Some of you will no doubt pick up on the intended motorcycling pun in the title. Today I have been swinging around the treetops like our primate cousins who took a slightly different evolutionary route. Quite clearly if we were meant to be defying gravity like that, we would also have arms as long as our legs, hands and feet like vice grip pliers and a brain that could not extrapolate what happens if you make a mistake. Flight of the Gibbon is a tour company that runs a ziplining operation in the mountainous rainforest some 50 km outside Chaing Mai.
The small group of thrillseekers taking on this challenge with me consisted of 4 girls and a guy, all from England. I am older than the combined age of all the others in the group, and should have more sense, but I don't. After getting a safety briefing and signing a waiver, we were kitted out in a parachute type harness with all kinds of mountaineering gear attached, and a silly plastic hat about as useful as tits on a bull.
See what I mean about the hat!
We had two Thai guys who guided us through another briefing, then away we went. The bottom line was this. At all times you have at least one safety line attaching you to something. When you are zipping, you have two safety lines. Don't touch the clips yourself, the guides do it for you. Don't touch the cable unless you want to ruin your hands and fingers, place one hand on top of the thing with the wheels in it that grips the cable, and the other on the sling attaching you to the cable. Then jump. For some reason the guys, who insisted on calling me Mark (its Mike, M.I.K... oh never mind), decided that my gray hair implied some sort of expertise, or out of deference for my age, made me go first. Everybody else breathed a sigh of relief.
I stood on a little timber platform attached to a huge tree, got clipped onto the cable, got my hands in the right position, then stepped out into .....nothing at all. Christ!! Gravity took over for a split second as I dropped until the cable deflected under my weight, and the harness pulled tight, then I accelerated forward with the little wheels screaming. I dared not look down. Down to the bottom of the sag (catenary, actually) then up the other side, slightly decelerating now as I was going upwards. The landing platform that should have come into view was nowhere to be seen, mainly because somehow I had spun around and was facing the wrong way. I made an ungainly contact with the platform as a pair of hands grabbed me and I scrambled to find my feet and searched for a hand hold. Then I got unclipped. Wow, I'm still alive! That wasn't so bad after all. The rest of the group followed, and the young adrenaline junkies made it look pretty easy.
And so it went for another 16 stations, as we became accustomed to how it worked and felt, and got the directional stability under control. A couple of tricky bits though. The longest ride was about 800 metres. Think about how far that is, its half a mile in the old money. I thought I was never going to get there before the wheels melted, they were screaming like the knock-off whistle at Holden's. Then there was the station where they clipped you at the back. That means there was nothing to hold onto at all, totally hands free. This was just like bungee jumping or parachuting. You just had to throw yourself forward into space. This was the most difficult station for me. There is a huge psychological block meant to protect us from such folly, and it must be overcome. I kind of froze, I had two attempts at leaving and checked myself at the critical moment both times. The mind started to doubt, I thought for a second "I can't do this", then somehow I just shut my eyes and jumped. As the cable and harness tightened, I opened them again, and I was rocketing towards a large rope net hanging from a tree about 100 meters away. I grabbed at it like a man falling off a skyscraper and after a rather ungainly exit, got to the platform and hugged the tree. My heart was racing fit to burst. Bloody Hell! After that it was all relatively easy. There were a couple of stations where you descended vertically on a rope. These were slow, and not the least bit scary after all the zipping.
At the completion of all this, we returned the equipment and there was an opportunity to get hold of some photos in various formats. Here are a few of mine and some of the professional shots.
The locals looked slightly bemused.
How about this then?
Going down, vertical descent.
Still going down.
Final approach on a section of the high speed zipline.
Landing gear down.
Flaring for touchdown.
The landing area on one of the short sections.
A few rickety bridges thrown in to keep us honest.
The view of this long section is a little scary prior to jumping. Only the first part is visible.
Ok, it's really scary. And if you could see all of it at the same time, it would be terrifying.
Great big tree, tiny little platform, tiny people.
Long Way Down, but its the finish, and its another easy vertical descent. I SURVIVED!!!
The small group of thrillseekers taking on this challenge with me consisted of 4 girls and a guy, all from England. I am older than the combined age of all the others in the group, and should have more sense, but I don't. After getting a safety briefing and signing a waiver, we were kitted out in a parachute type harness with all kinds of mountaineering gear attached, and a silly plastic hat about as useful as tits on a bull.
We had two Thai guys who guided us through another briefing, then away we went. The bottom line was this. At all times you have at least one safety line attaching you to something. When you are zipping, you have two safety lines. Don't touch the clips yourself, the guides do it for you. Don't touch the cable unless you want to ruin your hands and fingers, place one hand on top of the thing with the wheels in it that grips the cable, and the other on the sling attaching you to the cable. Then jump. For some reason the guys, who insisted on calling me Mark (its Mike, M.I.K... oh never mind), decided that my gray hair implied some sort of expertise, or out of deference for my age, made me go first. Everybody else breathed a sigh of relief.
I stood on a little timber platform attached to a huge tree, got clipped onto the cable, got my hands in the right position, then stepped out into .....nothing at all. Christ!! Gravity took over for a split second as I dropped until the cable deflected under my weight, and the harness pulled tight, then I accelerated forward with the little wheels screaming. I dared not look down. Down to the bottom of the sag (catenary, actually) then up the other side, slightly decelerating now as I was going upwards. The landing platform that should have come into view was nowhere to be seen, mainly because somehow I had spun around and was facing the wrong way. I made an ungainly contact with the platform as a pair of hands grabbed me and I scrambled to find my feet and searched for a hand hold. Then I got unclipped. Wow, I'm still alive! That wasn't so bad after all. The rest of the group followed, and the young adrenaline junkies made it look pretty easy.
And so it went for another 16 stations, as we became accustomed to how it worked and felt, and got the directional stability under control. A couple of tricky bits though. The longest ride was about 800 metres. Think about how far that is, its half a mile in the old money. I thought I was never going to get there before the wheels melted, they were screaming like the knock-off whistle at Holden's. Then there was the station where they clipped you at the back. That means there was nothing to hold onto at all, totally hands free. This was just like bungee jumping or parachuting. You just had to throw yourself forward into space. This was the most difficult station for me. There is a huge psychological block meant to protect us from such folly, and it must be overcome. I kind of froze, I had two attempts at leaving and checked myself at the critical moment both times. The mind started to doubt, I thought for a second "I can't do this", then somehow I just shut my eyes and jumped. As the cable and harness tightened, I opened them again, and I was rocketing towards a large rope net hanging from a tree about 100 meters away. I grabbed at it like a man falling off a skyscraper and after a rather ungainly exit, got to the platform and hugged the tree. My heart was racing fit to burst. Bloody Hell! After that it was all relatively easy. There were a couple of stations where you descended vertically on a rope. These were slow, and not the least bit scary after all the zipping.
At the completion of all this, we returned the equipment and there was an opportunity to get hold of some photos in various formats. Here are a few of mine and some of the professional shots.
The locals looked slightly bemused.
How about this then?
Going down, vertical descent.
Still going down.
Final approach on a section of the high speed zipline.
Landing gear down.
Flaring for touchdown.
The landing area on one of the short sections.
A few rickety bridges thrown in to keep us honest.
The view of this long section is a little scary prior to jumping. Only the first part is visible.
Ok, it's really scary. And if you could see all of it at the same time, it would be terrifying.
Great big tree, tiny little platform, tiny people.
Long Way Down, but its the finish, and its another easy vertical descent. I SURVIVED!!!
1 comment:
Older, wiser?? Or just older, more expendable!! And there is something about that "flight of the Gibbon" that is a bit too close to home....Looks like your having fun though mate ;-)
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