Treetop Adventure

Zip lines! Treehouses! Jungle hikes and adventure! It was all just too good to be true. I had been playing email tag with a guy who's name was showing us as Thor from the second half of November all the way up til Phnom Penh, and eventually worked out our reservations: we were going to be leaving on January 2nd for the two-day, one-night adventure.

The spot where we mustered for the trip was maybe a hundred feel away from the hotel with the tiny room, and when we got there we stashed our big bags upstairs. We had been informed to pack smaller bags for the day-night-day adventure, seeing as how we'd be hiking all our stuff in and out.

Here's a sidecar supply delivery guy piling up provisions for our weekend. There were thirteen or fourteen of us, so the pile was serious:

Then the drive.

We piled into these Hyundai people-mover vans like sardines, and off into the hills we jammed. The sky went from hazy white, to hazy baby blue, to fully blue in the forty minutes it took to get out of a "city". This was officially Paxsong. Then, we turned down a dirt road and the driver turned and smiled and said, "Only a half hour to go!"

And then the driving adventure started. That was thirty minutes of the bounciest, the roughest, the most destructive swath of "road" I've ever seen. We were thrown around like rag-dolls for a half an hour, coming out all bruised and weary.

We were weary still from all the biking and hiking at Angkor, and here we were getting our asses kicked by a drive. And Corrie was still pretty sick, but feeling well enough to keep up with the trip.

Finally the roughest half-hour we'd had so far was done, and we were able to grab a snack as we waited for the rest of the party. And the gear.

We had to put on all the harnesses and helmets before we started hiking. The tiny village where we started was cute and it seemed like every single person grew coffee cherries and dried their own beans. (I bought a bound for a few dollars when we were leaving.)

We started walking down a dirt road, very bombed out and similar to the rough one we rode in on, and eventually it turned into green and lush jungle:

Then the hike got rough, and my knee, which hadn't quite recovered from the Angkor shenanigans, was struggling to keep up with my spirit. Corrie, of course, soldiered on like a delirious shaman, her fever spiking. We realized it broke at some point during the heat and humidity of this first day. And I say heat and humidity with respect to living in Long Beach; it was between 75 and 85 degrees with 70% humidity, and this is the cold season.

We came to grassy clearing:

And the crew started setting up banana leaves on the ground like a table. Then then set up the food we were to eat for lunch right on the leaves. It was the most traditional meal I might have ever eaten in any of our travels. We rolled up sticky rice in our hands like clay and dipped it into a wide variety of grub, some better than others. Here's the leaves with only some rice and pork jerkey, before the food really came out:

Unfortunately, both Corrie and I got sick (differently than she had been), and we're petty sure this meal was the culprit. In any case...

After the lunch and the rest, we hit the jungle again and got to our first wires. Here's my brake, a stick:

The first wires were walking ones, holding the top wire and inching along the bottom, all hanging a few feet above a creek. It seemed silly, like we could just hike down and out of the creek-bed, but the point had been to get used to how the harnesses and safety lines worked.

Things got much scarier from there.

We made the first zip line, harnessed in, and stepped off a perfectly good platform.

I have some pictures of the lines, kind of, but really, nothing does justice to the feeling of being a hundred feet off the ground, strapping onto a skinny wire as thick as you thumb, and jumping off. The other end is, in the case of the longest zip-line, 435 m away. That's like 1400 feet, and 45 seconds of zooming over a canyon that opens up to far, far farther than hundred feet down. It was something else. At 1400 feet, you can't even see the end point:

Eventually we made the grounds, and the cliff barrier was pretty cool looking:

But definitely not as spectacular as breakfast view:

Our group was told that if we wanted to shower, we could either: 1) go down to the swimming hole (but it was very cold); 2) try out the shower stalls (also very cold); or 3) climb up to the waterfall and use it as a shower. As dusk was coming in, the waterfall was also the place to get a good look at the sunset. These reasons together wee just the motivation corrie and I needed.

I chose to "shower" in the waterfall, and the following picture is the last I took before I dropped the camera, my shirt and shoes, and headed off for the water:

The time under the falls was mystical: it was me and the water from a thousand years of storms and humidity. It was me and nature, nature and herself, the mist and roar and cold water...it all felt so good, worthy of the dangerous barefoot hike along the slick rocks.

That night the generator died, so the only lights anyone had were the headlights we all seemed to have brought. After dinner we were brought in tiny groups to our zip-lines that took us to our treetop bungalows. It was dark and we couldn't see how high up we were. We made it to the tiny bed, slipped under the mosquito netting, and fell asleep staring out at the stars.

This next picture is a look at one of the tree-houses, but, specifically, NOT ours:

This is the view the next morning from ours. Those broad skinny leaves, I feel obligated to mention, are half as big as me. that's when we realized how high up we were:

We went on eleven more zip-lines that morning before coming back and packing up, and starting the hike out. Through all the ass-kicking hikes and fever breaks and battles to be the first in line at the toilet I called out to Corrie, in the middle of trying to catch my breath, "Does this mean we're not up for a jungle safari?"

She called back, "We're on a safari right now!"

Yup, we absolutely were.

It was during the hike out that Corrie and I made a conscious decision to take it easy once we got back. Lounge on a beach or something...

We had one last harrowing part of the trek left: the thirty meter rock climb up and out of the canyon.

This was done with rebar loops that were drilled into the side of the mountain:

The path went up, then snaked around the face, then up some more, then a little back tracking, and then up to safety. And if you were about to shit your pants before...

We chose a different driver from Paxsong to Pakse and made it back last. We went across the street to the Sala Champa Hotel, and ended up with the largest hotel room I've ever paid for myself, directly across the street from the smallest room I've ever had. Cool symmetry there.

It was also the site of the Greatest Shower Ever, but that's an anecdote for later...