TreeTop Explorer Ziplining

We met at the place where we booked the boat from at 11am, and took the boat back to mainland with mixed feelings about 4000 Islands. Don Det is a beautiful island, but I can imagine it is somewhere that is really easy to get stuck if you can bear the heat. There are a few westerners living there running bars or restaurants, but the pace of life is soooooo slow. Which is nice for a few days but becomes frustrating after a while, although it has taught me the importance of hammock time, I feel a little a day is now essential.

The bus back to Pakse was uneventful, and took about 4 hours. The bus dropped us somewhere totally random, so we had to get a tuk tuk, which helpfully took us around the block a couple of times and then dropped us literally about 500m from where the bus dropped us, nice work!

The hotel was quite nice as in it had air-con, a tv and an actual bed with a mattress as opposed to a wooden box with sunbed cushions on which seem so popular in Laos. The best thing of all was it directly across the road from the Green Discovery people that we booked the trip with.

After discovering that there is precisely nothing of interest in Pakse, we retired to a couple of days or R & R in our hotel room, with the air-con blasting, and a lot of CNN.

The morning of our trip we traipsed all our stuff all of 100m to the Green Discovery office for storage and set off with our daypack for our adventure. After driving in a very nice 4x4 for about an hour on a nice tarmacked rd we turned off onto a real bone rattler for the last hour of the journey. We then arrived in the village of Ban Nongluang and met our village guides. Then we trekked, and trekked and trekked admittedly through some very nice scenery, coffee plantations and small vegetable gardens until wild semi-evergreen forest gradually takes over. But if there is one thing that this experience has taught me is I am no trekker!!! Walking is fine, I can do that, I have been well trained by mum, but trekking is not just walking. The trail went very rocky and there were tree roots everywhere, it was at some stretches quite steep. We passed ravines with beautiful waterfalls and crossed flower-studded plateaus. At some point about 1.5 hours in we stopped for lunch and i was already knackered. We had a very nice traditional Laos picnic lunch with dried meats, rice, vegetable and some spicy sauces.

The first activity we came to is a breath-taking canopy walkway in the heights of the trees and across a steep river valley. The trekking then continued passing the huge Tad Seua (‘Tiger’ waterfall) and leading soon after to the giant ‘Kamet’ fall (name of a monkey), where the water plunges more than 100 m down into the valley. It is a relatively narrow, densely forested basin, with waterfalls seemingly everywhere. This is where the zip-lines start. We went straight in after some safety instructions on the introductory, smaller cables.

The cables crisscross the valley in front of the waterfall, letting you feel the stunning height and the cold spray of the water. Its a very weird sensation being weightless and that close to nature. The first few ziplines were quite small and then they got bigger to about 300m. I think that first afternoon we did 6 or 7 varying size ziplines all the way down through the canopy. After the first couple of go's you soon get into it and its the most incredible feeling.

After about 3-4 hours of ziplining we zipped into the tree house camp. All of the communal areas of the are set on stilts with walkways between them, that includes the restaurant and the showers. Before dinner we had time to go for a dip in the waterfall, to be honest i barely made it down there as by that point my legs had started to seize up. When we got down, it was a little murky and you couldn't see the rocks so it wasn't really ideal for swimming, but a nice place to sit and listen to the sounds of the jungle.

Then back up to base camp for dinner, which was spring rolls and then chicken and sticky rice. It was lovely to be able to sit and have dinner in the trees with the sounds of the jungle and the waterfall all around.

At about 9pm we finally made our way into our own tree house almost 10m above ground. These traditional houses, made of wood, bamboo and grass, can only be reached by a zip-line.

            
The treehouse was lovely if a little scary at first. There were two beds with mosquito nets, and a little table with two chairs, and yes there was a toilet with a sink. The night was stayed it was pretty windy and the wall around the outside of the tree house was not that high, so it took a little getting used to. But all in all it was pretty awesome, a once in a lifetime experience and surprisingly we both slept very well.

Waking up in the morning 10m up in a treehouse is an odd experience, but lovely all the same. From our treehouse we could see the monkeys playing on the cliffs around the waterfall which was lovely. At about 8am our guide came and collected us from our tree house.

We had breakfast and then set off for the first trek. I have to say that a nights rest had done nothing to help the state of my legs and I was walking like a decrepit old woman, it was quite embarrassing. Anyway there was no way i was going to miss this, so i soldiered on. We trekked for about an hour before reaching the first zipline and 350m and then the 400m big one. I have made a little video of them, to try and give you an idea. The footage is not great as the camera was hanging from my harness but i hope it gives you an idea of how very, very, very high and scary this was. The proximity to the usually invisible upper level of the forest is an amazing and unforgettable experience.

After trekking back to camp for lunch we picked up our bag and prepared for the long trek (that bloody word again!) back to the village for our transport.

There is no way that i can convey to you how much pain i was in at this point. It was like my legs had just given up, so there was a lot of huffing and puffing and water breaks, all very dramatic. To be fair there were a couple of points where I seriously pondered how they would get me out if i just couldn't walk anymore. Then they threw one final hurdle at us when the trail suddenly ends at a steep rock wall. The way is now narrowing into a ‘via ferrata’, where iron U-bolts are fixed and glued into the rock. You have to do this to get to the other side. Well i did it, i don't think it was very pretty or elegant, in fact I am sure it wasn't, but I made it. You then reach the top of the mountain, one of the highest peaks in the area, an open, almost vegetation-free plateau affords once more – and for the last time – stunning views of three waterfalls and vistas over the Mekong deep into neighbouring Thailand. Its then a further 1.5 hour trek back to Ban Nongluang, where a car was waiting to take us back to Pakse. I was at that point close to the point of collapse.

We got back waddled to the bakery around the corner (the food in Pakse was shocking, thank god for bakeries!) for take-out and collapsed in our hotel room in a heap of pain, but still very high from the experience.

The time now is the ideal time to go to Vietnam, so that is next on the agenda. After being told that the visa application can be quite long, we thought what better place and cheaper place to wait it out on Otres Beach in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. Bus tickets are very cheap and we had been told that it was one of the cheapest places to get a Vietnamese visa.....