Southeast Asia

I slept terribly last night. Sharing a bed with a strange guy was awkward, but not the end of the world since we had separate blankets and curled up in our respective corners. What really killed the possibility of any sleep was the fact that he snored, extremely loudly and without pause, all night long. I don’t think I had more than 1 hour’s good sleep.

Woke with the sun rise at 7:00. The jungle looked beautiful at that time of the morning since all the cloud was yet to lift and condensation dripped from all the leaves. Breakfast was traditional Laos food, very similar to dinner actually. I had chat with Liz and a few of the guides over breakfast. They were very surprised to hear about the article I had found on the project and obviously had no idea that it had been written.

There were 2 options for today, the first was to take an 8 hour hike to the waterfall. I’m sure it would have been beautiful, but I opted for the second option which was to stay and play on the zip wires. I’m sure I’ll have opportunity to see many more beautiful waterfalls in Laos, but the zip wires are a once only opportunity. A few of the guides suggested some of their favorite walks for me to take through the jungle. I eventually decided to take my book (just started on ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’) over to tree house number 3 which involves a beautiful walk through the forest beyond the zip wires. I had to take 3 zip wires before I even reached the beginning of the walk, they are so much fun. It was a gorgeous walk because it was in a different level of the forest, it took about 30 mins and I had to zip wire into the tree house. No.3 is a much smaller tree house than no.1, but it is in the most amazing position. Unlike tree house 1 which is in shade early in the mornings and late in the afternoons each day because of the mountains, tree house 3 would have a completely unimpeded view of the sunrise and sunset. I sat and read for a few hours before walking back to the zip wires, but instead of using them to get back to the main tree house I decided to walk up the mountain and around the back of the ridge which was completely exhausting and took over an hour. I could feel every muscle in my legs burning after the hike up the mountain yesterday.

I hit my head on the zip wire coming back into the tree house, which I barely noticed at the time but tonight is very red and beginning to scab although it looks much worse than it really is. Back in the tree house I spoke to Liz and played with the resident monkey who was abandoned by its mother and donated to the Gibbon experience with the hopes of re-introducing it to the wild. Although Liz was telling me these monkeys are reluctant to accept a new member to a family group, particularly a female, so if assimilation is not successful she will remain a member of the Gibbon Experience family. It was also explained to me that tonight is not only new year for us, but also for the Hmong people since tonight is the new moon, it is rare for them to coincide. Because of this many of the employees were not working and instead were down in the village preparing for tomorrows New Year celebration.

For the rest of the afternoon I had planned to read my book, but I fell asleep instead, I hope I get some more sleep tonight. Early evening, just before the sun set and it got too cold I took a shower in the tree house. The water comes from a natural spring further up the mountain and is therefore safe to drink, which makes it the only safe drinking water in SE Asia. The shower was freezing and the floor was lattice, it was a weird sensation to look down and see all the water pouring the 40m down to the jungle floor.

Dinner was similar to yesterdays, although we were allowed wine because it was NY. That was actually a big surprise since they have a strict no alcohol policy which is fair enough considering the living in a tree thing. Even so, one of the villagers also came by with a bottle of lao lao (rice whiskey) just incase the wine wasn’t enough. I thought the wine was delicious, perhaps because I haven’t had any since Australia – its very expensive here, but apparently its not the right thing to give French wine to a Belgium couple, an Austrian couple and an Italian guy. It has become quickly apparent to me that when you take one European couple and put them together with another European couple they do nothing but bitch and whine about anything that’s not European, and more than that, not from their respective European countries (I’m sure that there are lots of Europeans who are not like this, its just that I’m yet to meet them).

The sun sets here at about 6:00pm and since there is no electricity it’s difficult to achieve anything after this time. Hence staying awake until midnight to see in the NY was not really an option. We spent an hour or so looking at the stars through the telescope in the tree house. The sky is so clear here and there is so little light pollution that you can see hundreds of stars. The American geologist pointing out the planets which was interesting, but about 9:00 we all gave up and went to bed. Although not before the resident cat caught herself a rat in the tree house which she settled down to demolish throughout the night.

Tags: Laos

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Laos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.