I've mentioned a few times on this and other related threads how there is very little wildlife left in the Vietnam countryside, the reason being of course that it has all been eaten. Today I arrived in Dalat from Cat Tien National Park (that account will be coming up some time shortly), and after finding a guesthouse I went to find some food. I settled into a nearby restaurant and ordered something cheap. While waiting for that to arrive I perused the menu for future reference and decided I wouldn't eat there again. There were various preparations of softshell turtles which was just sad because I like softshell turtles when they are alive. Then there were frogs which were also sad but not as sad because the photo didn't really look like frogs whereas the turtles were literally whole steamed or fried turtles sitting on a plate. Presumably because they have soft shells you can just eat the entire animal. Roasted sparrows were novel, and there were several pigeon dishes (including pigeon porridge) plus more regular wildlife like wild boar and deer, and all sorts of different interesting fish and shellfish. But then I found grilled and stir-fried porcupine which put me completely off the place, followed by the strangest of all, weasel steamed with lemongrass. Seriously, who eats weasels? I like my wild animals to remain alive and uncooked, not poached. The one dish I was most intrigued by, though, went by the name "Pourred Greasy On Chicken".
I think Dalat is the centre of weasel coffee production, so maybe they are just trying to make an extra buck from the deceased weasels. Do you have half a day to go to the Crazy House? It's tacky and weird, but you'll never see anything like it again.
oh, I did not know that about Dalat. I guess they are just using ex-farm civets then, which is somewhat better. Although I dare say civet would not taste that great. I may have half a day, and it looks like the Crazy House is about 600 metres from my hotel! I don't know if I'll visit there because birds, but it may happen. For others: Hang Nga Crazy House in Dalat, Vietnam You know, if you had actually written about your Vietnam trip I could have picked up some pointers (places like the Crazy House simply aren't on my radar) It also would have been interesting reading about your visits to, say, Cat Tien or Cuc Phuong in relation to my own visits. I don't even really know where in Vietnam you got to.
The failure to find a way to document my travels on ZooChat that actually seems to work time and motivation wise is a puzzle that I still intend to solve. I came pretty close to success last year in Czechia, but in Asia backpacking is a much more social experience. This spring I have lot more time spare so I do intend to try to revisit the last 18 months' travels and at least cover the highlights. In terms of Vietnam I think Cuc Phuong, Van Long, Phong Nha, Cat Tien, Hanoi and Phu Quoc covers all the bits you would have liked to hear about. I'll PM you the notes I made for CP and VL. There are a couple of useful things to know there.
As previously mentioned I have been to Vietnam once before, in 2015. On that trip I started at Cat Tien National Park which is not far from Saigon. The tale of that previous visit can be read here Doucs And Dong: Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part four (2015) (posts 8 to 32 for Cat Tien). In 2015 I had travelled to the park the only way I knew of. First I caught a Dalat-bound tourist bus from Saigon's backpacker district of Pham Ngu Lao, getting dropped off at the town of Tan Phu, and then took a motorbike-taxi the rest of the way. This combination cost me 320,000 Dong. But when going back to Saigon I discovered that there is a local bus which runs directly between the park and Saigon's Mien Dong bus station. I think this may have been a fairly recent development at that stage because whereas I hadn't read about the existence of this bus previously, now that information is easily available. I was charged 120,000 Dong for the ticket at the park's counter by the river (on the opposite side to the park HQ itself) but assumed it was much less in reality because it seemed like the locals were paying around 80,000 or so. So with all that in mind, on this trip I didn't bother with the over-pricing and hassles of the tourist bus-motorbike combo. Instead I went straight to the Mien Dong station, where I discovered that the bus ticket is just 71,000 Dong - almost half of what the park charged me in 2015. I think the bus goes every three hours because I got there at about 9am and the next bus wasn't until 10.30 (the previous ones being at 4.50am and 7.40am). Curiously, the bus going in the opposite direction, from Cat Tien to Saigon, runs every hour. I have no idea how that works! Also curiously, at the park I was told the return trip would be 80,000 - so either they got rumbled for their over-charging or I was just scammed on my first trip. Interestingly, that same lady also told me the direct bus from Cat Tien to Dalat (there's only one, at 6.30am) would cost me 160,000, but in the park HQ they told me 150,000. Does the lady just pocket the extra cash herself? I emailed the park the day before I went to book a room in the Pheasant building. These are the cheapest rooms at 200,000 Dong for a fan-room, or 250,000 for A/C. The most expensive rooms go up to 1.1 million Dong. Checking their list of accommodations when I arrived at reception I see they also have dorms at 80,000 per person (but they need a minimum number of occupants) and a campsite where a tent costs you 200,000. The rooms in the Pheasant building have a shared bathroom so they don't seem to be offered to tourists unless you specifically ask for them. There was a dead bat on the bathroom floor when I arrived. Although really a dead bat is about the second best thing I could hope to find on a bathroom floor. It takes about four hours to get to the park from Saigon, and it also took a while to accomplish all the checking-in and so forth when I arrived, so I didn't get out birding until 4pm. Still, in those last two hours of the day I saw quite a few birds including three species of drongo - first a hair-crested drongo alone in a tree-top, and then a mixed feeding-flock with lots of bronzed drongos and at least one greater racquet-tailed drongo, as well as a racket-tailed treepie which basically looks like an all-black magpie with a tail shaped like a spoon. Other nice birds were moustached parakeets, a white-browed piculet (a sparrow-sized orange woodpecker), and a pale-headed woodpecker. On the mammal front I saw a slender-tailed tree shrew by pure chance. I saw one last time I was here too, also by chance. They are tiny wee things and seem to live mainly in the stands of giant bamboo, so they are very difficult to find if specifically looking for them. The park does night drives every evening. The largest of the trucks they use seats up to 36 people (!) - I was told that the night before it was full, it being a Saturday. For one or two people the night drive costs 460,000; for three to five people, 170,000; for six to eight people, 150,000; and so on downwards. The drive goes for a few kilometres along the road from the HQ which leads through grasslands and then comes back. It's not long, maybe 45 minutes, but last time I was here I saw a herd of gaur and an Indochinese hare, so I thought I'd try it out again. There were six people going, so it cost me 150,000. The drives are basically for tourists who don't see wild animals normally, and they always think it's great. For me, that's not always the case. The spotlight guy spoke pretty much no English. About the highest level of information you can expect on the drives is "deer", an identification which is pretty unnecessary to anybody over the age of three. On this trip all that was seen were several common muntjac, a lot of sambar, and a few common palm civets briefly. I've seen hundreds of sambar and muntjac so they're not exactly exciting any more. But the thing with night drives is that you never know what might be seen, so they are worth doing. Afterwards I went out along the road for a couple of kilometres in the other direction, through the forest, and found nothing. It gets light here at about 5.30am. I was out first thing in the morning because I could hear buff-cheeked gibbons singing. Last time I was at Cat Tien I saw a family of gibbons in the trees right by the accommodation buildings, probably attracted by captive gibbons in the cages for rescue animals behind. I therefore hadn't been anticipating any difficulty in seeing the gibbons this trip, and so it proved. They were, as before, just swooping around in the tree-tops whooping their lungs out. An easy addition to the Vietnamese primate total. Today turned out to be a very good mammal day all round actually, with eleven species seen in total. After breakfast I walked the road for 9km to the Crocodile Lake trail. The trail has a separate entry fee of 200,000 Dong which I'm sure is a recent development. Anyway, I had been to the lake on my last visit and so didn't feel the need to pay to go there again. It meant I'd miss a good number of water birds but they'd all be species I've seen before anyway. Instead I just looked for birds and mammals in the forest along the roadside. Over the course of the day I saw six or seven groups of black-shanked doucs, although they are so shy that I only got good clear views of a couple of them. There was also a possible Annamese silvered langur but it left so fast and the view was so brief that it could have been a douc as well. A lone pig-tailed macaque also had to be left as a "probable" when it disappeared as soon as I saw it. To add to the catalogue of "maybes" were three separate road-crossers which were most likely Berdmore's ground squirrels because apparently I just see those everywhere now. Not all the mammals were so unreasonably fast though. There were easily identifiable wild pigs, common muntjacs, red-bellied squirrels and Cambodian striped squirrels, but best of all of them was a crab-eating mongoose casually crossing the road. In the late afternoon along this road, the red junglefowl and Germain's peacock-pheasants come out to forage in the grass on the sides. I had only seen my first peacock-pheasants at Kaeng Krachan about a month ago (they were grey peacock-pheasants) so it was great seeing my second species, especially because the one I saw was right out in the open in full view. I stayed near the trailhead until dusk and then walked back to the HQ in the dark to see what I could find, but literally the only result was the eyeshine of a lesser mouse deer which left before I could see it. In fact apart for the animals seen on the night drive, that mouse deer was the only animal I saw at night while in the park. I had been particularly looking for pigmy slow lorises but (not unexpectedly) I completely failed to find any. Changing it up, the following morning I went to the grasslands instead of the forest. In the earlier stretches of the road near the HQ are some stands of giant bamboo, in which I saw a northern tree shrew. A bit later there was what was almost certainly a small Asian mongoose darting across the road but it was gone before I could even start to lift my binoculars. The birds were all the usual suspects. Racket-tailed treepies are very common round here; I saw many of them every day. A noisy flock of white-crested laughing-thrushes distracted me for a while, and there were also green imperial pigeons, Oriental pied hornbills, a common flameback woodpecker and other such fare. There was a heavy rainstorm in the late afternoon which curtailed activity somewhat, but afterwards I went back out along the road to the forest. Not far from HQ I saw a macaque in a tree, mostly hidden amongst the foliage as the monkeys here usually are. My immediate thought was "pig-tailed macaque" because it was too large for a crab-eating macaque, and was a rich brown colour which is completely unlike the crab-eaters' greyish colour. But then it walked across a branch in the open, just briefly but enough for me to see that it had a short thick tail which came only halfway to its feet. This completely baffled me. The macaques in south Vietnam are the pig-tailed macaque, which has a very short curled tail like a pig; the crab-eating (aka long-tailed) macaque which has a very long thin tail; and the stump-tailed macaque which is much larger, mostly terrestrial, and has no tail at all. I was scratching my head even more when two younger macaques came following the larger macaque across the branch because these were very clearly crab-eating macaques. The best idea I had was that it was a big old male which had lost part of its tail. I wasn't happy with it, but what else could it be? The macaques disappeared behind the bamboo stands, and I stayed in the area watching for birds. After a while I saw the strange macaque again, passing over the road in the bamboo. I saw it better this time and it was most definitely not a crab-eating macaque, but yet also most definitely not a pig-tailed macaque. I was still puzzled but not for long because I suddenly remembered something I had read when planning for the first trip I made to Vietnam in 2015. Rhesus macaques, which are found naturally in the northern half of Vietnam, have been introduced to various places in the south of the country including Cat Tien (here they were confiscated animals released into the park by wildlife officers), and they have started hybridising with the native crab-eating macaques. I saw loads of rhesus macaques in India so I should have picked it straight away, but it just wasn't in my head as a possibility for here. More of the troop was following the rhesus across the bamboo bridging the road and while most were typical crab-eating macaques, some were larger than they should be and with only half-length tails (i.e. longer than the tail of a rhesus but shorter than the tail of a normal crab-eating macaque). I think these latter ones must have been hybrid animals. In the evening I was in the park's Yellow Bamboo restaurant ordering my dinner, when the chap in the neighbouring table turned around and asked "Do you speak Vietnamese?" "No," I said . "Oh, I just heard strange guttural sounds and thought you must have been speaking Vietnamese" "No, it'll just be my accent." "Are you Australian?" "New Zealand" "Are you Israel?" It turned out he was Peter Ericsson who is a well-known Swedish birder who lives in Thailand. I had met him back in 2006 in Malaysia but we hadn't met since. He motioned at his birding companion and said "I was just telling him about a guy I know who writes blogs where half the blog is just on how to get to the place". I spent the final two days on the trails inside the forest near the HQ. The roads are easier when birding - you just walk and scan the trees ahead and above, whereas visibility is much reduced inside the forest - but there are various birds and mammals which you are not as likely to see on the roads. Oddly I did not encounter a single leech the whole time I was at Cat Tien, even with the afternoon rainstorms on the last three days of my stay. I tried spotlighting in the forest on the trails as well, but the foliage was just too thick. During the day you can see well enough but at night all you see are the closest trees of the understorey. Amongst the more usual species when I was on the trails by day there was a couple of orange-breasted trogons (always worth seeing) and a female gibbon swinging through the canopy. Best animal of the trails was also up in the canopy. I just saw the movement and assumed it would be another red-bellied squirrel. However I always check squirrels out, just in case, and this was just as well because the animal was actually a yellow-throated marten. Although it was quite high up I even managed to get some crappy photos of it. Later in the day I saw what was presumably the same animal, running through the forest on the ground. A black giant squirrel made the twentieth species of mammal I saw at Cat Tien. On my first visit to Cat Tien in 2015 I spent NZ$230 in five days, including transport to and from Saigon (an average of c.NZ$46 per day). This visit was cheaper at NZ$184 for five days (NZ$36.80 per day average). I'm not sure why it wasn't a lot cheaper than that though, because I stayed in a 200,000 room the whole time whereas last time the first night was in a 480,000 room, then two nights at Crocodile Lake which is 350,000 per night (plus I had to pay for transport to the trailhead), then only two nights in the 200,000 room. Also getting to the park from Saigon cost me 320,000 last time whereas this time was only 71,000. The return bus to Saigon last time was 120,000 and this time it was to Dalat for 150,000 so about the same. There was one night drive on each visit, costing 170,000 the first visit and 150,000 on the second. And as well as all that the exchange rate is better now - in 2015 it was about 14,500 Dong to one NZ dollar and now it is just under 16,000.
A comparitive list of the 14 mammal species I saw on my 2015 visit and the 20 species seen this visit (both visits were for five days). The only species I saw in 2015 which I didn't see on this visit were Indochinese Hare and Gaur. Of the 20 species I saw this time, the five asterisked ones are not included on my proper list of "seen mammals" because although I consider most of them to be "almost certain" I didn't see any of them for long enough to be absolutely 100% sure. The Annamese Silvered Langur is only a "possible" because it was so brief. The Lesser Mouse Deer was eye-shine only but I know it was that species. The other three species (Northern Pig-tailed Macaque, Berdmore's Ground Squirrel, and Small Asian Mongoose) were almost certainly those species but I didn't get onto them quickly enough. The Northern Pig-tailed Macaque therefore does not yet make it onto my Vietnamese Primate list for this trip, although I saw it at Cat Tien in 2015. 2015 List: Southern Buff-cheeked Gibbon Black-shanked Douc Annamese Silvered Langur Crab-eating Macaque Northern Pig-tailed Macaque Northern Slender-tailed Tree Shrew Pallas' (Red-bellied) Squirrel Cambodian Striped Squirrel Indochinese Hare Common Palm Civet Small Asian Mongoose Sambar Lesser Mouse Deer Gaur 2017 List: Southern Buff-cheeked Gibbon Black-shanked Douc Annamese Silvered Langur* Crab-eating Macaque Rhesus Macaque Northern Pig-tailed Macaque* Northern Slender-tailed Tree Shrew Northern (Belanger's) Tree Shrew Black Giant Squirrel Pallas' (Red-bellied) Squirrel Cambodian Striped Squirrel Berdmore's Ground Squirrel* Yellow-throated Marten Common Palm Civet Crab-eating Mongoose Small Asian Mongoose* Wild Pig Sambar Common Muntjac Lesser Mouse Deer*
Vietnam Primate Update (Lifers are in bold) CHUA HANG Indochinese Silvered Langur Trachypithecus germaini - 1 of 25 TA CU MOUNTAIN Crab-eating Macaque Macaca fascicularis Black-shanked Douc Pygathrix nigripes Annamese Silvered Langur Trachypithecus margarita - 4 of 25 CAT TIEN NATIONAL PARK Southern Buff-cheeked Gibbon Nomascus gabriellae Rhesus Macaque Macaca mulatta - 6 of 25 See this post (#256) for the full list of Vietnamese primates: Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017
Dalat is an interesting little city. From a distance - up on the hills from where you can see the whole town - it is actually quite big with a lot of high-rise sort of buildings, but when you are in the middle of it the feel is more of a small hill station. Some buildings look typically Vietnamese, some are obviously old French colonial, and then there are the newer ones which are just kitschy and quirky, like the town is just messing with visitors. Apart for all the tourists everywhere it is a very pleasant place to spend some time. My bus dropped me right in the centre of Dalat. I saw a couple of hotels on the road above so headed up that way and walked along the street asking at each one until I found the cheapest one, the Nam Chau at 150,000 per night. I'd recommend this hotel. It's cheap, clean, friendly. However there's not really much English spoken and the other guests are mainly Vietnamese or Chinese, so if you're after socialising with backpackers then it wouldn't be your sort of place. There are three main sites for birding in the area, all 10km or so outside town: Ho Tuyen Lam (forest around a reservoir), Ta Nung (forest around a village), and Mt. Lang Biang (forest on a mountaintop). Today was Friday and I had read that Mt. Lang Biang gets very busy on weekends because it is the main tourist attraction, so I decided to do Ho Tuyen Lam on Saturday and Ta Nung on Sunday. It was around midday when I got into Dalat, so for starters I just had a wander around the nearby lake. The big park next to the lake which I had seen on Google maps turned out to be a golf-course so I just walked round the outside of that, not being allowed inside. Over the lake I saw a white-bellied sea eagle, an osprey, and some house swifts. Along the edges I found a common kingfisher and a Chinese pond heron coming into breeding colours (all the other pond herons I'd seen so far were in non-breeding plumage when you can't tell the species apart). And in the trees by the golf-course were lots of Burmese shrikes. At 6am the next morning I got a taxi out to Ho Tuyen Lam, which took about twenty minutes and cost 170,000. The taxis in Dalat are all metered, and are roughly 15,000 Dong per kilometre, so you don't need to do any bargaining because any price you agree on will probably be more than the meter anyway. Having said that, the taxi back from Ho Tuyen Lam only cost me 130,000. Ho Tuyen Lam is the name of the reservoir itself. It is a huge artificial lake caused by flooding a valley, and instead of being a nice orderly lake it is like a jagged forked-lightening bolt with spiky arms snaking off in all directions. The shores are covered in native pine forests but higher up on the hills is broadleafed forest. The point to get to for birding is the Da Tien Restaurant at the bottom southeast corner. This is right at the end of the road and appears to be a crumbling "resort" with tumbledown huts called Khu Du Lich Da Tien. (A couple of days later I realised from other signs about the place that khu du lich just means something like "tourist place"). In a strategic error I did not arrange for the taxi to either wait or to return to pick me up. This was largely because I didn't know how long I would be here for, and secondly because I wrongly assumed that because there was a restaurant there then there would surely be some sort of transport available - or at least other visitors who I could get a ride with. This was wrong on both counts, but it worked out fine in the end. I had read a few reports on birding here, and it sounded like the smaller trails may be difficult to find with local guides but the main trails were easy enough. There should also be birds everywhere in abundance. Hmm, no, not today. This was one of the worst birding days I have had for a long time. I mean, I often write something along the lines of birding being poor on a particular day but it is all relative. Today really was poor. Also it turned out that the trail I was on wasn't the main one which I thought it was, so that may have been part of the reason too. However the bird I absolutely wanted to see here was the Vietnamese red crossbill which is a type of finch with the two parts of the beak crossed over like mangled secateurs, and I saw several of these birds so I can't complain too much! They are awesome birds, and much larger than I had been expecting. They join the "birds with weird beaks" which I have seen, alongside such characters as wrybills, skimmers, and openbill storks. The reason I ended up on the wrong trail was just a simple memory lapse. The account I had in mind said the start-point was the parking spot for the restaurant (which is down a little foot-track from where you park). Right at the parking spot there's a trail heading up the hill through the pine forest, so I took that. What the report had actually said was that the start-point was the parking spot but that the trail itself begins after going through all the huts past the restaurant. Anyway, I went on up the hill. The trail was very clear, but birds were not swarming all around me as it seemed they should have been from all the reports I'd read. A couple of black-collared starlings flew past, there were some Burmese shrikes, sooty-headed bulbuls and lots of grey bushchats, but that was it. After a few minutes I came out onto a road. A brand new road. It was still being built in parts higher up so it had a perfect tarseal but no vehicles except the occasional motorbikes of the workers. The trail continued on the other side but because the road is winding up the hill it kept continually cutting across the trail - and being cut out of the hillside meant that more often than not there were high banks on the upper side meaning the trail became difficult and then impossible to access. I ended up just walking along the road itself. Where the broadleafed forest started above the pine zone, I couldn't find any trails at all. I think the new road has just destroyed all the old trail higher up and it has overgrown and disappeared. I did see some nice birds despite the lack of numbers. While still in the pine zone I saw the first pair of crossbills and watched them foraging amongst the pine-cones for some time. A white-throated fantail, some ashy drongos, and pairs of green-backed tits were next. Then in a tree above one of the workers' make-shift tent-accommodation I spied a small flock of Vietnamese greenfinches accompanied by a grey-capped pigmy woodpecker and another (or the same) pair of crossbills. In the last section of pines before the broadleafed forest, I saw my first ever cutia which is a relative of laughing thrushes but looks sort of like a cross between a shrike and a cuckoo. Really the three main birds I wanted here were the crossbill as mentioned, and then the greenfinch and cutia, so it actually was a successful day on that count. Right where the broadleafed forest began, a pair of yellow-throated martens went hurtling off one tree into the canopy of a lower tree as if they were monkeys, and disappeared. The only other mammals seen today were a giant squirrel and a slender-tailed tree shrew. I didn't really see any birds in this stretch of forest. I could hear plenty but the vegetation was too thick along the roadside and there were no trails for access. Higher up the forest reverted to pine, and then the road just ended. Perfect seal and then just grass and pines on a steep drop-off. It was like they just kept building and sealing without looking ahead, and then went "oops, can't put any more road here, we'll have to go do it somewhere else". I headed back down, and this time in the broadleafed forest patch I saw an Annam barbet, and then a little birdy area with a chestnut-vented nuthatch, Mrs Gould's sunbird, lesser racquet-tailed drongo, and verditer flycatcher. I figured I'd go back to the restaurant area and see if I could find the other trail from there. The whole complex looked dejected and abandoned. There was an elephant standing at a platform with a seat strapped on its back for rides for the non-existent visitors. Nearby a crab-eating macaque was chained to a tree. I stopped at the restaurant, which seemed to be barely open. Their menu was a tad overpriced. Even the fried rice was 150,000 Dong, about three or four times what it should cost. I asked for the mixed vegetables which was the cheapest thing there at 70,000 Dong. They brought me out a plate of lettuce with some sliced tomato on top. I gave up on the day and they rang a taxi. I had asked if someone there could give me a ride back on one their motorbikes but apparently all the staff sitting around doing nothing were busy. I was concerned that I was going to be paying a princely sum for the taxi pick-up but, in contrast to the norm in Asia, the driver didn't start the meter running until I got in the car and it only cost 130,000 back to the hotel. So it was a bit of a good but mostly not-so-good morning in terms of the birding. With my afternoon now free I visited the Crazy House which was brought to my attention by FunkyGibbon a few posts ago. I'm glad he did so because it is a fantastic place. I totally recommend it if in Dalat. The house is a series of mutant tree-like structures with rabbit-warrens of narrow corridors and over-bridges and bolt-holes, and it really defies verbal or written description. It is like if M. C. Escher drew up the designs and then passed them over for completion to Lewis Carroll when he was high on goofballs. It is the strangest and most mind-bending example of architecture ever. The lady who created it was taught architecture in Russia which may or may not explain the result. The entry fee is only 40,000 Dong but they must be raking it in because there would have been at least a hundred people there just on my visit. There were selfie-sticks everywhere. Have people got so lazy and stupid that they can no longer even hold a camera or phone properly? Aaaaand, most of them were Russians. Three tour buses of them, plus all the individual ones. Almost every white person there seemed to be Russian. Are there even any Russians left in Russia?
Sunday - that is, today - was supposed to be for going to Ta Nung. This is the name of a village about 20km from Dalat and I think also the name for the area or valley in which the village is situated. It seemed like the directions to the best bird sites there are kind of vague so I wasn't confident of finding the right place. But that didn't matter because when I came back from Ho Tuyen Lam yesterday I was googling some information about the sites and found a birder's blog from last month where he said that the Ta Nung area is closed off at the moment due to road construction. Found that out just in time! So I changed my plan for Sunday to the Datanla Falls which I only found about yesterday, on that same blog I think. I saw it on two blogs, one saying that this tourist spot 5km from Dalat was the most birdy place he encountered in Vietnam, and the other saying he had read that first blog so went there himself and saw lots of birds just by sitting in the balcony restaurant there. Instead of a taxi I caught a local bus to Datanla for just 10,000 Dong (about a tenth of what the taxi would probably have cost). The mini-station from which the bus leaves is just up the road from my hotel, about five minutes walk. I don't know how often they go - I got there at 6.45am and the bus left at 7am. It took almost half an hour to get to there because, well, it's a local bus and not a taxi. Apart for the waterfall in the name, Datanla Falls is also a major "thrill park" with a luge and obstacle course and abseiling and white-water and dead English people. The entry fee is 30,000 Dong but you then pay extra if you want to do any of the other activities. I knew it was going to be busy, being Sunday, but when I arrived there was just one tour bus there and no people to be seen. The entry gate is just beside the restaurant. As you head down the steps, on your left is broadleafed forest and on your right pine forest. These aren't actually "forest" because they aren't large areas, but they ultimately are connected to all the forest in the surrounding countryside so from the birds' point of view they still count. The area just past the gate was supposedly the very birdy area. Hmm, no, not today. Again! I saw a cutia here which was cool, but otherwise there was very very little about. The best animal was a maritime striped squirrel which was the one-hundredth mammal species I have seen on this trip. All the people started arriving not long after I did; afternoons must be packed. It seems like the standard thing to do is to walk all the way down to the waterfall (that is where all the people from the tour bus were when I first arrived), and then go back up and either sit in the restaurant or do the luge. I didn't bother with the waterfall - I've seen water before - so did what the birder in the second blog did and went and sat in the restaurant. There were so many birds visible I forgot to yawn. No seriously, there were none. Not a one. I walked back to town rather than wait for a bus (one had gone by just as I was coming out). Datanla is supposed to be five or six kilometres from Dalat but that can't be right. It only took me half an hour to walk to the main bus station which is on the outskirts of the town, and then another twenty minutes to the city centre. Having the big lake in the middle of town certainly helps for orientation because as soon as you see it you know where you are in relation to where you want to go. Dalat has been mildly windy the whole time I've been here, and clouds - often black and ominous - have been present most of the time. However this afternoon was the first time it rained, with a torrential downpour around 1pm and now just ordinary rain. Which is why I have been writing these Dalat updates.
I hadn't had much luck in the forest above the Ho Tuyen Lam reservoir, and Ta Nung was apparently closed off for now, so my next spot was Mt. Lang Biang. This is a mountain about 10km or so outside town and is a popular tourist spot for both locals and visitors. Handily for budget travellers there is also a bus straight to the gate which only costs 12,000 Dong, roughly a tenth of the cost of a taxi. I had put off going here until Monday because I had read that it gets very crowded on the weekends, although having now been there I think that might not be a huge issue when you are on the forest trail to the summit of the mountain. I had read the buses to Lang Biang start at 6am, so early in the morning I walked over to the little bus station near my hotel. I got there are 5.45am and was met by a motorbike guy who told me the next bus would not be until 7.30am but he could take me for 50,000 Dong. This was a third cheaper than a taxi but four times what the bus would cost. The problem with these little bus stations is that they never have an office or any sort of posted timetables - all the locals apparently just know instinctively where and at what times the buses go. I didn't believe the motorbike driver, so went into one of the little coffee shops nearby and asked the owner what time the next bus was. He said 6.15am. Then I saw a sort of shelter (which, as it happened, was where the drivers hang out between departures) and there I was told 6.40am. This turned out to be the correct time, and once I could find out the schedule when the bus arrived I discovered that the bus before the 6.40am one was at 5.15am. They then go roughly every hour-ish throughout the day, and take exactly thirty minutes to get to the Lang Biang entrance gate. There are a couple of little shops outside the gate too, if you need food and water. From the entry gate there is a paved road up which jeeps take people to the radar station on top of one of the peaks. This isn't the summit of Lang Biang and there's probably no point going there if you are a birder because I think it is all pine forest there instead of broadleafed forest. Instead the summit trail starts about halfway along that paved road. I'd wager that the majority of the people who visit on weekends just take the jeeps to the top of the road and then come back down again. There probably would be more people on the jungle trail than during the week but I don't think it would be crowded in the way I imagined it before I saw the site first-hand. On the days I was there (Monday and Tuesday) there was nobody on the trail all morning, and then after about noon there were just a few pairs or groups of tourists. I knew there was an alternate route up to the start of the summit trail - a so-called "short-cut" up through the pine forest - which you could take instead of walking up the road or taking a jeep. The problem with the jeeps for a solo traveller is that they cost 360,000 Dong. This can be split to as low as 60,000 Dong each if there are six people, but in the early morning you might be waiting a while for an appropriate group to turn up with which you can share. I had found a few internet sites with details of the "short-cut" so I had an idea of where it was. One said it started inside the gate up the road a bit, but a couple of others said it started outside the gate up a dirt road directly to the right. After I paid the entry fee (30,000 Dong) I asked the lady at the counter about the trail. She said there was no trail, but I could walk up the paved road. I said there was supposed to be a trail up that dirt road right there, and she said yes there is a trail up there. I love it when a person gives me conflicting statements within the space of a few seconds. According to the blogs I'd read the "short-cut" starts a few hundred metres up that dirt road and "you cannot miss it". I'm not sure that's entirely true, because I did miss it. The dirt road passes through fields and greenhouses where strawberries are grown, and I asked several workers about the trail. None of them seemed to know about it. I figured I'd gone a bit too far (maybe 500 metres) so I headed back and finally met one woman who pointed it out to me. I think once you know where the trail starts then it is obvious but otherwise it looks like a track for a farmer to get to his field. An easier way to have described it would have been "the first track on your left which doesn't have a barbed-wire gate across it". It is actually right next to one of the wire gates and runs up onto the top of the roadside bank. It there looks like a rain-cut gully rather than a trail. It is only when you get to the top of that steep section that it becomes obvious it is the trail because it is lined either side with barbed-wire fencing to stop walkers and cows from getting into the coffee fields. After a few minutes you come into the open where the pine forest starts. A lot of this track through the forest is very steep but it is quite easy to follow. There are even occasional arrowed signs showing up and down so that you know you're on the right path. Pity they don't put a sign right at the start of the track on the dirt road! There's really only one bit where you could go astray and that is just before you reach the paved road, where the track forks into a Y. There is a directional sign but it is a bit ambiguous as to which path it is pointing to. I took the steeper left track which looks a bit like it was made by rainwater coming down rather than by feet, and that proved to be the right one. The summit trail then begins at a little hut about fifty metres further along the paved road. Including birding-time the "short-cut" took about an hour. The next day I walked up the paved road to get an idea of the difference and it was marginally faster than the "short-cut" at about 45 minutes. The paved road is also not as steep but is somehow more taxing; I had to stop for a rest at the hut which I hadn't had to do when using the "short-cut". I also saw when walking up the paved road that there are several trails going off on your right into the pine forest and these all connect to the "short-cut" trail. On the first morning, as I came out onto the paved road from the "short-cut" trail, I met a man and his wife coming down on a motorbike. They stopped and the man said good morning. English is quite widely spoken in Vietnam where-ever there are a lot of tourists, places like Dalat or Danang or Saigon. He then asked me a question I didn't expect: "Are you the director of Kong?" I guess white men with beards just all look the same. In India I was told I looked exactly like Dan Bilzerian, a famous American poker-player who I had never heard of before. If you google a photo of Dan Bilzerian and then google a photo of Jordan Vogt-Roberts, my beard-length is about halfway between the two. From the hut the summit trail runs for about a kilometre through pine forest and then another kilometre through broadleafed forest up to the summit of Mt. Lang Biang (2167 metres high). The only thing at the summit is a patch of grass where the forest has been cleared off, and a sign saying you are at the summit. With binoculars you can see "the other summit" with the radar station where the jeeps go to. Most of the trail from the hut is pretty gentle. The last 400 metres is where it starts getting steeper, and the final 200 metres or so is almost vertical, just a series of steps which makes the Mt. Kinabalu summit trail look like a fun-run. I only went to the summit on my first day. There's obviously the possibility of seeing birds on that last very steep stretch - I saw the endemic Dalat shrike-babbler almost at the top - but it's just too much work to do it twice! The pine forest has birds too, of course. In the fields before reaching the forest there are Burmese shrikes, paddyfield pipits, plain-backed sparrows and sooty-headed bulbuls. Right where I left the coffee fields and met the forest, there was a flock of large brightly-coloured birds zooming back and forth in the trees, screeching away. I couldn't work out what these were at first because every time they landed they'd just disappear amongst the branches, but finally I got a perched view and realised they were Eurasian jays. The reason I hadn't been able to recognise them was because their faces are almost entirely bright white and in flight this makes them look completely different to "regular" Eurasian jays. To see the difference Google Image "Garrulus glandarius" (which will mostly be photos of the nominate form in Europe) and then add "leucotis" to see the local form here. In the pine forest past the hut I got good views of Vietnamese cutia and chestnut-vented nuthatch (both seen much better than at Ho Tuyen Lam the other day), as well as green-backed tits, grey-capped pigmy woodpecker, black bulbuls, long-tailed minivets, and three species of warblers (Kloss', yellow-browed, and Blyth's). I had been hoping that the poor showing at Ho Tuyen Lam wouldn't carry over to the broadleafed forest on Mt. Lang Biang but I was still kind of disappointed with my results. The thing with reading trip reports is that they always make it sound like the entire forest is dripping with birds, everywhere you look. Part of it is that very few trip reports are written by people birding by themselves. Especially in places like Vietnam they are almost always with guides and they generally use taped calls to bring the birds to them. I don't like using guides because I'm not that interested in seeing every single bird possible - if I was I would be in a constant state of deep depression! I just like going out and looking for them; a large part of the experience for me is finding wildlife for myself. I will never see as many species as a tour group would but that's fine. And I don't use tapes at all. For me that is just interfering in the birds' lives. You can make the argument that your mere presence is interfering with their lives which could be true, but they can leave or stay as they like. When you tape a bird in you are actively stopping it from doing the things it should be doing, like feeding or incubating or defending its territory against real birds, and to me that is just selfish and potentially detrimental to the bird. Some reports I have read from Mt. Lang Biang carry on like "we taped in this species and then taped in this species and then taped in this species, and then when looking at our lists realised we hadn't seen this species yet so we played our tape and got an immediate response". What all that means is that reading trip reports leads to you thinking you'll see birds everywhere and then when the numbers are less than hoped for, you feel disappointed. Still, I did see about thirty species in the broadleafed forest over the two days (and more in the pine forest, making about 45 species total) so that's all good. I think that here, as in many other montane forests, you need to find bird-waves - mixed feeding flocks which move through the trees looking for insects. The forest can seem empty, but then suddenly a bird-wave comes past and you have birds everywhere. Some days you see lots of bird-waves and some days you don't. And if you don't find any bird-waves then you simply don't see many birds that day. On my first day I saw only two bird-waves (mainly mountain fulvettas with a few additions like white-throated fantail, yellow-cheeked tit, grey-headed canary-flycatchers, and warblers) and on the second day also only a couple, although the first of these was mostly made up of grey-crowned tits (the six-hundredth bird of this trip) and the second had a silver-eared mesia which apparently used to be a common species on the mountain until the bird-trappers almost wiped them out. Then there are all the much more common birds like mountain bulbul, snowy-browed flycatcher, grey-chinned minivet, verditer flycatcher, etc. There are certain birds on Mt. Lang Biang which all the birders want to find. One of them is the Dalat shrike-babbler which is endemic to the Dalat Plateau (I did manage to see that one) and another is the black-crowned fulvetta which is one of the cutest little babblers ever! I saw one of these poorly on the first day in amongst the mountain fulvettas, and then a pair very well on the second day. Grey-bellied tesia, rufous-throated partridge and large niltava are more widely-distributed in southeast Asia, but I saw those as well. What I utterly failed to find were any of the endemic laughing thrushes. I think these may be birds which generally need to be taped in to see. They are also heavily-persecuted by the bird-trappers. I did see a flock of white-cheeked laughing thrushes right by the hut - these are found also in Cambodia and Laos - but none of the other species. I had been going to return to the mountain for a third day running, because it isn't exactly an expensive outing (the bus each way plus the entry fee only comes to about NZ$3.50 in total), but when I woke up in the morning I was too lazy. I kind of knew I wouldn't get to see the collared laughing thrush which was the main species, and I would later be going to Mang Den which shares a number of other Dalat birds (albeit not those laughing thrushes). So instead I stayed in town, and tomorrow I plan on heading off to Yok Don National Park which is a dry forest park on the border with Cambodia.
I didn't go to Yok Don today after all. Instead I returned to Mt. Lang Biang. After posting yesterday's entry I had sat there thinking "I want to see a collared laughing thrush!" There's nowhere else to see one except here because they are endemic to the Dalat Plateau. There was only one thing to do. This morning I got back on the bus to the mountain. Second time lucky, right? Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't, but there's only one way to find out. The usual birds were around the coffee fields - sooty-headed bulbuls, paddyfield pipits, Burmese shrikes - but things looked more promising as I got to the edge of the pine forest. At the top of a dead tree sat a vinous-breasted starling, calling to nobody. This was only the second time I'd seen this species, the previous occasion being in Burma coincidentally enough (the scientific name of this bird is burmannicus). And in the tree next to it was a small flock of Vietnamese greenfinches, likewise only the second time I'd seen these - although in this case the previous occasion was only a few days ago. At the start of the summit trail a white-browed scimitar-babbler passed by the little hut and a few minutes later a white-throated rock thrush perched obligingly in a tree. Not far on in a patch of shrubs in a gully a couple of laced woodpeckers mixed with a flock of white-cheeked laughing thrushes. I'd seen the white-cheeked laughing thrushes the other day, but I took it as a good sign nonetheless. So far it was all looking good for a successful day, but when I got into the broadleafed forest there was silence. Where had all the birds gone? It was about half an hour before I saw anything, and that was only a couple of mountain fulvettas. Fortunately things turned around quickly after that. A white-tailed robin started off the new birds again - a glossy blue-black bird with white edges to its tail - followed soon after by a small covey of bar-backed partridges right beside the trail which casually strolled away into the jungle. Literally ten metres further on, I looked to the right and saw three largish birds darting through the undergrowth. Collared laughing thrushes! And it was still only ten o'clock. It was just totally unexpected that I actually saw this species, and they were just fantastic. Google a photo of them to see what I mean. There was a red-cheeked ground squirrel running around with the laughing thrushes too, my second squirrel of the day (the first having been a black giant squirrel about quarter of an hour earlier). The laughing thrushes left pretty quickly, but right above me a bird-wave had appeared. There were so many birds I didn't know which to look at next. Black-crowned and mountain fulvettas, green-backed and yellow-cheeked tits, grey-headed canary-flycatchers, silver-eared mesias, a Dalat shrike-babbler, white-spectacled warblers, rufous-capped babblers, golden-throated barbets, and Mrs' Gould's sunbirds. No doubt there were others that I didn't even see in all the confusion. And then there was also a red-bellied squirrel and a maritime striped squirrel in amongst the birds, making it a four-squirrel day. Like I said in my last post, in montane forest you really need to luck into finding bird-waves to see a lot of species. Then, as quickly as the birds had appeared, they vanished. Just passing through. I waited around. The Dalat shrike-babbler (a lone female) had remained behind so I hoped more birds might join her, and this paid off when a group of black-headed sibias arrived. Like many of the birds I saw today, I had only seen black-headed sibias once before, in China. I wandered up and down the main trail a while - seeing not a single other bird! - but the other tourists start dribbling in around 11am to noon, so I chose that time to head off on one of the side-trails. There are quite a few trails here although many of them don't go for long before disintegrating into the undergrowth. I'm not sure if these are trails for bird-watchers or for bird-trappers. I suspect the latter is more likely. Anyway, I had found a very good trail last time I was here which was easy to follow and went on for a long while. I followed this today and never found the end. It starts to go downhill after a while so I think it probably leads off to a village somewhere. There was quite a bit of human debris down there - bottles, food containers, etc - so it is probably a trail that the poachers come in on. There wasn't a lot of activity along this trail, just a small bird-wave which I never really got onto, seeing just a couple of mountain fulvettas, a black-crowned fulvetta and a Mrs. Gould's sunbird; but this was followed not long after by a lesser shortwing popping in and out of a tangle of vines, whistling away and flicking its tail up and down. A great little bird. Back near the start of the trail I unexpectedly came across the collared laughing thrushes again, and one of them hopped up onto an open branch in full sun for a few seconds. So all up a pretty brilliant day with collared laughing thrush seen well, and with ten birds added to both the year and trip lists. Tomorrow I am off to Yok Don National Park. I have been in Dalat for a week and have kind of been wanting to just stay here for the rest of the trip. It's a nice town, nice people, nice climate.
Yok Don National Park is in the west of Vietnam, on the border with Cambodia. There are still large mammals there apparently, things like banteng and elephants and tigers, but I was just going there for a quick look for birds. The big mammals, and also the really fancy birds like giant ibis, are right on the western side of the park in the forests which are off-limits or difficult to reach. But the dry dipterocarp forests near the HQ area are home to two birds I particularly wanted to see, the neglected nuthatch and the black-headed woodpecker, and the river right next to the HQ is home to the Mekong wagtail. I didn't actually put much effort into looking for the wagtail beyond checking out the banks and islands as I crossed the bridge into the park, so I never saw that one. I never saw the nuthatch either. But I did see the woodpecker, and that's really the best-looking one of the three so that's okay. The bus from Dalat to Buon Ma Thuot took six hours and cost 110,000 Dong. Most of the way was through hill country, some of it still covered in forest but mostly just towns and cultivation. Yok Don National Park is about 25km outside Buon Ma Thuot and I knew there was a bus, coloured pink and green, which went out there. All the travel sites I had read said this bus leaves from Ly Thuong Kiet street in the middle of town. Figuring this was because most tourists are just going out there as a day trip, I hoped the bus might start its route at the main bus station where my Dalat bus was ending its ride. Sure enough, as my bus pulled into the station I saw a couple of pink and green buses sitting there. Unfortunately one left just as I arrived, but they seem to go every half an hour so I only had to wait until 4.30pm. It cost 19,000 Dong, which is just over NZ$1. The main bus station is a few kilometres from the centre, so the bus didn't get to Ly Thuong Kiet until 4.50pm, and it then took over an hour from there out to the park. At dead on 6pm I got dropped right at the gate of the park HQ. I don't think many people actually stay at the park, but they have a lot of rooms available. The cheapest are 300,000 Dong which is a bit more than I like to pay (about US$13 or £10.60) but it's not that expensive and they are really nice rooms - hardly "basic" as one trip report called them. However meals at their restaurant are 100,000 Dong each so instead I ate at a little place right outside the gate where the meals only cost 30,000. I was a bit concerned about the cost of guiding here as well - 300,000 for two hours or 500,000 for a full day - but it turned out that a guide isn't a requirement as some bird reports had suggested, and they were quite happy for me to go in alone. So at 6am the next morning I was heading across the bridge into the park. The entry ticket is 60,000 Dong, which you buy at the HQ reception, but there's nobody to check it and locals on motorbikes were going in and out all day long. Once you've crossed the bridge there is a concrete road running through the forest, and off the road there are numerous trails. Everything was bone-dry. It was so dry that the trails were covered in the pits of ant-lions. Normally you only see these under covered areas, where they are sheltered from rain. I spent two hours out there, then at 8am went back for breakfast before heading back in again. The morning wasn't a huge success. I may have seen more with a guide, but I don't think being on foot changed anything. The forest is all the same, so it probably doesn't matter if you are close to the HQ or twenty kilometres away. Most of the birds seen were common species - hair-crested and greater racquet-tailed drongos, Indian rollers, lineated barbets, black-collared starlings, things like that. A couple of Asian barred owlets were cool; they are common but I don't see them every day. A pair of black bazas circling lazily overhead were even better. Lots of red-bellied squirrels as well. The best bird was, of course, black-headed woodpecker. I saw a pair of them when I went back in after breakfast, and it is a truly spectacular woodpecker. And they were bookended by a common flameback and a pair of rufous woodpeckers. Three woodpeckers in a row is pretty cool. A kilometre along the concrete road from the bridge is a junction with signs pointing to various tourist spots. I chose the rapids which were 4km away along a dirt road. I figured that way I could look for birds in the forest along the way and then the wagtails at the river. I never found the rapids. I walked for over two hours in total, past a ranger outpost where three dogs tested my mettle, and on and on and on. There are no signs along the roads so you really don't know where you are at. You could be a hundred metres from the place, or you could have missed a turn-off three kilometres back. Your only options are to keep walking and hope it is up ahead, or to give up and turn around. At noon I decided that I had very obviously gone further than 4km - even allowing for the heat and looking at birds - so I stopped to eat some disgusting biscuits I had bought and then started back. Unfortunately I got hit by heat exhaustion, or something akin to it. I don't know what the temperature was out there but it was hot and because the forest is so open there is no shade. The temperature was so high that the water in my bottle, inside my bag, was almost hot enough to make coffee with. I've only had this happen once before, in Samoa, and you really feel like you are about to die - which can happen. I got to the ranger outpost where this time there was no ranger to call the dogs off, but I carefully sat myself down and immediately the dogs stopped barking, started wagging their tails and then went to sleep. There was a water container there, and my bottle was almost empty, so I drank enough to drive the taste of death from my mouth. After resting for a while I set off, and the dogs jumped up and came after me barking angrily. Such weird animals, dogs. I didn't even stop for birds on the return walk, just concentrated on putting one foot after the other until I was back at the bridge. I don't want to walk anywhere any more. Back at the HQ I went straight to sleep for the rest of the afternoon. At about 4.30pm a heavy rainstorm rolled through, which was a surprise given how dry everything was. Good thing I was already back by then though. I only stayed for the two nights at Yok Don. It is probably very birdy there but I didn't see much, and I certainly didn't feel like going back in the forest again after yesterday. So this morning I caught the pink and green bus back to the Buon Ma Thuot bus station, then another bus from there to Kon Tum, and finally one from there to Mang Den where I arrived at just before 7pm. I am back at the Hotel Hoa Sim, same as last time, and am now trying to figure out how to get somewhere to see grey-shanked doucs.
and a couple from Mt. Lang Biang: a maritime striped squirrel and one of the fake zorses which didn't make it into the blog entry.
I've put a few more photos in the Vietnam Wildlife Gallery - Vietnam - Wildlife - Photo Galleries | ZooChat - including these which aren't good but the best I got.
I don't really know what to say about it, which is partly why I didn't mention them in the blog post. There are horses grazing on the hill near the entrance to Mt. Lang Biang, and some of them are painted to look like zorses. I don't know why.
