With the Greatest of Ease

"Are you ready for Monkey Show?"

He seemed inordinately pleased with this bit of English. The Thai people absolutely delight in a 'double-entendre', although the meaning of this one was not yet made clear to us.

With that, and a huge smile, he expectantly looked up into the trees. 120 feet above us, nearly in the jungle canopy, a small platform wrapped around the trunk of a large tree. Shockingly small really. By western standards, perhaps unthinkably so. Something like 8 feet on a side, with a 3 foot wide tree in the middle, that left a mere 2.5 feet on each side. 10 people had until quite recently been gathered on that platform, practically hugging that tree. Oh, I can't forget to mention that they aren't keen on railings.

We had just abseiled down from this ponderous height. Strapped into a rather shoddy looking rope and lept over the edge to descend at an alarming rate. Quite exhilarating, really. The relevant bit however, is that our guide there at the top controlled (if one could even apply that word to the situation) our descent via some kind of well worn metallic device.

Ok back to the "Monkey Show". No... No, let me start at the beginning.

Chiang Mai is a beautiful city. Deep in the Thai jungle, it averages nearly 10 degrees cooler than the concrete jungle that is Bangkok, on any given day.

Additionally, at this stage of our travels and after nearly 2 months in Asia, it is a happy mix of traditional Thai, and modern western. Point and case? Mikes. Chili dogs, cheese steaks, and french fries. Right there on the canal surrounding the old city. A sight for sore eyes, let me tell you.

Our goal however while there was not the sad sight of 3 white people stuffing their faces with chili dogs, but a bit of jungle adventure. Jake (who since Bangkok, and for reasons that will have to wait for another blog post, has gone by 'Jaguar'), Krissy, and I set out to go on a zip line trek deep in the jungle, whatever that means. Krissy and I have been meaning to ride on of these zip lines for ages, having seen advertisements for them all over the world. Generally, such as in Hawaii, the high cost had deterred us. Lax safety standards and knock off equipment to the rescue! For the truly quite low price of 1900 Baht (... something like $65) we signed for not just 1 zipline, but 15! Add to the mix abseiling, some wild canopy-level swinging bridges, a hill-tribe village, free lunch, and a t-shirt, and we're there!

So after picking up a troupe of 6 slightly worse for the previous evenings' wear Irish girls, we head into the jungle. No wait make that 5, they had managed to lose one the previous night, and by our 8:15 AM departure had not yet recovered her... Whoops! They weren't too concerned, so neither were we. I do wonder if she ever turned up... While the trip was a good value, it was non-refundable and by backpacking standards still quite expensive. For comparison's sake, Jaguar was spending 250 Baht/night on his single room, we the a-bit-too-much rate of 400/night for our double. Something like $9 for him, and $13 for us.

Anyhow the road to our destination was long and winding, but truly beautiful. Deeper and deeper into the jungle we went, and higher into the hills we climbed. As time progressed, the roads regressed until it became necessary for the driver to creep along the track, letting the horn go at every (frequent, and always blind) corner, in case another vehicle is coming the other way. This deep in however, that turned out to be a rare occurance. We would turn off our mountain road onto a jungle road, turn off that onto a mere track, and from that to what I swear was an ill-used hiking path.

Finally we arrived into our hill tribe village, which would be our setting off point. After a quick bit of coffee, tea, or water, we were rapidly strapped into full-body harnesses. We were given a strange bamboo stick (to fight off the monkeys, we were told with straight faces), a hair net (of which my hat exempted me - score another for the hat!) and a helmet, then marched off down the road.

And that was that. Zoooooom! Slinging down zip lines of up to nearly 500 feet, one after another, across a gorgeous misty valley, high in the treetops. Wow.

Jungle Flight was the company we went with, and in the end we were extremely pleased. We opted for package 'A', the cheap option. It was well worth it, they guides were a lot of fun, and the zip trek was top-notch! It comes highly recommended, next time you're in Chiang Mai... :-)

Somewhere about halfway through I realized that on the previous zip, I had managed to loose my sunnies. Dang. I made the mistake of leaving the hanging on my shirt after a brief break for some water and the chance to use their "Five star mountain top toilet" as our guide laughingly put it. This turns out to have been labeled 'woman zone' and 'man zone'. For my part, there was a (large-ish) bamboo tube headed down the hillside... You get the point. It did have quite a view however!! Anyway it was my fault, and there was just jungle well below the zipline, so I told the guides to head back after work, and earn a free pair of Oakley sunglasses. Surprisingly, the stopped our group and spent 10 minutes zipping upside-down across the previous line searching for the missing shades. No dice.

So we moved on. The rest of the trek was just as amazing. And then we arrived at the end, our free-fall "abseil" from 120 feet, going on a mile.

After we had all dropped, with just the one guide who had controlled our descent still at the top, there it was:

"Are you ready for Monkey Show?"

We looked up, and suddenly falling from the platform our small dark-skinned Thai guide was plummeting, upside down, with a huge grin on his face. Moments before impact, he made a quick tug at his rope and came to a stop, still upside down and grinning, just above our heads and shouted "Monkey Show!" then dropped to his feet.

He pointed over our shoulders and said "Now time for Happy Ending!".

There was a large sign which read "Happy Ending".

They love a double-entendre, almost as much as a dirty joke. Usually at the same time, and always with a big Thai smile.

To top the day off? As we were having lunch and getting ready to head back home, one of our guides came running up to us - he had my sunnies! He HAD gone searching for them after the tour, but to return them, not keep them. I'd highly recommend Jungle Flight Zipline Trek.

(Sadly all our pictures for this were taken with our other camera, which has a wrist strap so it didn't plummet into the jungle - which means we can't get them into the blog until we are at a PC somewhere, likely after we get home)