Zippy Lining

Today we went on a zip-lining tour through Jungle Flights (whose advertisements are just as common around here as Flight of the Gibbon). A van took us about an hour outside Chiang Mai, although I'm not sure which direction it is because I was asleep on the way over there... and on the way back. This "tour" consisted of zip lining through 22 platforms in a forest, repelling down up to 40 m from a tree, and walking across 2 rickety sky bridges way above the ground. It was quite exhilarating to zip down a rope in a harness and our tour guides were hilarious and kept things interesting. They would entertain us by hanging upside down on their zip lines or shake the rope to scare us while we were on the ropes. It's pretty funny that this is part of the Chiang Mai experience even though we were not in Chiang Mai to do this. The scariest moment for me was dropping down 40 meters above the ground, I begged the tour guides to drop me slowly in Chinese since they had discovered that I was Chinese and kept speaking to me in Chinese. They definitely let go of the rope a few times to let me free fall for a couple of seconds but I managed to keep my eyes open to experience everything. A large insect also decided to fly in my eye earlier during the day, and my blinking effectively killed it but then I had a bug in my eye. That was entertaining.

We finished off the day with a nice lunch but then we were driven to some random hot springs right outside the forest. I'm not sure why they thought it would be appealing for us tourists to see hot springs in 100 degree weather, especially if the springs itself were too hot for us to touch the water. We walked around the fence surrounding the hot springs the size of a large table, cringed at the stench of sulfur, and walked to a coffee stand to get some shade. The driver realized we were not really enjoying this so we went back to the van and went back to Chiang Mai.

Later that night, we returned to the Night Bazaar where I snagged yet another dress and some souvenirs while Haj continued his quest to find the perfect t-shirts (we have already found some really funny ones). We bumped into Brittany and Stacey at the Night Bazaar and walked to Brasserie Restaurant east of the Ping River, where we had some beer and listened to some decent live music. Probably a good idea to get to bed since we have an elephant tour to wake up to tomorrow morning!