you across the face!'.
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After a few drinks and a little mental coaxing to get us up and mobile we poured ourselves into the truck for the bushwacking drive back to Huay Xai. Not sure how long the ride back took but I can tell you that through the fog of sleep and dreams I don’t remember much of it. I took a few shots on the drive back just to show how wrecked we were at the end of the drama of the last day.
JJ and Audrey on the ride back to Huay Xai
On the ride back to Huay Xai - I think the look says it all !
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Eventually we found ourselves back in Huay Xai, everyone in that barely lucid state of 'Did that really just happen'. We lined up the Sabaidee guesthouse pretty much directly on arrival. In all truth, quite a decent place with a great view over the Mekong river into Thailand, especially into the early evening when the sun was setting. Not that we really made much of the joint other than the beds that we immediately crashed out on after the much needed showers. Actually, from the point in time that we got there until some time during the next day I don't remember much of what actually went on or whether I did anything other than pick up a few bits and pieces of TV through half closed eyes.
Sunset over the Mekong - Sabaidee Guesthouse - Huay Xai - Laos
Downtown Huay Xai taken from the Sabaidee Guesthouse - Laos
