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You've done the heritage walk around old Chiang Mai town, soaked up the museums and calmed down at Wat Phra Singh. You've done your tour of tourist duty and now it's time for your reward: a chance to go wild in the jungle.

Zip wires and treetops - but, strangely, no gibbons - await in the high-altitude adventure called Flight of the Gibbon.

"Unlike bungee jumping, in which the thrill is sudden but brief, the zip wire has you hanging in midair for three hours," says local guide Ronaldo.

"The adrenaline rush is endless."

Ronaldo is no relation to Cristiano Ronaldo. Mae Khampong isn't Manchester.

In fact, he says, his name is Nan - a very typical name in the North. Born and bred in rural Chiang Mai, Nan earned a "high living" as a bee hunter by climbing 100metretall trees.

The arrival of Tree Top Asia a few years ago, with Flight of the Gibbon, has changed his life, not just his name.

The Flight proved an instant success among young travellers and fun junkies with its 15 lofty platforms linked by "sky bridges" and two kilo¬metres of zip wire through different layers of the rainforest canopy.

Gravity works overtime zipping you through the valley along the wires, to which you're hooked with harness and pulley.

Ronaldo explains how to slow down in mid-flight.

"If I lift up my hand, pull down on the bamboo brace attached to the wire," he says, referring to the braking device we clutch with both hands.

"Otherwise you'll be stopped by the trees."

Harnessed in and ready to fledge, I'm positioned in the middle of the group as the heaviest.

Reassurances from younger guide Champ - that the wire network was designed by New Zealand engineer and certified to British safety standards - have little effect on my desire to pee in my pants.

"Make sure you have your cell-phone switched on so we can call you if you drop into the valley," Champ says by way of making a very unfunny joke.

It's a short ride to the second plat¬form, but there's something about flying through the air that makes me feel anything is possible. Still, I won¬der what's ahead.

"Does anyone ever get cold feet and just give up partway through?" I ask Ronaldo as we prepare for the second hop - a full 100 metres.

"There is no way to go back," he says. "You have to finish it."

I take off and sweep away from the platform, gravity tugging me along and boosting the speed. I soon find my mild adrenaline buzz yielding to a breezy relaxation. There's even time to look around.

The aerial views of the valley are a treat. From the high mountain slopes, the valley and its resident stream tumble through the thickets of trees, including yang trees - gurjan - that poke up 30 metres.

"In the old days, bee hunters hammered footlong bamboo sticks up the length of the trees to form a stepladder," says Ronaldo. "They'd just climb to the top to get the honeycombs."

I can see part of a bamboo "staircase" in a tree below us as Ronaldo and the crew of engineers lay out more wire. What I still don't understand is how a shard of bamboo, barely notched into the tree, could support a man's weight.

But that's another story for another day.

Ronaldo points out a white wild orchid hanging from a branch. Between the 15 zip runs you listen to the guides sharing tales of the forest, flowers and wild honey … and your fellow travellers screaming.

It's eco-tourism with an adrenaline sweetener.

I get past the first 13 way stations effortlessly, and even start teasing my frightened friends. But the last two stations - with 50-metrehigh platforms linked by a 70metrelong wire - end my lucky run.

The setup is genuinely scary. If anything goes wrong and I plummet from midair, I'll be in at least 10 pieces by the time I reach the ground, which looks all too obtrusive from where I'm standing, complete with a buddy waving at me with a chilled can of beer.

"Tell my mother I love her," I say before yelling my way the whole distance to the last platform.

This, at last, is where you are lowered back to Mother Earth. The guides ask if you want to descend "from the back or front", the differ¬ence being the degree in the adrenaline surge.

Undaunted, I choose the "more extreme" back way.

A wire is hooked up to my back and I'm dropped from the sky. You know in your heart that the harness is totally safe, but logic doesn't stand a chance against the mortal fear of falling.

Hanging in the air with nothing to grab onto, I scream like a drama queen.

Three days of thrills

All this year MasterCard, the Tourism Authority of Thailand, airlines and travel agencies in Chiang Mai are touting "72 Hours Amazing Thailand".

You can mix and match among the promotion's various components - a boutique resort or a grand luxury hotel, easygoing cooking classes or extreme rock-climbing - and the gibbon zip.

Grab the guidebook "72 Hours Amazing Thailand: Chiang Mai" for Bt237 at any Se-Ed bookstore.