Yes, a bear!
But first ... after Luang Prabang, I decided that I wanted to see
Northern Laos, and the most obvious route was to start with Huay
Xai.
There were two choices getting there - the slow boat (click for photo of the slow boat)
or the speedboat. I chose the slow boat, which entailed a two day
(nine hours each day with a stopover at a nice town halfway) boat trip
up the Mekong river. The trip was comfortable and the scenery was
beautiful. The speedboat is a souped up, high speed boat (click for photo of the speedboat)
that makes the trip in six hours. However, the speedboat is
cramped, cold, and quite dangerous, with some fatalities in the recent
years from them flipping. I was actually more concerned about my
luggage (including expensive photo gear and my laptop) than myself and
I had plenty of time, so, call me chicken if you will, the slow boat
seemed a good choice. Here are some videos of the trip -
|
 Sunset over the boats at Luang Prabang. click to enlarge |
| The boat made many stops and was
good for scenery and photographs. Aboard was about thirty
people, half Lao and half foreigners. One of the "falangs" on
board was a Danish girl I kept running into at several places in Laos,
and we were both on our way to the "Gibbon Experience" (more on this
later). In Pak Beng, at the overnight stop I was wandering around
at night and happened upon a group of Lao people sipping some type of
home brew licquer out of a long straw. They invited me to sit
down and drink with them, and they also gave me a sweet potato.
I entertained them with my Lao language, but since it was so cold I
soon went back to my two dollar and fifty cent hotel and retreated
under the covers. The second day was nice as well but everyone
was anxious to arrive. Last year I spent six days straight on a
boat in the Amazon so this seemed like nothing for me. So, I
kicked back with my Tagalog (language of the Philippines - I am already
practicing) book and enjoyed the ride. See some photos below... |
 This was taken from inside our boat looking at another. I exposed for the outer boat and used flash to light up the dark (inside) foreground. |
 Halfway up the Mekong we stopped for the night at a town named Pak Beng. It had a bad reputation (excessive drugs) but I found it just fine. |
 There were always things to see and photograph on the shorelines. |
 The scenery was beautiful, with rugged mountains and rustic villages along the way. |
| In Huay Xai, I found a four
dollar hotel with a hot shower and I enjoyed the scalding hot water for
an inexplicable
amount of time. After being so very hot, for so very long, in
Cambodia and Southern Laos, it was amazing how sensitive to the cold I
had become. I also went to the "Gibbon Experience" office to
check in and receive instructions for the following morning. This
side trip turned out to be one of the highlights of my trip so far, but
surely
had nothing to do with travelling in Laos. For three days and two
nights a group of twelve tourists went into the forest of the Bokeo
National Reserve and slept in elaborate
treehouses. Specifically, our
group of twelve was broken up into three treehouses, one with four
people, one with two people, and I got very lucky to be in treehouse
number one with 5 other people. As these treehouses were sperad
out
we were mostly with our subgroup for the three days. Here is the
fun part - the
treehouses are all linked by zip lines and to enter or exit a
treehouse, or go between them, you slide down the ziplines. The
system of thirteen zipilines is a masterpiece of engineering, the
brainchild of some strange French guy. The idea of the Gibbon
Experience is to protect the forest from logging. They have two
mazes of ziplnes and each day there are two groups of 12 living in
these treehouses (our group in the three treehouses and 13 ziplines,
plus another group of 12 in another part of the park a five hour hike
away). The cost is 140$ for three days and two night, so each
night they generate up to (24 people*70$perperson per night =)
1680$.
They then take 40% of this (=672$ per day) and directly pay villagers,
park rangers, and everyone else to protect the habitat from logging,
poaching, or anything else. |
 In Huay Xai there wasn't much to see or photograph, so I worked at a panning motion shot - very hard because you must pan the camera perfectly and shoot at a slow (1/10 sec) shutter speed. |
 I slept in this treehouse (much bigger than the photo shows) with a really fun group (Kiwi girl, two Finnish guys, and two Irish girls). We joked, zipped, got drunk on lao-lao whiskey, and zipped some more. |
 The views out of the treehouse were beautiful. Unfortunately there wasn't much (aka, hardly any) wildlife to be found. The Hmong villagers ate every amimal in sight for years until this program started and it will take a while to repopulate the forest.. |
 In the mornings, and in between zips we were hiking all around the forest (click for photo). Here I used shutter drag (mixing slow shutter speeds with flash) plus a different camera angle to make an interesting photo. |
| Some of you are
still probably saying "what the hell is zipping, anyway?" A
zipline is a tight line stretching between two points, designed to be
slightly downhill so you can slide down it. If designed carefully
(and these were designed nearly perfectly) you come to a stop right at
the end without smashing into the end platform or having to pull
yourself too much. In between the zips you must hike up a bit to
make up for the lost elevation. You use a harness and a pulley
apparatus (click for photo) to hold
yourself onto the zipline then you take off (click for photo). To enter the
treehouses (click for photo)
and to exit you go on ziplines. Some of the ziplines are really
long (up to 500 meters = over a quarter of a mile long) and they are up
to 150 meters tall (= almost 500 feet!!!!). (Click for photo) They say a picture is worth a thousand words. The photos above probably give you a rough idea. I would like to add that a video is worth a thousand pictures (as, it literally is a thousand pictures). So, to give you some real insight into zipping here are some videos (make sure to have the sound on your computer on when playing the video)
What a blast, huh? It got even more intersting though - once I did a zip and as I neared the finish platform ... there was a bear on it! (click for video of the bear) I grabbed the brake and stopped short in amazement. It turns out that the people from the Gibbon Experience rescued the bear from a market where it was probably going to be sold to a Chinese person for it's gall bladder or some other silly thing - Sorry for all those Chinese out there ... but please just use Viagra instead of rhino horns, tiger penis, bear parts, shark fins, or anything of the sort. Anyway, the bear roams freely but they also feed it. It is semi-tame but unpredictable - you cannot pet it but you can walk beside it (click for photo of me behind bear). It is only a year old, named Bola, and when it gets to be two it will be dangerous (and they hope it will want to be on it's own in the forest). A couple of times, though he tried to playbite me - when a dog does this you sometimes let him gently, playfully bite you. But when it is a bear you seriously pull your leg away. So he was not easy to control or predict and often he would just want to walk with us (click for photo of me walking behind the bear). It was particularly difficult to get up and down from the zip platforms because he liked to climb up and down the steps, often trapping you up there - oh yeah, also the bear has a hugely fat ass (click for photo of me on platform with fat ass bear). We didn't see any gibbons (perhaps we were the gibbons) but we did hear some. We just saw the bear, a giant squirrel (who would run into our treehouse when we were gone and lick the sweetened condensed milk can) and a couple of pesky monkeys (click for photo). What fun, love and happy holidays, Ed |
