Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017

and some from Kaeng Krachan National Park in Thailand:
Thailand - Wildlife - Photo Galleries | ZooChat

 

langur photos are now in the India Wildlife gallery. I uploaded photos of all four Semnopithecus species that I saw.
India - Wildlife - Photo Galleries | ZooChat

Compare especially the Southern Plains Grey Langur and the Chamba Sacred Langur!

 

The Cambodian-Vietnam border is a funny little place, not like any other border crossing I have done before. I was going to do my usual solo-crossing, which would mean a motorbike or tuktuk from Kep to the border, then a motorbike from there to the Vietnamese town of Ha Tien, and then the ferry across to Phu Quoc Island (primarily to visit the Vinpearl Safari). But there is a tourist mini-van which does the same route, with the ferry included, for US$18 which is probably cheaper than doing it by myself (the ferry is US$10 alone). So I took that option.

The leaving time was supposed to be 10.30am but was, naturally, quite a bit later. It didn't really matter because the ferry wasn't until 1.30pm. Normally at a border crossing you have to take your passport to the Customs or Immigration and get it checked and stamped. At this border the van driver just takes everyone's passports in a pile to the counter - nobody checks anything against the individual person. Then all the passengers just sort of stand around waiting until the driver returns with the passports. It's weird but actually much easier than otherwise. The only issue was that they had stamped my passport with a one month exit date when my visa was for three months. I said this to the driver and he says "no, it's fine, let's go". I said it wasn't fine and he said it was. I don't think he was even paying attention to what I was saying. After several attempts I finally got him to take it back to the counter and the officer there simply changed the 3 (for March) to 5 (for May) with a pen.

In Ha Tien, at the place we stopped to collect our ferry tickets, the guy there tried to get people to exchange their US dollars at a rate of 20,000 Vietnamese Dong per dollar because "on the island they only exchange at 18 or 19,000" (the exchange rate is 22,000 per dollar) and because "the only ATM on the island is right up the top a long way from the town" (obviously, being a tourist island, there are ATMs everywhere in the town). Only some people were fool enough to change their money with him. I had a one hundred dollar note in my wallet, which is staying there until I get to Saigon and can change it at a bank, but I also had several hundred thousand Dong as well which I had got in Sri Lanka of all places - a girl I met there had just come from Vietnam and couldn't find anywhere that would change Dong so I swapped her Sri Lankan rupees at a direct exchange rate.

Phu Quoc Island is apparently pronounced as either "foo cock" or "poo cock" with both being acceptable. There was a bit of madness at the pier with scrums of motorbike and taxi drivers vying for the disembarking passengers. There were some mini-buses there as well which appeared to be the cheapest option, and I got a seat in one for 50,000 Dong (coming back to the pier when I left the island, the fare with a ticket from an agent in town was 30,000 Dong). There's only one town on the island, named Duong Dong. Most backpackers stay at Long Beach a bit south of town but I just got off in the town centre and found a place called the Kim Phung Guesthouse for 200,000 Dong (about NZ$12).

I really only had two plans for Phu Quoc. The main one was to visit the Vinpearl Safari, a major new zoo which had opened about a year ago. The second was to look for Indochinese silvered langurs. Phu Quoc Island is the stronghold for this species of monkey but I knew of another site on the mainland where they were supposedly reliable, so if Vinpearl Safari didn't exist I would have skipped the island entirely. Phu Quoc is basically a tourist beach resort now, with everything being more expensive than it should be, so I didn't want to spend too long there.

The next morning I went to the zoo on the free bus which handily left from just near my hotel. See the review here: Vinpearl Safari Review - 1st March 2017

I was at the zoo for most of the day (five hours or so), so the monkey-search had to wait until the following morning. A large part of the island is still covered in forest with 60% of the land area being covered by the Phu Quoc National Park. I had found a handy website which discussed the best places to see wildlife (I think it was phuquocislandguide but the site won't load for me now, so not sure). Apparently there are stump-tailed macaques on the island.

Most of the national park is closed to the public, and there don't seem to be any trails, so wildlife-spotting is done from the main roads. The highway which runs between Duong Dong and Bai Thom on the north coast seemed like the best road. I spent the morning along here and saw very little. The only mammal was a variable squirrel, similar to the ones at Kep National Park but with a white tail-tip (the subspecies here is harmandi which is endemic to the island). I found one good trail, signposted as being a site for seed regeneration, but the only animals I saw on it were some thick-billed pigeons. Despite the island's proximity to the mainlands of both Cambodia and Vietnam it does seem to retain a lot of larger animals, and I think if you spent several days just cruising up and down the roads in the morning and evening you'd probably see some nice wildlife.

I had been going to leave Phu Quoc the next morning, but check-out time at my guesthouse was at noon, there was a ferry leaving at 12.45pm, and it was still only 11am when I got back to Duong Dong from the national park, so I decided to leave now. I would be able to find a cheaper hotel at Rach Gia on the mainland, and from there I could go find Indochinese silvered langurs at the "reliable" site I knew of.

 

On the ferry from Phu Quoc Island to Rach Gia I encountered the endearing way that time is told in Vietnam. I asked the girl checking the tickets what time the ferry would get to Rach Gia and she said "three hours and forty-five" which I took to be the length of the trip. I thought that we would therefore be arriving at 4.30pm. Instead what she was saying was that the arrival time would be 3.45pm. If you see a time written down on a schedule this would be written as "3H45" (or, more usually in the case for pm, "15H45").

Something I really like about Vietnam (and this has nothing to do with anything before or after this paragraph), every hotel or guesthouse, no matter how cheap it is, will always have free soap, shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, comb, towel, and shower jandals. If you were going only to Vietnam on holiday you wouldn't need to take any toiletries with you. In India, in contrast, you're lucky if your room has a plague rat for a pillow.

Literally a couple of minutes walk from the Rach Gia pier is a row of cheap guesthouses. Apparently the best of them is the Lang Du Inn, so I headed there. Their rooms are 150,000 Dong (about NZ$9), they have WIFI (although I was on the third floor where it didn't reach so I had to sit in their noodle-house on the ground floor to use it), and the owner speaks English well enough. The pier is at the mouth of a river, across which is a road-bridge with locks underneath, so the water is still like a pond when the locks are closed. There were a dozen or so white-winged black terns hawking over the water, directly outside the guesthouse.

There were two places I wanted to visit in the Rach Gia area before heading off towards Saigon, both roughly 50km away but in opposite directions to the north and south. To the north was a site called Chua Hang which is where I hoped to see Indochinese silvered langurs, and to the south was the U Minh Thuong National Park which is a remnant of what the Mekong Delta wetlands used to look like before everything was converted to farming.

A couple of years ago I had found a website called Primate Watching by a Vietnamese primatologist named Andie Ang. It's a work-in-progress so there are still lots of gaps, but it was through there that I found out about Chua Hang. The page on Indochinese silvered langurs isn't exactly specific about the details of the site, giving only a vague "Kien Luong" (the name of the whole district) as the place to be. (See Primate Watching for the website). It took a bit more digging on the internet before getting better directions. Halfway between Rach Gia and Ha Tien is a little peninsula on which is the town of Hon Chong. A few kilometres from the town, at the bottom of the peninsula, is Chua Hang which is where a Buddhist temple is found (I think chua means temple or pagoda). The temple is at the base of a forest-covered limestone outcrop, and the langurs live in the forest there. According to the Primate Watching site the langurs are easy to see because they are habituated to the many Vietnamese tourists who come to the temple. She rates the chances of seeing them as four out of five.

I further found that there are buses to Hon Chong from Rach Gia. According to various travel sites the direct local buses are infrequent, so most likely I would have to catch one of the Ha Tien bound tourist buses, get off at Ba Hon, and then take the remaining 16km by motorbike to Chua Hang.

Rach Gia's central bus station isn't far from the pier. After breakfast I walked over there and it only took ten minutes. Well, it took ten minutes to get to what I thought must be the bus station but was actually a big covered market. There was a coach parked out front, which confused me because it did look like it should be a bus station. If I had continued walking along the road for another 100 metres I would have found the station, but instead I asked some people where the bus station was. No-one spoke English but one woman seemed to understand the words "bus station" as I pointed at the coach, and she enthusiastically pointed me off down another road. I'm not sure what she thought I was looking for, but it wasn't the bus station, and of course as soon as I got off the road I was meant to be on I got lost in the maze of little streets. It took me twenty minutes more before I finally stumbled across the station. As luck would have it though, there was a direct bus leaving for Hon Chong at 7.30am, and it was now 7.29am. Perfect.

It took about three hours to get to Hon Chong - I think between 2.5 and 3 hours is normal. I had been expecting that I would then have to get a motorbike the rest of the way, but it turned out that the route doesn't terminate in Hon Chong, the bus goes all the way to Chua Hang and stops there. Even more perfect! I wasn't sure if there was only one bus per day or not. The bus I was on had the schedule printed onto the interior of the bus (7.30am from Rach Gia, 1pm from Hon Chong) which made it seem like there was just one bus, and the conductor told me to be back at 1pm. Still, it was now 10.30am which gave me 2.5 hours. That would be ample time to see these habituated used-to-tourist langurs, right?

Chua Hang is a temple built at the foot of a huge limestone outcrop. It isn't a mountain because it is too small, but it isn't a hill because it is entirely made out of rock. These outcrops are dotted all over the Kien Luong district, like islands in a sea of farmland, and they are the only places where forest still remains. This particular site is obviously a major attraction. From the parking area to the temple entrance is a complex of stalls and restaurants, mostly selling seafood. Today was a Friday and quite quiet, but I imagine on the weekends it would be packed.

I strolled through the stalls up to the temple and scanned the trees on the cliffs with my binoculars. No langurs. Well maybe I wouldn't see them in the first two minutes but that was fine. It's not going to be hard to find them. I wandered all around the temple grounds, checking the cliffs above. No langurs. Hmm. Maybe round the other side, where there was another path through more stalls to the right of the temple gate. This path wound along the beach. I could see the cliffs here and there between the cloths shading the stalls, but no langurs. A northern tree shrew was scuttling around amongst the rocks on the edge of the forest. When the path ran out I returned to the temple and checked the cliffs there again. I even asked a few of the stall-holders but none spoke English, and even if they understood the word "monkey" I didn't know if their answer was "yes they are everywhere!" or "no we have eaten them all already".

I walked off to the left, away from the temple following a dirt track through shrimp ponds which skirted the other side of the outcrop. Still no langurs, and it was getting jolly hot out here. There wasn't really anything to do except keep walking back and forth, checking the trees high above, and ruminating on why I was even doing this.

Back at the temple I finally found a lady at one stall who spoke English. When I asked about the monkeys she immediately replied that they are here every day - at 3pm! During the day they are back in the forest "on the mountain" (i.e. somewhere on the outcrop beyond sight from the paths). I looked at my watch. It was only 11.30am. The bus would be leaving at 1pm. The monkeys wouldn't be here until 3pm. The times were not good.

I thought it most likely that there was only one bus per day between Chua Hang and Rach Gia, so if I didn't catch that then I would have to be paying for a motorbike to get back (at least to Ba Hon 16km away, or possibly all the way to Rach Gia 50km away if it was too late to get a connecting bus). On the other hand, if I did catch the 1pm bus and hadn't seen the langurs I'd then be paying the bus fare to return here tomorrow to try again. I decided to hell with it, I'd just stay until I saw the langurs and then figure out how to get back later. Who dares wins.

I had some lunch, and then took to walking around the outside of the outcrop again. Round the temple area, then around the right side through the stalls, then way off around to the left side through the ponds. Finally back to the temple. And hey, there were some langurs! It was 1.10pm. I knew that would happen. The langurs were in the trees right behind the temple, although quite high up so the photos were basically "point the camera at the trees and maybe something will come out". I had seen the langurs now - would the bus be late leaving? I didn't want to just rush off after only seeing the langurs for five minutes, but a motorbike exit would be expensive, so I hurried back through the stalls to the parking area. There was a bus sitting there. I ran the rest of the way, expecting it to pull off just before I got there, but no, this bus was leaving at 2pm (its schedule was 10.30am from Rach Gia with a 2pm return). Perfect again!

I had 40 minutes more for watching the langurs, and two of them came down from the trees, climbing over the crags until they were on the rocks right beside the temple. I think the photos should come out quite well, unless the sun was throwing too much shadow over them.

I think Andie Ang's recommendation of this place for the Indochinese silvered langur is correct (although her site could do with more specific directions), but I also think that her four out of five success rating would be dependent on the time of day. I think probably early morning and late afternoon would be good bets - the middle of the day not so much.

 

Vietnam Primate Update

Indochinese Silvered Langur Trachypithecus germaini - 1 of 25

(I also saw Crab-eating Macaques Macaca fascicularis at Vinpearl Safari but I'm taking those to be escaped captive ones rather than genuine wild ones)


See this post (#256) for the Vietnamese primate list:
Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017


A little note on Silvered Langurs which I couldn't fit into the narrative easily. There are two, three or four species of Silvered Langurs, depending on your taxonomic leanings. Originally all were lumped as one species, Trachypithecus cristatus, with two general populations. One was in the Sunda region (Peninsular Malaysia, Borneo and Sumatra) and the other in Indochina. These were split into two, T. cristatus in the Sunda region and T. germaini in Indochina. No primatologist would still lump these two together because they are quite different. The latter though was further split into the Indochinese Silvered Langur T. germaini west of the Mekong River (in southeast Thailand, southern Cambodia and southwest Vietnam) and the Annamese Silvered Langur T. margarita east of the Mekong (in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam). Not everybody agrees with this split but it is generally accepted. The fourth potential species of the group was proposed more recently with a split of the Sunda species into T. cristatus in Borneo and Sumatra, and T. selangoriensis in Peninsular Malaysia. This really doesn't seem to be followed by anybody, and I don't either. (I think the primate volume of the HMW accepts it, but they will accept anything).

I have now seen all of them: T. cristatus in Borneo (but not Sumatra); "T. selangoriensis" in Peninsular Malaysia; T. margarita at Cat Tien National Park in Vietnam (in 2015); and now T. germaini to complete the set.

 

people in Vietnam certainly do like wildlife. On a plate. Last time I was in Vietnam (in 2015) I saw how outside of protected areas there is really nothing left alive, and even inside the protected areas there is often little left. I made a comparison to Thailand (and I did the same in this current thread a wee while back) how in Thailand there are birds everywhere in the cultivated lands, even if they are common species like egrets and mynahs and drongos, but in Vietnam even those species are rare to nonexistent.

However, with regards to the langurs at Chua Hang I think they are protected by virtue of living above a Buddhist temple and probably also because of the inaccessibility of the interior of the outcrop. The langurs themselves aren't a tourist attraction though, just the temple itself. If the langurs died out or were all killed I don't think anyone local would really care.

Also, a note on why primates are so heavily hunted in Vietnam. The skeletons are boiled down until they form a sort of glue - this is what is known as "monkey balm". It is used as a medicine. It is the same procedure as for "tiger balm" (genuine tiger balm not the stuff you buy in western shops where we are sensitive about boiling down tigers). There is a bigger demand for monkey balm than for monkey meat, although of course the meat is still eaten when hunted.

 

I've uploaded the rest of my primate photos (except the Indochinese silvered langurs because I haven't got them off my camera yet).

Purple-faced and Tufted Grey Langurs and Toque Macaques here: Sri Lanka - Wildlife - Photo Galleries | ZooChat

Bonnet, Rhesus and Lion-tailed Macaques, and a poor shot of a Nilgiri Langur here (as well as all the previously-mentioned Semnopithecus langurs): India - Wildlife - Photo Galleries | ZooChat

 

and continuing with the photo-uploading theme, all the Delhi Zoo photos are now in the gallery:
Delhi National Zoological Park - Photo Galleries | ZooChat

The review of the Delhi Zoo visit is here for anyone that missed it:
Delhi National Zoological Park - Delhi Zoo visit, 4 February 2017

 

I think that's it for a while for uploading photos. I still have loads of Sri Lankan and Indian wildlife photos, and all of the ones from Colombo Zoo to go, but today was just a spare day I had.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to get to the U Minh Thuong National Park - I'm not really sure how to accomplish this so it may not work out, but I know to avoid weekends. The park is a popular fishing spot for locals with, apparently, 2000 visitors per month, mostly on the weekends! Today is Saturday. I figure if I go on Sunday then everyone will be leaving that day and I will be able to find somewhere to stay, and then Monday should be quiet. Fingers crossed.

 

After Chua Hang the next place I wanted to visit in the Rach Gia area was the U Minh Thuong National Park. I had been really looking forward to this - it was possibly one of the national parks I was most wanting to visit in Vietnam. Unfortunately it was a major disappointment.

There were several specific reasons I wanted to visit, and all of those reasons were mammalian. Although the park is probably a paradise for wetland birds there wouldn't be anything there I hadn't seen elsewhere. On the mammal front, though, there was a mixed colony of Lyle's and large fruit bats; small-clawed and hairy-nosed otters; fishing cats; and pangolins. The last three are nocturnal which meant I had to stay inside the park to have any chance of seeing them.

There is little usable information on the internet about U Minh Thuong. There is general information about the park's environment and wildlife of course, but for information on visiting I was just sifting through bits and pieces. Several sources said there was a guesthouse and restaurant in the park, so my plan was to stay there for at least a couple of nights. The park is only very small (12 km by 6km), and I imagined I would be able to walk trails between the channels and canals, hopefully at night for spotlighting. There were also, I knew, boat rides through the wetlands.

The main thing I couldn't find out was how to get there. The park is (apparently) hugely popular for local fishermen, with a reported 2000 visitors per month, but of course they don't need instructions on the internet how to find the place. For foreign visitors the best I could come up with was to catch a bus heading south, get dropped off on the highway, and then try to hitch the rest of the way.

When I went to Hua Chang I had just walked to the central bus station ten minutes from my guesthouse, but the buses from there service the routes north of Rach Gia so for U Minh Thuong (which is south) I needed to instead catch a bus from the Rach Soi station which was 7km away. This meant I had to take a motorbike there for 50,000 Dong. Coming back I discovered that I could have caught one from the central station after all, going first to the town of Tac Cau and then getting a second bus from there. In fact getting to U Minh Thuong from Rach Gia cost me 145,000 Dong (NZ$9) in total - getting back via Tac Cau without needing motorbikes for transits only cost me 31,000 Dong (NZ$2).

When I got to the Rach Soi station I was directed to a mini-van heading for the town of Vinh Thuan. It was just about to leave (at 8.30am), cost 45,000 Dong, and as it happened went right past the junction for U Minh Thuong, from which the park gate is only 3km. Nice and simple. There are motorbikes waiting at the junction so no need to worry about how to make the last stretch. It cost me another 50,000 to get a bike to the park from there.

So far, so good. But when I got to the gate it all fell apart. Firstly, there is no guesthouse - the closest is a couple of kilometres away - and you aren't allowed in the park at night. That basically meant almost everything I wanted to try and see was impossible. There was a map of the park on the wall, and the guard at the gate showed me where I could go. There was a road for a few kilometres straight through the middle to a small circular lake with a path around it. To that point the ticket cost 10,000 Dong. After that point I could only go by boat - for 600,000 Dong (NZ$37). As for the bat colony, that was in a part of the park which could not be visited. It was pretty much a wasted trip really. I couldn't go in the park at night and there were no trails anyway, just the access road and too-expensive boat trips on a set route.

I continued on to the lake on the motorbike. Maybe there would be some birds at least. It was around 10.30am by this point. I hadn't tried to get here early because I had been going to stay and go birding early next morning, but now that meant that it was a bit too hot for many birds to be around. I walked round the little lake. That took all of five minutes. I was going to give up on it and just go back to find a bus to return to Rach Gia, but I met a guy from Saigon who spoke some English who was also alone and looking to share the boat cost with someone (the 600,000 is for the whole boat, which seats ten people). I knew there was very little chance of seeing small-clawed otters in the middle of the day here (and no chance of any of the other mammals), so I wasn't keen on paying 300,000 to see common wetland birds. He also thought 300,000 was too expensive for him. We decided to wait and see if some more people turned up. Despite the park supposedly being very popular on weekends, and today being a Sunday, we were waiting a fair while. Eventually a couple turned up who wanted to go on the boat and were willing to share, making it 150,000 per person, and away we went.

The boat trip was pretty rubbish. It was roughly an hour and a half, but most of it was along an arrow-straight canal covered in blankets of water hyacinth and water lettuce (two invasive aquatic plants from South America), with the banks just thickets of tall sedges, meaning there was absolutely nothing to see. When we turned off into a side-channel it became a bit more interesting because we were then going through floating meadows followed by a small area of swamp forest. The point of the trip was that we came to a dead-end pool where we got out of the boat and climbed up a swaying watch-tower to see a distant breeding colony of waterbirds - openbill storks, little egrets, little cormorants, grey and purple herons, and glossy ibis. Even with my binoculars the birds were too far back to be interesting. And then we just went back the way we had come onto the canal and back to the road. Potentially if you could do the boat ride very early in the morning or very late in the afternoon you might see something good, but the noise from the boat's motor seemed to make even that unlikely, and with the cost of it you really wouldn't want to be doing it repeatedly!

It hadn't been a really expensive outing, but I was a bit saddened at how disappointing the park was for me. Probably more so because I had been so looking forward to it. Anyway, the Saigon guy gave me a ride back to the main road on his motorbike (saving me the fare I'd have had to pay otherwise) and I caught a bus which was going to Tac Cau. This cost 16,000 Dong and took an hour, and there I (and everyone else on the bus) transferred to another bus going to Rach Gia which cost 15,000 and took about an hour and a half. This bus ended at the central bus station, meaning I could walk back to the guesthouse instead of paying for another motorbike ride. The Lang Du Inn only had air-con rooms available (200,000 as opposed to the 150,000 for fan rooms) so I went along to the Thien Trang Guesthouse a few doors down where I got a room for 130,000.

This morning I am getting a bus to Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City or HCMC). There is another wetland reserve which I had had on my plans, called the Tram Chim National Park, which was set up to protect sarus cranes. You can get there from Saigon, but for me it would have made more sense to go there from Rach Gia, and then on to Saigon afterwards. However it really has the same problem as U Minh Thuong, where you can only get into the reserve with boats on set routes for specific lengths of time, and the boats are even more expensive at 800,000 to 900,000 Dong (NZ$50-56). I decided to give it a miss because I'd have to just be hoping there would be other people there to share the boat costs, and even then I'd just be seeing birds I'd seen plenty of other places before. There would be better places to be spending my money.

 

I changed my US$100 in Saigon today at a rate of 22,740 Dong to the dollar (so I got 2,274,000 Dong). It's not really important to the story but I was happy I didn't fall for this guy's line.

 

and I have just uploaded some photos of the Indochinese silvered langurs: Vietnam - Wildlife - Photo Galleries | ZooChat

 

a following post (#199 on page 10) which you may have overlooked or forgotten, also:
"Some may remember earlier in the thread the discussion about batteries in check-in luggage vs carry-on luggage (see this post onwards: Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017 ). At the Jammu airport there is a big sign on the wall saying that all batteries must go into your check-in luggage. This is for all airlines, including SpiceJet which elsewhere specifies batteries need to go in carry-on "for safety reasons". Same at Ladakh airport - all batteries have to be put in your check-in bag."

 

The bus from Rach Gia to Saigon was a sleeper bus. I've only seen these in Vietnam, although no doubt they occur everywhere. Instead of seats the bus is fitted with a double level of reclining "beds", like a bus filled with bunk-beds. I had taken one of these last time I was in Vietnam, and I disliked them just as much now as I did then. Especially because this ride was during the day and not the night. The beds aren't the best fit for any Westerner over five and a half feet tall. I couldn't lie down full-length because then my head was hanging off the back of the bed (which would not be comfortable for the six hours to Saigon!), but I couldn't sit up properly either because there was no back-rest and the upper level of beds was where my head would be. I could either lean-sit sideways using the window to rest against, or lie down with my legs folded up. Not the best journey.

The ride terminated at the Mien Tay bus station. As always you are accosted by taxi- and motorbike-drivers as you disembark. The taxis wanted 200,000 Dong (almost NZ$13) to the backpacker/tourist area at Pham Ngu Lao street, and the motorbikes wanted 100,000. I wanted a bus. Of course there "is no bus", although one driver inadvertently let slip that there is a bus "but not for two hours, so better to take a taxi". I walked off to find the ticket office, and was told the #2 bus goes to Pham Ngu Lao. I walked all the way back across the station - the #2 bus actually left directly next to where my bus had dropped everyone off! They seem to leave every five minutes, which is good, and only cost 5000 Dong (thirty cents).

Between and around the streets of Pham Ngu Lao and De Tham there is a maze of narrow alleyways, packed with guesthouses and eateries and massage-parlours. The accommodation prices are not as cheap as one might expect. Which is not to say they are expensive, but for a backpacker area they are more expensive than they should be. I think this is a consequence of being a famous backpacker area. Like with Khao San Road in Bangkok - the prices for guesthouses there are higher than in surrounding streets just because they can be. People stay there because of the reputation, and I guess a lot of the travellers are fresh-off-the-plane and don't know any better. The range around Pham Ngu Lao is around US$10 to US$30 for a room. I don't know why everyone quotes in US Dollars because they only accept payment in Vietnamese Dong - perhaps it is easier to get a higher price because it sounds cheaper saying "ten dollars" than "220,000 Dong". I was keen on finding a cheaper room because I would be staying in national parks quite a bit while in Vietnam, and the accommodation inside the parks is always higher than usual. I don't mind so much paying more when in a park because it allows me more freedom, especially for spotlighting - but it means I need to try and save more during the times when I'm not in parks. Anyway, I spent an hour wandering through all the alleyways and finally found a room for 160,000 Dong at the Nhu Guesthouse (that's about US$7).

The next day was a zoo day. The Saigon Zoo is only a few kilometres from Pham Ngu Lao, and there are several bus routes which run along Nguyen Thi Minh Kai past the zoo gates. Handily, there is a bus station for the city buses right at Pham Ngu Lao, about three minutes walk from my guesthouse.

My review of the zoo is here: Saigon Zoo and Botanical Gardens - Saigon Zoo review - 7 March 2017

 

I only spent one day (two nights) in Saigon and then made my way to my next primate-spot, Ta Cu Nature Reserve. Also spelled Ta Khou or Ta Kou, this is a mountain just south of Phan Thiet and is best known for having a Reclining Buddha at the top. The Buddha is the longest in Vietnam, and the longest on any mountain in Asia. It was only built in 1962 and is made of concrete painted white to look like marble. It is a popular tourist attraction, for both foreigners and Vietnamese, and so there's a cable-car going up to the monastery above which the Buddha lies.

In an earlier post I mentioned Andie Ang's Primate Watching website where I had found out about where to go for Indochinese silvered langurs at Chua Hang. Her website -see Primate Watching - was also where I found out about Ta Cu, specifically with regards to the Annamese silvered langur for which she gaves a chance of three out of five for seeing there and the black-shanked douc with a chance of four out of five. I have actually seen both these species before - at Cat Tien National Park in 2015 - but I hadn't even come close to getting photos of the Annamese silvered langurs and I figured I may stand a much better chance at Ta Cu given that it is a tourist spot and the langurs would be more used to people (as with the Indochinese silvered langurs at Chua Hang). Andie says on her site that "the area right around the majestic Reclining Buddha is a good spot to see the langurs". Also she had seen a pigmy slow loris there, which was a species I had never seen.

I wasn't too sure how this part of the trip was going to go. Andie Ang mentioned there was accommodation on the mountain, but that was literally the only reference I could find about this when originally planning the trip. The day before going to Ta Cu I did another google search and found a tourism site which said that there was a dormitory up there which foreigners needed police permission to stay at, and also a guesthouse. Fingers crossed then!

From Pham Ngu Lao I caught a city bus (#93) to the Mien Dong bus station, and found a bus heading for Phan Thiet at 9am which cost 135,000 Dong (NZ$8.50). This unfortunately was another sleeper bus, but the ride was "only" four and a half hours. Along the way there were dragonfruit plantations. Dragonfruit is my favourite tropical fruit, but I'd never seen the plants the fruit comes from before. It is actually a kind of cactus with long strap-like stems cascading down from the top of a short thick trunk. It is like a cactus-version of a small palm tree. The plantations ranged from small holdings around houses to large multi-acre fields.

I was a bit unsure about the accuracy of there being a guesthouse on Ta Cu Mountain, given that I'd only been able to find a couple of passing mentions about it, so I had half-decided to just stay in a cheap room in Phan Thiet and catch the bus up to the mountain and back each day. It would mean I'd be paying for the cable-car every day but if there was a guesthouse up there it would probably be expensive, so staying in Phan Thiet may be the cheaper option. However it was only 1.30pm when I reached Phan Thiet, so I changed my mind and went straight to the mountain. I figured that if I got up there and found nowhere to stay, at least I could hang around until the end of the day to look for monkeys and then find somewhere in Phan Thiet in the evening. No problem.

I knew that local bus #4 went from Phan Thiet to Ta Cu, and that it left from outside the Lotte Mart. At the bus station they told me the Lotte Mart was 2km away but a motorbike to there would only cost 20,000 Dong (NZ$1.30) so off I went. On my return trip I discovered that the #4 runs along the road around the corner from the bus station, so I could literally have walked a minute or two and caught it there. I also discovered that while the turn off to Ta Cu Mountain is about 29km south of Phan Thiet, the bus from Saigon goes straight past that turn-off. You could easily get dropped off there and then it's only a kilometre or two to the entry gate for the mountain. You could walk it, get a motorbike, or just wait for the #4 bus to come along if you have a bunch of bags. There are also several guesthouses at that junction point.

From Phan Thiet the #4 bus took about 45 minutes or so, and cost 16,000 Dong (NZ$1). At the entry point I asked whether there was a guesthouse on the mountain. I was told there was not - but I could stay in the pagoda (i.e. the monastery) for free if the monks gave me permission. That sounded fine to me. It was about 3pm by this stage and the last bus back to town was at 5pm. The cable-car to the top only takes ten minutes, so even if I couldn't stay at the monastery I'd still have over an hour to look around and then come back the next day. The cable-car cost 80,000 Dong each way, and then the entry fee was 20,000 Dong. There was also a 20,000 Dong fee for a shuttle to the cable-car. I had read this was unnecessary because it was only a couple of hundred metres, but the lady at the desk never mentioned this additional fee (although it was written up on the fee signage), and when I went in the shuttle was free anyway. Maybe you pay it if you read the sign, and don't if you don't.

The bottom of the mountain was all scrubby secondary forest but this quickly changed as the cable-car rose higher, becoming tall thick forest with big old trees which looked perfect for doucs. At the top cable-car station there was a restaurant, sitting empty. It looked like it was just closed that day, but at the same time you could see that the kitchen and wait-area were empty. I read that it had closed because there were no customers. The next morning while wandering around this area I found the guesthouse underneath, the rooms - like the restaurant - looking like they could be used easily but clearly haven't been for some time. The beds had even had plastic covers put over them.

I headed along the track from the cable-car station to the pagoda, stopped for something to eat (two-minute noodles which, as I quickly discovered, was all there was to eat up there except biscuits!), and enquired with sign-language about staying the night there. The monks were happy to let me do so and showed me to where I could sleep, a room empty apart for a mattress on the floor and a frog. I stayed two nights and on the second morning there was the addition of a couple of small rats. I'm not sure which species they were. Their tails weren't long enough for them to be juvenile black rats, but they didn't look like brown rats either. They may be one of the local Vietnamese rats. They were quite comfortable running right around my feet without fear, but as soon as I got out my camera they suddenly went all shy and I only got one photo.

From the pagoda there are some steps leading further up the mountain through the forest past various Buddha statues until you come to the very impressive Reclining Buddha. Forty-nine metres long and pure white. The same colour as Moby Dick but twice as long. The forest behind and around the Buddha is where I was hoping to see my langurs, however despite the abundance of fruiting fig trees there was little activity from birds and no sign of any monkeys at all. I stayed up there until evening. It got very windy later in the afternoon, but more birds came out, including a group of large woodshrikes and lots of blue-eared barbets. The next couple of days there was also a flock of yellow-vented green pigeons with long pointed tails and bright blue bills, feeding in one of the fig trees. I spent some time spotlighting after dark. It wasn't much fun in the strong winds, especially when you hear a branch crashing to the ground somewhere nearby, but I scored one good mammal when a spotted giant flying squirrel came gliding right past me, landed on a tree trunk and paused there for a minute before squeezing into a hole which looked too small to admit a large rat let alone a giant-sized squirrel. In a mammal survey of the reserve which I had found online (which I cannot re-find now) small-toothed palm civets are common up here. I was therefore expecting to see those, especially given all the figs in fruit, but I didn't see anything else at night there except that one flying squirrel.

One curious observation at night, when looking down from the mountain across the lowlands, is that there are all these huge rectangles covered in rows of lights. I couldn't imagine what these would possibly be. The best I could come up with was rice fields, with lights to keep the rice growing faster, but I knew there were no rice fields in this area because it is too dry. It wasn't until I left the mountain and was on the bus back to Phan Thiet that I realised they were the dragonfruit plantations! Each row of plants has strings of electric lights running alongside. Because a lot of cactus are pollinated by moths I figured the lights might be to attract moths. But I just googled it and in fact it is because the plants require short nights and long days to fruit effectively, so they give them a longer "day-time" to get a longer harvest period throughout the year.

Early next morning I was back up at the Buddha. It gets light here well before 6am but I was awake before then. The thing with staying in a Buddhist monastery is that they are chanting and banging gongs late into the night and then start again at 4am in the morning. Not suited for those people who complain about Muslim mosques starting up at 5am! There was a lot more wildlife around in the early morning. All around the area of the Buddha were Berdmore's ground squirrels. I had only seen my first one at Kaeng Krachan in Thailand a month ago, but here I gave up counting them after I reached seven because by then I couldn't tell which ones I had already counted. This must surely be the very best place to see this species of squirrel. There were also Pallas' (red-bellied) squirrels in the trees, and in the afternoon I saw a Cambodian striped squirrel as well.

The ground squirrels all disappear as soon as the tourists starting arriving, between 7am and 8am. I did see one squirrel at about 5pm but otherwise only in the early morning. Most of the foreign tourists don't spend more than four or five minutes at the Buddha. They just take a couple of photos and then go back down. Considering a lot of them must come from Mui Ne (the beach resort area further on from Phan Thiet) that's about a four-hour round-trip just to look at the Buddha for a couple of minutes! I guess the short length of time the tourists spend here explains why the guesthouse is no longer operating, and I suppose they are all up here for so short a time that they don't need to eat so the restaurant is redundant too.

Most of the foreign tourists are Russians, which was a surprise to me. They are everywhere! I had no idea Vietnam was such a big destination for Russians. Even the signage at all the tourist spots is trilingual in Vietnamese, English and Russian. A lot of them are on tours too, all lead by a girl in short shorts or a little skirt with a head-set giving a commentary in Russian. I actually saw one of these girls smile at one point, which for a Russian must be like an American burning the flag or an Englishman punching the Queen in the face.

Today turned out to be a good monkey day though, despite the presence of Russians. In the morning a troop of crab-eating macaques came out of the forest onto the platform with the three statues which sits halfway up the slope between the pagoda and the Reclining Buddha. This seems to be where they often hang out, waiting on people coming up to feed them. I was at the Buddha all day, mostly just watching the tourists come and go, but at around 3pm when there was nobody there but me, a small group of black-shanked doucs showed up. They were some distance off - not too far but not too close - and I inadvertantly scared them off trying to move closer across the slope of boulders which lies next to the Buddha. I had not expected them to be that shy here. The only photos I got were the initial ones which showed them as dots in a tree. At 5pm a long way off across the canopy I spotted some Annamese silvered langurs jumping between the trees. And I mean a LONG way off! If this was the first time I'd ever seen them I wouldn't have counted them, but for the purposes of seeing as many Vietnamese primates as possible on this trip, that'll do for now. Maybe I'll see them again at Cat Tien.

I'm not sure I'd recommend Ta Cu as the place to see black-shanked doucs. I think that while you may see them well at Ta Cu, a much better bet would be Cat Tien in my experience. Conversely, while I only saw the silvered langurs at a far distance at Ta Cu, I think you'd be more likely to eventually get much better views here (if they came near the Buddha area) than at Cat Tien where everyone seems to agree they are difficult to find. In either case I would still recommend visiting Ta Cu because it is a lovely bit of forest, albeit without any real trails (there is one up the mountain which you can take instead of the cable-car), and most especially if you really wanted to see Berdmore's ground squirrels!

 

Vietnam Primate Update
(Lifers are in bold)


Indochinese Silvered Langur Trachypithecus germaini - 1 of 25

Crab-eating Macaque Macaca fascicularis
Black-shanked Douc Pygathrix nigripes
Annamese Silvered Langur Trachypithecus margarita - 4 of 25


See this post (#256) for the full list of Vietnamese primates:
Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017

 

I just put my sentence into Google and the first hit is an article titled "Here's how Trump's election will affect U.S.-Russian relations."