Some people told me that it was essential to bring lots of food with you on the slow boat because they sold either bad food or overcharged you by a lot. So before I went to the docks I stopped at my street vendor again to buy three big baguettes for on the river. Upon arrival I boarded the boat and soon left cruising upstream on the river.

There is not much to be said about the boat ride, except that it is boring as hell and seems to take ages. The boat had old car seats in it so it was not that uncomfortable but after a full day of sitting everything gets uncomfortable I guess. I was quite ok with my book and my music and around 18:00 the boat arrived at the midnight stop at Pakbeng. When I woke up the next day I made sure I had enough food with me and on the boat I went again. It was like the day before, arrival at 18:00 in Houay Xai and I shared a tuctuc to get into the centre from the docks. I went straight into the office of the Gibbon Experience to book the tour and found out that the tour that was recommended to me, and I therefore wanted to do, started the day after tomorrow.

I booked the tour, $310 for three days, and was hoping that the money would be worth it since it was by far the most expensive thing I have done so far. A woman was giving me a hand out for a restaurant in a voluntary house and I decided to drop by after having dinner with some of the people I met on the boat. I said that I had nothing to do tomorrow and asked if I could help them out for one day. They were happy and surprised by my offer and the next day I found myself chopping bamboo and building a small table. Not that it looked perfect, but they were happy with and so was I haha.

The morning after it was finally time to go on the Gibbon Experience. We had a safety instruction video and straight after that they handed each of us a beer with was quite contradicting ofcourse. We were with 10 people and were split up in two trucks. It took us one and a half hour to get to a short rest stop before we went in a sand trail up and down the mountains. After half an hour we arrived at a small town where we exited the truck and walked for an hour to get to the first zipline.

I was a bit nervous at the start but that was completely unnecessary. After one of our guides explained again how to attach your gear to yourself and the zipline I was the first one to go after the first guide. The other guide said that you needed to put the safety cord before the actual roller to go faster and he had already put it like that. So without really thinking about what I was about to do, zip two hundred meters far while being about 50 meters above the ground, I jumped off the platform.

Off I went, and it was awesome. The nerves were gone as soon as I left the platform and I just enjoyed the first zipline. When everybody was on the other side, we hiked towards the next one. There we arrived at a hub of several lines, 6 to be exactly. From there we did a little circuit on the lines to enjoy and get used to attaching yourself to the line and just the ziplining. We left the hub to go to our tree house where we would sleep for the night. We needed to enter the tree house by ziplining into it which was pretty cooll obviously. There was clean water coming out of the tab, there was a cold shower and a squatter toilet. The guides would boil water in the kitchens that they had throughout the forest (there were 7 tree houses and something like 4 kitchens I'm guessing) for coffee and tea and the cook would zipline with food for us. The meals were nothing special but that was to be expected being in the jungle. We went to bed quite early that day since there was no electricity and the solar power was empty around 19:00.

Around 08:00 we got breakfast. The other tourists were fascinated by the singing gibbons in the morning but since I had experienced this already during my voluntary work I just continued sleeping again (they sang around 06:00 in the morning). After breakfast we went ziplining again. We hiked and ziplined a lot and we visited all the other tree houses to have a look at them. Tonight we would sleep in another tree house where we could actually see gibbons. On our way there we passed by the biggest zipline on our trip, which was 100 meters above the ground and about 550 meters long. It was very cool to just fly through the air at such a height with such a speed. When we arrived at our new tree house, we dropped off our small bags and went back to the hub of ziplines where we could zip until it became boring. I also managed to take a really cool picture while I was on a big zipline. I started breaking from the start and ended up in the middle to take a cool 'zipline selfie'. After dinner we played some card games, the guide sang some songs and told some stories and then we went to bed.

The next morning after breakfast we hiked up to the hub again. It was time to head back to the village but before that we were allowed to to a couple of circuits again. By the time we were back at the village, we just had to wait for an hour for our pick up to arrive. I gave the local kids some of the stickers with the rolling eyes that my mother to give me to the kids when I was teaching. The first one was a bit scared but when they realised what I was handing out there was a big line of kids waiting for a sticker.

When I got back in Houay Xai I jumped in a minivan to get to Chiang Mai. From there on I will be travelling to Bangkok where I meet up with Philipp and his girlfriend. In the meanwhile I got good news from the voluntary organisation. I asked them if I could come back for something like a week to bridge the gap between the 25th of february, last day of Philipp, and the 8th of March, when I can finally pick up Ryanne from the airport in Bangkok. They were happy to have me again and I just needed to call Phil, the coordinator, when I would be arriving in Singburi so that he would arrange a pick up.

I stayed a day in Chiang Mai and later that day I would take the night bus to Bangkok.