Ziplining

Ziplining

 

Before my recent visit to Chiang Mai, one of Thailand’s most popular tourist destinations, I thought ziplining was the layer you zip into your jacket for the winter and zip out again in the spring.  Chiang Mai, the largest city in the northern province of the same name, has a plethora of historic sites, temples, museums, galleries, and markets -- ziplining wasn’t even on my radar screen for the weekend. However, the PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer) friends I met up with had it high on their list and after learning more about it, I decided to go with them. I think it was the favorite activity of everyone in our group. – Of course you can go ziplining in the US too, no need to come all the way to Thailand. But ziplining here has a special beauty because you are in a tropical rainforest about an hour’s drive from the city of Chiang Mai, and it has a special poignancy, because it’s in a gibbon habitat area. 

The tour we chose is called “Flight of the Gibbon” because the lines that zip you from one launching platform to the next mimic the type of route that gibbons take as they swing from tree to tree.  But you can understand the name another way as well:  the gibbons seem to have taken flight from the area where the ziplines are installed. The only gibbons we saw were munching snacks at a feeding station that has been installed for them – and to give us tourists an opportunity to see them eating, from a safe distance. Otherwise, they stayed out of sight.

 The ziplining itself was really fun, exhilarating, and – after the first couple of launches – not the least bit scary. The guides who accompanied our group to hook us on to the zip line and off again treated us very professionally, which dispelled any apprehension some of us may have felt at first.  The views we experienced were extraordinarily beautiful – my photos can’t do justice to what it’s like to see the rain forest from those heights, or to look down and all around you while hanging from a line between two platforms.

As for the gibbons: they are very shy animals, with no interest in noisy tourists clambering up slopes, crossing hanging bridges from one launching platform to the next, and yelling aaah yaay aaah yaaah while zipping between the trees – if I were a gibbon, I’d stay away too. Gibbons are endangered not only because of habitat loss, but also by unscrupulous hunters who steal infant animals to sell as pets – a particularly heinous act because it usually involves killing the mother gibbon to get to the infants. It was somewhat reassuring to read on the website of treetopasia that Flight of the Gibbon invests part of their profits in rainforest rehabilitation and protection of gibbons – if you're interested, you can read more at http://www.treetopasia.com/rainforest-conservation/thailand-rainforest-conservation