Swinging Through the Jungle

I had the most wonderful day today! I signed up to go with the American Embassy on a trip 90 minutes outside of Bangkok to an adventure park called "Flight of the Gibbons". A gibbon is like unto a monkey. I has short legs, long arms and no tail. Since it has such short legs it prefers to do less walking and more swinging through the trees. The adventure park is named after the gibbon because it is made up of about 20 or so zip lines above, and though the trees of the jungle. We would make our way to each one. So cool!

I was with a group of 8 other people and 2 guides. The group included a family of 3 plus a friend (mother, father, daughter and daughter's friend...11 years old), a mid 50 year old woman and about 4 of us women in our 30's (one happened to be a good friend of some friends of mine...we'd never met before but became fast friends). With the exception of one of the group members, none of us had ever zip lined before so we were a bit anxious and some to the point of down right nervous! We started on the first zip line and there was a lot of screaming! Once we got over that, and looked around us at the tops of the trees and saw the butterflies flittering about beneath us we became more and more comfortable. Personally, while I've only been on a little zip line AGES ago, I just sat back, relaxed and enjoyed swinging from tree to tree (not without my fair share of screaming mind you).

The surroundings were beautiful!! Dense vegetation, tall trees and the music of all sorts of different birds. We also heard the laughter and screams and squeals of other groups we knew were out there somewhere but it was impossible to see them through all the trees. It added to the suspense as we wondered what was making the groups ahead of us scream so much!

I had such a great day enjoying the beautiful scenery that Thailand has to offer in a bit of a different way than your typical jungle walk (but we did that too). Playing Tarzan was a blast! And the image of the butterflies of various colors and sizes floating among the tree tops is one that will stay with me for awhile.