On my 2015 trip to Vietnam I had come to Mang Den in an attempt to see grey-shanked doucs. Several reports from birders and mammal-watchers said this was the place to be. Unfortunately, by the time I got here they were gone. Although I was later told by one birder that there was still a troop left in the forest, all the locals I talked to at the time were explicit that there were none left. They had all been shot and eaten. I had heard of another site called the Kon Ka Kinh National Park which had the largest remaining population of grey-shanked doucs, but I hadn't been able to find out anything about it. After returning home and starting planning for this trip I tried again to find out anything at all, and again came up empty. There are various tourist sites which purport to give information, but they are in fact just general "national park" descriptions. Basically all I had was a douc survey from Kon Ka Kinh and the neighbouring Kon Cha Rang Nature Reserve (also spelled Kon Chu Rang), and Google maps which showed where they were. My plan therefore was incredibly bald - I'd go back to Mang Den which is the nearest town to the reserves, and then try to find out a way to access them from there. Coming from Yok Don National Park, the bus from Buon Ma Thuot to Kon Tum took about five hours. Last time I caught a silver mini-van to Mang Den from beside the Kon Tum bus station, next to the little restaurants. So this time I went straight to that spot and was told that the bus would be at 4.15pm (after a motorbike driver told me he had to take me elsewhere to catch the bus, and the guard at the bus station entry told me there were no more buses to Mang Den that day). When the bus came past it was actually a green and yellow mini-bus, not one of the silver mini-vans, but they cost the same (40,000 Dong) and take the same time to get to Mang Den (around one and a half hours). I got the bus on it's inward route - still dropping people off, and then there was a wait at the departure point - so it didn't actually leave until 5pm. On the previous trip thread my account of travelling to Mang Den caused LaughingDove to ask "Did you really go a whole day and only see one species of bird?" That time it was a large-billed crow - this time the only species of bird I saw all day while travelling to Mang Den was tree sparrow. Vietnam's great for birding. Once again I stayed at the Hotel Hoa Sim. It was the only hotel name I knew so I asked the driver to drop me there. The rooms are 220,000 Dong so not quite as cheap as some other places along the way but still cheap enough. The lady who now runs the hotel speaks some reasonable English and she made some calls for me. The Mang Canh forest, 15km from town, is where I had been looking for doucs last time. I wanted to go back there at least once for birds. I had seen buses running through there, and she arranged for one to pick me up in the morning (a motorbike would be 300,000 for half the day or 500,000 for the whole day, versus 20,000 for the bus). She also, rather unfortunately, found out for me that Kon Ka Kinh and Kon Cha Rang both require permits which need to be arranged at least a month in advance. That pretty much meant the end of seeing grey-shanked doucs before I'd even got started. While she was making calls, a guide from Cat Tien National Park walked in. He was there with a Vietnamese client looking for grey-shanked doucs also. He said they are still found in the Mang Canh forest but I really don't trust his judgement. Because I hadn't been able to find out anything about Kon Ka Kinh I had been asking park guides about it whenever I could. When I was at Cat Tien I had asked this guy and he immediately said he knew the park - but then started describing what was clearly the Mang Canh forest. When I said I wanted to visit Kon Ka Kinh to look for grey-shanked doucs he had told me that I should go to Son Tra for them. I said they were red-shanked at Son Tra and I was looking for grey-shanked, to which he replied with they were the same at both places. When I rejected this, he said the grey-shanked were only found in the north of Vietnam, to which I suggested he was thinking of Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys. Anyway, he was now in Mang Den acting like he knows all about grey-shanked doucs. Last time I was here everyone said all the doucs had been hunted out, and on this visit I only met one local who said they were still here. On balance I believe they are well-gone. There now seemed no point in trying for grey-shanked doucs at all. I really doubt there are still any in the Mang Canh forest given its state of ongoing destruction. Kon Ka Kinh and Kon Cha Rang were not an option any more. I contemplated hiring a guy to drive me around further afield looking for them, but the chances of seeing any from the road would be remote and the cost of transport here is too high. Basically I decided to just give up on this one, go try to find a few birds at Mang Canh, and then head off to Danang to try and see the red-shanked doucs at Son Tra. If I'd come here even five years ago I probably would have been able to see them easily at Mang Canh, but I was just a little bit too late. In the morning I set off for the Mang Canh forest at around 7am. The bus was a silver mini-van - I never saw any of the local buses here which I saw last time - and it didn't go all the way to the forest, instead turning off on another road just after the km9 marker-stone, so I walked from there. There is actually forest along a lot of the road from Mang Den but it is in patches left over from where farms have been carved out of it. It doesn't start properly as a continuous stretch until just before the km15 marker, but even then it only goes for about three kilometres before ending in a newly-built village. And all along the road there are trails going off which, if you follow them, usually end quickly at big empty spaces where trees used to be. There is more destruction here than last time. Won't be more than a few more years before it is all gone. It wasn't a great day for birding, and the fact that it was continuously drizzling didn't help much. Early in the day I saw some ratchet-tailed treepies, a red-headed trogon, and flock of mountain imperial pigeons, then not much else. I followed a couple of logging trails which looked promising but had no birds on them. I did run into some bird-trappers on one of them though, with their day's catch of laughing thrushes. I couldn't do much about that because the forest isn't protected at all, it's not a reserve or national park or anything like that, despite signs proclaiming "protection of the forest eco-system" it is just a free-for-all, and I don't know if trapping birds is even illegal here. I can't really start something if I'm the one who is in the wrong. It wasn't until 2pm that I finally came across a bird-wave, and even then I couldn't see much in it except mountain fulvettas and a Mrs Gould's sunbird - until a couple of black-hooded laughing thrushes suddenly popped out! This is one of the endemic laughing thrushes which I hadn't seen at Mt. Lang Biang. Just after that I caught a passing silver mini-van coming from Kon Tum to get back to Mang Den. It turns out that their route from Kon Tum and back now runs straight through the Mang Canh forest along road 676, so it is simplicity itself for budget birders to get to the forest and back (although as I found out the next day, there don't appear to be any coming back to Mang Den after about 2 or 3pm). The lady at the hotel reception had arranged the bus again for the second morning but it never showed up. She rang them a couple of times, told me "ten minutes" at 7am, but at 8am I gave up and decided to just walk it. If I saw a bus on the way great, if not I'd just get to the forest late. Mang Den is no bigger than a tiny village so the 676 road to the forest goes right through the middle of town, and there in the centre I found several of the silver Kon Tum mini-vans. They leave every hour so I didn't get started until 9am, but because I could get dropped at the km15 marker instead of having to walk the last six kilometres I only got there half an hour later than the previous day. It was another drizzly day, and so misty at first that when I arrived at the forest I could barely see more than twenty feet. I got my first bird-wave after just a few minutes. Although it was tricky actually seeing the birds through the mist, it included yellow-billed nuthatches, mountain fulvettas, golden babblers, grey-headed canary-flycatchers, and a white-browed piculet. A couple of pale-capped pigeons passed by overhead. I spent most of the day inside the forest on various logging and bird-trapping trails. Maroon orioles were seen throughout day, and random other birds were grey-crowned tits, red-headed trogon, and a sultan tit calling from the top of a tree. There was another good bird-wave about 1.30pm with a single grey-headed parrotbill, ratchet-tailed treepies, lesser racquet-tailed drongo, both Mrs Gould's and black-throated sunbirds, and some laughing thrushes which I didn't get to identify. Actually I saw or heard flocks of laughing thrushes four or five times today but I was never able to see which species they were. Over the two days I saw most of the birds I'd seen on my previous visit, plus a few additional ones like the black-hooded laughing thrushes and sultan tit, although most of them were ones I'd seen recently at other places like Dalat. At 4.30pm I realised that I hadn't seen any mini-vans for at least two hours. It gets dark at 6.30pm and the 15km back to town would take at least two and a half hours. I generally walk at a rate of ten minutes per kilometre if I'm not birding, but the uphill parts are slower and obviously the further you walk the slower you get. I jogged the downhill parts to make up time lost on the uphill bits, but after five kilometres a car came past which I flagged down and got a ride the rest of the way. On the first day something had been biting me while I was at the forest. I have no idea what. I'd feel an itch, look down, and there'd be a little ball of blood on my hand or arm. Mosquitoes and blackflies just leave bumps or red marks. So it was something small enough to go unnoticed until it had left, but with a big enough wound-making-apparatus to leave an actual hole. I'm suspecting invisible flying scorpions. In the night the bites all swelled up. All of them. And I don't mean a little swelling either. My left hand had three bites and most of the hand is swollen up. If I make a fist the skin is stretched tight enough to be painful. It makes me think of Comfortably Numb with the line "my hands felt just like two balloons". If there's nothing posted on this thread later it's either because my hands have exploded or I'm dead.
Sounds totally bizarre, maybe they're painted to avoid people stealing them? "Yes officer, that's definitely my horse. I can tell by the shoddy paint job!"
Sorry, I've only just caught up That sounded a little scary for a moment. So he remembered your name and details but not what you look like? Did you spend any more time with him?
well it had been ten years. It was his first time in Vietnam so it was a strange coincidence us meeting there. I basically only saw him in the restaurant and a couple of times on the road. He was there with a friend and they had a guide (the same guide I then met at Mang Den actually) - you can't really join up with other birders when they have a guide because they are paying for his services, plus they were mostly after pittas which involves sitting in a little hide and throwing out mealworms and playing tapes. Not my scene. They went to Dalat after Cat Tien, on the same day I went there but later in the day by car, but I never saw them there at all.
I got into Danang at 4pm after a six-ish hour bus ride from Kon Tum which involved a heated dispute with the driver over the "foreigner price" (basically him ripping off tourists and pocketing the extra money himself, because unlike taxis or motorbikes, bus fares are a set price for everyone). I found a guesthouse just by the bus station, the Pho Xanh, which is 200,000 Dong per night. The only reason I was back in Danang was to try and find red-shanked doucs on the Son Tra Peninsula just next to town. There are three species of douc monkeys. The black-shanked is easy to see at Cat Tien National Park. The grey-shanked is critically-endangered - that's the one I tried and failed to see at Mang Den. The red-shanked douc is the most common of the three species, and there is a good population of them in the forest on Son Tra. The full name of the peninsula is Nui Son Tra, which means "monkey mountain". Apart for the doucs there are also rhesus and Assamese macaques there. I had come here in 2015 and seen no monkeys at all, despite the macaques supposedly being common. The red-shanked doucs are also found at the next two places I'm going, Bach Ma National Park and Phong Nha-Ke Bang, but Son Tra seems like the most reliable spot. I had been told by a birder that he had been to Son Tra twice and seen the doucs easily both times, even though he just went up in a taxi while waiting on flights. I therefore hoped I could do the same - just swan on up there in a taxi, see the doucs, then go back to the guesthouse for the night and leave the next morning for Bach Ma. Nice and simple. It had just started to spit at 4.30pm when I got a taxi. The driver spoke little English but said he knew the peninsula and the doucs. It kind of turned out he didn't know the peninsula at all, and kept stopping for directions. Also it was a bit further away than I remembered, so my hopes of the taxi fare not being too dear didn't last. The meter had already clocked up 350,000 Dong before we even left the coastal road and headed uphill. This was going to be an expensive fail! I was hopefully keeping an eye on all the trees as we drove. Once again there was not a single macaque seen, which was both surprising and disappointing. I have never seen the Assamese macaque before, and I thought that even if I didn't see any doucs at least I should see the macaques. Somewhere along the road which runs across the tops of the peninsula's peaks we stopped at a likely-looking spot so I could scan the trees down the valley. The driver wandered up a bit further to ask some local guys under a tarpaulin tent if they had seen any monkeys. I couldn't see anything so followed him to see what the guys were saying. They hadn't seen any monkeys. I turned around and checked out the trees in the other direction with my binoculars. And right there in the open, in the canopy of a stand-alone tree, were three red-shanked doucs! This was almost literally the only point on the road from which they could be seen because of the other trees along the sides. Just blind luck. On the other side of the luck was that it started to rain properly right then, and also it was 6pm by now and in this part of the country that means dusk. So the viewing wasn't fantastic but better than nothing, and a few of the photos weren't extremely terrible (which is to say, they were terrible but not as terrible as the extremely terrible ones). The taxi fare came out at 680,000 Dong which is about NZ$42 or US$30 or £24. In real terms it isn't a lot. I mean it was two hours and something like 54 kilometres in total. A bargain really. Given the cost, though, Murphy's Law says that I will now see red-shanked doucs at Bach Ma and/or Phong Nha-Ke Bang. But equally, if I hadn't spent the money finding them on Son Tra then I wouldn't see them at the other two places either. That's just the way it goes.
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 SON TRA PENINSULA (DANANG) Red-shanked Douc Pygathrix naemeus - 7 of 25 See this post (#256) for the full list of Vietnamese primates: Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017 RECAP: so far on this trip I've seen 7 out of the 25 primate species in Vietnam. Of the species through which ranges I have passed, I have seen 7 out of 14 species. The two lorises I really don't expect to see at all, and I've only had the chance for spotlighting at Ta Cu and Cat Tien anyway. Northern Pig-tailed Macaque was probably seen at Cat Tien but I didn't get a clear view (but I saw it in Vietnam in 2015, so it will count on a final Vietnamese tally I suppose). Stump-tailed Macaque hasn't been seen yet, but it also occurs in the north so may still be seen. Grey-shanked Douc was a big fat no, and I am now north of its only range. Northern Buff-cheeked (or Annamite) Gibbon was missed (for the same reason as Grey-shanked Douc) but is also found at Bach Ma so is still a very slim possibility. I thought I would see Assamese Macaque at Son Tra but did not - hopefully I will see it somewhere else. Total number of primates seen on this trip is now 24.
As with some of the other places on this trip through south and central Vietnam, I also went to Bach Ma National Park on my 2015 visit. The account of that visit can be read here: Doucs And Dong: Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part four (2015) On that trip I stayed at one of the hotels up near the summit of the mountain. I really enjoyed my time there. Although the birding wasn't as profitable as I had hoped I had a fun time spotlighting in the forest up there, seeing my first ferret-badgers. For this visit I wanted to spend more time at the summit, both for birding and for spotlighting. I hoped to see an Annamite muntjac properly after maybe almost seeing one last time (a black blur of about the right size), and it is a good location for Owston's palm civet. I also wanted to spend some nights at the HQ accommodation at the bottom of the mountain because that is closer to the Pheasant Trail which I didn't really get to explore last time. And, finally, the park is home to another one of Vietnam's endangered primates, the Annamite gibbon. I have decided I like the name "Annamite gibbon" better than "northern buff-cheeked gibbon". It is shorter and easier to say, and it has a more distinctive sound to it as a name. The main problem with Bach Ma, as a visitor after wildlife, is that there is accommodation at the bottom, there is accommodation at the top, but in between is just 17km of winding rising road. Motorbikes aren't allowed in the park (except for those of the staff) and transport up and down is restricted to the tour buses and to the park's own mini-vans which cost 900,000 Dong for the trip up and down. So if you are a solo money-poor traveller looking for gibbons you don't have much choice but to walk. I had a survey of Bach Ma's gibbons from 2007, which showed that they are found in the altitude range between 400 and 800 metres - so not at the bottom and not at the top, but only in the middle stretch. The forest doesn't even start until at about the 8 or 9km mark; below that is just scrub and bamboo. When I arrived at the park HQ I found there had been some pricing changes since 2015. Firstly the HQ accommodation was now 300,000 Dong per night instead of 250,000. That wasn't too bad a rise (300,000 is about NZ$ 19), but much worse was the increase for the Phuong Lan Villa up near the summit. In 2015 this cost me 550,000 Dong (c.NZ$35) per night and that was the cheapest accommodation up there. Now the price was 1,050,000 Dong (c.NZ$66). Three nights there would set me back almost two weeks budget, and that's not even including food and the transport up there. Straight away this meant the summit was out of the question. In my original plan for the trip I would have had enough money to cover staying at the summit for several nights (well, at the old price, not so much the new price) but because Sri Lanka was added in and then I went back to Ladakh a second time, that meant I got into Vietnam about a month behind my planned arrival and about a month over-budget. I'm running out of money but still want to try and fit in all - or at least most - of the places I intended to visit in Vietnam. I decided that I'd have to forget about Owston's palm civets and concentrate instead on just the gibbons. The rooms at the HQ are worth about a third of what they are charging. The one I had looked more like they had just stuck some beds in an abandoned room. However the lady in charge of it is really nice and helpful, and she gave me the third and fourth nights at 200,000 which meant the average was 250,000 per night. She also brought me over a water cooler to refill my bottles, which saved me a bit of money on buying water, and a bag of bananas and dragonfruit. The impression I got was that they don't get many people bothering to stay here, probably especially for several nights. For the first afternoon I just went to the Thuy Dien waterfall. It's along a 2 or 3km road from the HQ, and is outside the park so you don't need an entry ticket. The "waterfall" is more of a big rock over which the river flows. According to one trip report there is a watch-tower there which is strange because not only is there no watch-tower but there would seem to be no reason to have a watch-tower there anyway. Just past the huts by the waterfall I found a trail into the forest. Judging from the slashed-back vegetation and the crumbling state of the concrete path, it appeared to have only recently been reclaimed from the jungle. It was a nice trail, only a couple of leeches, but with few birds being the middle of the day. Puff-throated bulbuls and buff-breasted babblers were the first for the trip, and there was a green vine snake on the path at one point. I also saw a slender-tailed tree shrew, making this the third place I've seen them in Vietnam (after Cat Tien and Dalat). At 6am the next morning I walked up the road to the Pheasant Trail. According to the park map the trail is at km8. The HQ is at km3 (the kilometre markers start at the highway). I figured a 5km walk should take about an hour at most, and going very early should avoid the worst of the heat. Last time I was at Bach Ma I had walked down from the summit to save on money and it was the dumbest thing to do. I swore I would never do that again. However even this early in the morning it was dreadfully hot, and within half an hour I was absolutely drenched with sweat. It took almost an hour and a half to get to the trail - I didn't think I'd been walking that slow! I figured I should keep walking up the road a bit and find a viewpoint for scanning the valleys and hillsides, to see if I could spot any gibbons. I'd go onto the trail on the way back down. It wasn't more than a hundred or so metres before I came to a kilometre marker, showing that in fact the trail is just before km9 which makes a bit more sense of the walking time, especially given that it is all uphill. Just after the km10 marker-stone I heard a gibbon calling. It was somewhere reasonably close. That bode well, so I kept going. I heard a couple more gibbons further up but again didn't see any of them. Gibbons are actually pretty difficult to find. You might think they would be easy to see, with the way they are always swinging about in the trees and hollering at each other, but they also spend a lot of time just sitting in the branches. And here in particular, you are restricted to a single road from which you have to just use binoculars to scan the surrounding slopes. So you're basically trying to find an animal about the size of a dog, hidden somewhere in the canopies of a hundred trees on the other side of a valley. The road up the mountain is 19 kilometres long. I am obviously something of a masochist because even though I'd sworn I'd never walk down that road again, I just kept going until I ended up at the top of the mountain. My thinking was basically that there could be a gibbon right around that next bend so I just kept pressing on. And also this time I didn't have a pack on my back, just my shoulder-bag, so coming back down wouldn't be as bad. At around km14 I came across a troop of red-shanked doucs in the trees right beside the road which gave excellent views (as I predicted in my last post about Son Tra). They eye-balled me curiously, but of course as soon as my camera came out and there was a barrel pointed at them, the monkeys fled. This is typical of the larger mammals and birds in Vietnam (and to a lesser extent in the rest of southeast Asia) - anything which looks like it might be a gun is cause for immediate panic. I stopped for lunch at the Chicken Restaurant next to Phuong Lan Villa. The guy who manages it remembered me from 2015. Opposing what the pricing sheet at HQ had said, he told me that the rooms there were 650,000 Dong - but that was still too much with my current funds. He also said that for gibbons it would be best to look on the Pheasant Trail. I did the Nature Trail at the summit, just as it started raining. It had been fine and sunny up to that point, but then it didn't stop raining for the next two days. At the start of the Nature Trail there was a flowering tree with lots of orange-bellied leafbirds and maritime striped squirrels but after that I saw nothing except a red-bellied squirrel, until right at the end of the trail when a long-tailed broadbill appeared in a tree followed a few seconds later by a pair of silver-breasted broadbills. I walked back down the road, freaking out just a little as lightning and thunder crashed above me. It is pretty darn scary being on an open road on top of a mountain with a lightning storm literally directly overhead. About half an hour down, after the storm had died to drizzle, I saw something disappear off the road at a bend up ahead. Then a couple more animals dashed after the first one - stump-tailed macaques! These three must have been the tail-end of a larger group. When I got to the bend I saw one animal run across an open space much further down the slope. I put my binoculars on the spot and managed to get looks at two more. There must have been a lot of them though because I could hear them calling to each other from the forest below the road for quite a while as I walked. A few kilometres on, a guy on a motorbike stopped and gave me a lift the rest of the way down. In the morning it was back to the Pheasant Trail. Today was alternating between rain and drizzle, so the walk up there wasn't as hot because there was no sun. I spent from 7am to 1pm on the trail and saw almost nothing. Gibbons don't call in the fog, and it was difficult to see very far so most of the birds I could hear went unseen. The trail leads to a waterfall - an actual waterfall this time. At the river I did some "rock-pooling" to see what I would find. At Mt. Kinabalu I always stop for this in the mountain streams and there is always masses of life - insect larvae, freshwater crabs, tadpoles, fish. Here there was very little, although I did see a number of hillstream loaches on the rocks in mid-stream and some pools of tadpoles. I came back out onto the road after six hours, and was going to try scanning the forest from the road but the mist and clouds made that impossible so I just went back to the HQ. The third morning was basically a repeat of the second. I walked up to the Pheasant Trail in the drizzle but kept going along the road for a couple more kilometres to try and look for gibbons. However most of the time it was impossible to see the trees through the clouds and mist so I returned to the trail at around 9.30am where, once again, I found almost nothing because of the weather. Out of only seven birds seen today, the highlight was an eye-browed thrush. I'm really not sure if the road or the trail would be better for gibbons. I was back out on the road at 1.30pm, and everything everywhere was whited out with the mist. I had become a little weary of walking for six kilometres uphill every morning just to get to the point where I can start to look for the animals, and then being able to find nothing in the mist and rain, so after three days of this I gave it up. There are still places I need to go before my money runs out. Tomorrow morning I'll be off to Phong Nha-Ke Bang to look for Hatinh langurs.
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 SON TRA PENINSULA (DANANG) Red-shanked Douc Pygathrix naemeus - 7 of 25 BACH MA NATIONAL PARK Stump-tailed Macaque Macaca arctoides - 8 of 25 *Annamite (Northern Buff-cheeked) Gibbon Nomascus annamensis - call only See this post (#256) for the full list of Vietnamese primates: Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017
A few pages back (page 12 to be exact), when I was at Kaeng Krachan National Park in Thailand, I saw my first Berdmore's Ground Squirrel Menetes berdmorei and made the throw-away comment "I don't think there's many species of squirrels left for me to see in southeast Asia any more." This has been in my mind since then, so I decided to make a quick search and see just how many species there are left for me. It, um, turned out to be more than I thought! For the sake of ease, all I did was check the Wikipedia mammal lists for each of the southeast Asian countries and count up the squirrels I hadn't seen. I wasn't counting flying squirrels at all, because I've only see the giant species of those and all the flying squirrels are nocturnal, so it is just the "typical" squirrels. I found 26 species I haven't seen yet, and so with only 34 species from southeast Asia on my "seen list" I'm barely over half way there. It was the Philippines which ruined my percentage. I may need to go there some day. VIETNAM Inornate Squirrel Callosciurus inornatus (this species is in the north of Vietnam, so I am hopeful of seeing it some time soon) Red-hipped Ground Squirrel Dremomys pyrrhomerus Red-throated Ground Squirrel Dremomys gularis [this one isn't on Wikipedia's list of Vietnamese mammals, so it is a late addition to this post after I noticed it in the mammal field guide] Perney's Long-nosed Squirrel Dremomys pernyi (also in Burma) BURMA Anderson's Squirrel Callosciurus quinquestriatus Orange-bellied Himalayan Squirrel Dremomys lokriah BORNEO Kinabalu Squirrel Callosciurus baluensis (four times on Mt. Kinabalu and I still haven't seen this one!) Tufted Ground Squirrel Rheithrosciurus macrotis INDONESIA MENTAWAI ISLANDS Mentawai Squirrel Callosciurus melanogaster Mentawai Three-striped Squirrel Lariscus obscurus Fraternal Squirrel Sundasciurus fraterculus SULAWESI three species of Sulawesi Dwarf Squirrels Prosciurillus (I have seen two of the five species) Montane Long-nosed Squirrel Hyosciurus heinrichi Lowland Long-nosed Squirrel Hyosciurus ileile PHILIPPINES The Philippines is where I really came unstuck - I had no idea there were so many squirrels there! As well as the Philippines Pigmy Squirrel Exilisciurus concinnus there are no fewer than nine endemic Sundasciurus species!
Out of genuine curiosity I wonder how many people travel around the world to see various species of squirrels. You might be a pioneer in squirrel tourism...
I suspect that squirrel tourism is not a real thing. People studying squirrels don't count because that isn't tourism, it's work. So I think you're really just left with mammal-watchers and general nature-watchers, but they aren't usually after squirrels specifically but rather all the mammals/wildlife they can find. There are some squirrels I would make a deliberate trip to try and see though, foremost amongst them being the woolly giant flying squirrel. Maybe one day. After the Philippines
I have uploaded the two least-worst of the red-shanked douc photos from Son Tra. They were, I say in defence of their quality, taken at dusk in the rain, so...
I have also uploaded all the India photos I'll be adding. See them on several pages here: India - Wildlife - Photo Galleries | ZooChat There are all sorts of creatures featured, including Indian wild asses at the Little Rann of Kutch for Pertinax, various owls for TLD, gharials and skimmers at the Chambal River, Indian crested porcupine, Nilgiri tahr, squirrels, and lots of birds from everywhere. Plus there are all the previously-uploaded monkey photos for anyone who missed them.
The final Vietnamese park which I would be re-visiting from my 2015 trip is Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park. After this I'm going further north than I did before. As in 2015 my sole reason for coming to Phong Nha is primates. The main species I wanted to try and see was the Hatinh Langur which is one of the black and white "Francois' Langur group", a group of closely-related Indochinese leaf monkeys which are restricted to the remnant forests in limestone karst country. Hence they are also collectively known as "limestone langurs". All of the six or seven species in this group spend their days in the forest feeding and retire at night to sleep in crevices or small caves on sheer cliff-faces to escape predators. Phong Nha is basically the only place left where you can hope to find Hatinh langurs in the wild. Poaching still a problem - obviously, this being Vietnam. This news article from 2015 mentions at the bottom about poachers being caught at Phong Nha-Ke Bang with thirteen Hatinh langur skins (Poachers caught at Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park) and this one from 2016 is about four Hatinh langurs being found at a police traffic stop and mentions at the bottom another poacher being caught coming out of Phong Nha-Ke Bang with a smoked Hatinh langur (Four frozen endangered Hatinh langurs transported by coach). In theory seeing the langurs should be fairly straightforward because I knew there was a troop which slept on the cliffs just by the Dark Cave on the western side of the park. They do move around of course, sleeping on different cliffs at different times, but overall it should just be a matter of waiting there in the late afternoon or early morning until you see them. In 2015 this didn't work out so well, and it was so hot then (in August) that I only lasted two days. From Bach Ma National Park I caught a Hanoi-bound bus which dropped me off three and a half hours later outside Dong Hoi, from which I took a local bus for about an hour and a half to the village of Phong Nha (aka Son Trach) which sits on the north-eastern edge of the park. Last time I stayed at a hotel called the Binh Minh. This time I stayed at the Thien Thanh Hotel which is a bit cheaper, the owner Bong giving me a room for 200,000 as opposed to the 250,000 most of the other hotels were asking. There are also numerous hostels in town with dorm rooms but they aren't much of a saving (they all seem to be around 150,000 for a bed) and, with me being a good fifteen to twenty years older than your average backpacker and having different aims for travelling, I'd really rather have a room to myself than share with a bunch of barely-adults. The village consists largely of hotels, tour operators and restaurants, with most places being all three at once. Since my last visit the Why Not Cafe has changed its name to A Little Vietnamese Restaurant, possibly in response to bad reviews. It is actually much better now, both in terms of food and service, although really the service is pretty rubbish in all the restaurants here. The best food I found was at the Tuan Ngoc Restaurant. Access within the national park is via a long loop road. The village of Phong Nha sits up in the northeast. The Dark Cave - where I'd be going to look for the langurs - is almost directly on the opposite side of the loop and you can't go through the middle because it is all mountains. Whichever direction you take it is a 25km or so trip. The north route is through farmland outside the park and is all flat, while the south route is through forest but all mountains. Last time I was here I hired a guy to drive me around on a motorbike. This time I was going to just rent a motorbike myself, although I haven't ridden one in over twenty years, but the hotel also had bicycles for hire for only 50,000 Dong per day (about NZ$3) which appealed to both my pleasure at saving money and in inflicting pain on myself for no good reason. When I arrived in town in the mid-afternoon it was raining so I didn't go anywhere, but the next few days were mostly cool and cloudy which was nice for cycling. Given the distances needing to be covered I decided to just concentrate on trying to find the Hatinh langurs and to forget about the southern white-cheeked gibbons which are also found in the park. To look for gibbons I would need to be at the far southern end of the park early in the morning and even then the chances of seeing any would be minimal. Fortunately I had already managed to see red-shanked doucs at Son Tra and Bach Ma so I didn't need to worry about looking for them as well. The best times to be at the cliffs are around 5-6.30am when the langurs are waking up and leaving for the day, and 4-6.30pm when they are returning to sleep. I chose just to go there in the afternoons because if you don't see them coming to the cliffs to sleep then you're not likely to see them leaving those same cliffs in the morning. So I got to sleep late, do little during the day, and then at about 2pm set off on the bike to the park's Tro Mong entrance by the Dark Cave. It took me an hour and a half each way when I went to the Dark Cave. I'm not sure exactly of the distance but it is somewhere between 20 and 25km from the village. First you cycle north for forty minutes to the junction for Khe San, and then you cycle for about fifty minutes southwards. By motorbike it's about half an hour total. Annoyingly the two roads run pretty much alongside each other for the last part but the river between them means you can't just cut across and save half an hour of cycling! On the first day while cycling I spotted a narcissus flycatcher, which for once is an appropriate Classical name for a species because if there's one bird which would be constantly admiring itself in a mirror it is the male narcissus flycatcher. Phong Nha-Ke Bang has ten primate species within its forests, although your average visitor isn't going to see any of them unless they go to the Botanic Gardens where ex-pet macaques are rehabilitated. I counted myself lucky to spot a group of stump-tailed macaques on my first day, somewhat south of the Tro Mong entrance on the other side of the river. I hadn't been confident of seeing stump-tailed macaques anywhere in Vietnam because they seem difficult to see everywhere, but I have now seen them at two places here (the other being at Bach Ma a few days previously). I saw my second primate species here later in the day while stationed on the roadside watching the langurs' sleeping cliffs. The cliffs I was watching were on the other side of the river. You can tell the usual sleeping spots because there are broad yellow streaks down the cliff-face from their urine staining the rocks over the years. This makes it easy to tell where to keep an eye on, but unfortunately also makes hunting them a lot easier for the poachers. Anyway, I had been sitting there for over an hour with no signs until 5.15pm when I suddenly saw some trees near the top of the cliff-face shaking. I was naturally pretty excited, thinking I was going to be seeing langurs on the first day - and then a macaque popped into view. There were a few of them up there but they weren't close enough to tell if they were rhesus macaques or Assamese macaques which look quite similar to one another. Of the langurs there were none. One of the main annoyances when cycling at dusk is the clouds of midges which appear, bouncing off your face like needles and getting stuck in your eyes. I kept sneezing because the midges were getting up my nose, and that's not a sentence I thought I'd be writing. Apart for the midges, there is no more relaxing night-time activity than riding on a bicycle with no lights along an unlit highway with trucks and motorbikes tearing past you at top speed, while the local dogs take the position that because it's dark they can try to bite whoever they like. And then there are all the usual Asian road obstacles, like the motorbike with no lights coming towards you on the wrong side of the road and neither of you can see each other until just metres apart, or the water buffalo standing on the road which you literally cannot see until you are just about to hit it. For three days in a row I cycled to and from the cliffs. There was so much cycling that I considered that the species name should be changed from Hatinh Langurs to Hating Langurs. Nevertheless, it may have taken something like 150km of cycling, but I finally saw them. On the third afternoon I was at my usual spot, facing the cliff with the most obvious staining, wondering how much longer I was going to keep this up. According to papers I'd read the langurs tend to return to their cliffs at around 4pm and then spend time just hanging out and playing until going to bed. It was now 5.30pm. I had already cycled up and down the road several times checking all the cliffs along that stretch, not really knowing which ones they might appear on. I'm idly sitting there, and I think "hmm, what's that dark shape there?" On a cliff with scattered trees growing all over the face there are lots of black monkey-sized shapes. Some are just holes in the rock, some are gaps between branches - and some it seems are actually monkeys! As it turned out, Hatinh langurs are much less obvious when on the cliffs than I had been expecting. I only saw two langurs and they weren't actively climbing open rock faces, but rather moving individually across the cliff from vegetation patch to vegetation patch. A langur would come into the open, sit there quietly looking around, and then bound quickly to the next tree. After a while it would move to the next patch. Then the next langur would come out into the open. Given their habits I may have simply missed seeing them on the first two afternoons, and possibly even on the first visit to Phong Nha. I just checked Andie Ang's Primate Watching site and she gives only a one-in-five chance of seeing the Hatinh langurs at Phong Nha-Ke Bang, so that's interesting. The Hatinh langur was my first "limestone langur". The next primate in my sights is another of the same group, the Delacour's langur at Van Long Nature Reserve. That one is supposed to be much more reliable, so fingers crossed!
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 SON TRA PENINSULA (DANANG) Red-shanked Douc Pygathrix naemeus - 7 of 25 BACH MA NATIONAL PARK Stump-tailed Macaque Macaca arctoides - 8 of 25 *Annamite (Northern Buff-cheeked) Gibbon Nomascus annamensis - call only PHONG NHA-KE BANG NATIONAL PARK Hatinh Langur Trachypithecus hatinhensis - 9 of 25 See this post (#256) for the full list of Vietnamese primates: Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017
I've put a few photos of Hatinh Langur in the Vietnam Wildlife gallery. They all look similar to this one:
