Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017

Sutera have ridiculous prices at all their accommodations in various parks. The dorms up at Laban Rata where you have to spend the night when climbing the mountain are about 800 Ringgits per bed (about US$190).

I think in general people don't even realise that you can stay outside the park, so they just pay it.

There was actually a special deal at one of the dorms in the park when I was there, for about US$35. Still too expensive for me...

 

soon. Hopefully. Well not soon, but maybe several weeks from now. Possibly a month or so.

 

it's only been twelve squirrels so far (thirteen with the five-striped palm squirrels I have since seen in India - I arrived in Delhi yesterday). There were quite a few I missed which I had expected to see, but that was due to only having a couple of days at each spot in Malaysia. There aren't as many squirrels in India as in southeast Asia though, so there won't be a whole lot added in the near future.

And yes, the Western Ghats are in the plan...

 

Mt. Kinabalu has a nice cool temperature, perfect for someone like me who does not like heat and humidity. Kota Kinabalu is the complete opposite - meltingly hot and humid. The reason we came here with some days to spare was because Mr. Andy wanted to go to Pulau Manukan, a little island off the coast, to go swimming and snorkelling. Unfortunately for him, Typhoon Sarika was sweeping through Vietnam and the Philippines, causing high winds and lashing rain in KK.

The island trip was out, but later in the morning we caught a taxi out to Tanjung Aru Beach to look for parrots. Blue-naped parrots and long-tailed parakeets are both found here - I easily saw both on my last trip to Borneo - but today they were nowhere to be seen. Despite the heavy rain in the morning and the weather forecast saying there would thunderstorms all week, the day actually turned out to be fine and sunny. We debated going to the island for the second half, but decided we wouldn't have enough time to both snorkel and look for megapodes, and we didn't know if the weather would hold, so we left it.

Mr. Andy's flight was the next afternoon. If the weather looked good we might go to the island or if not something else. The weather was good - but instead we went to the KK Wetland Sanctuary, which is a mangrove reserve just above town. The tides were not in our favour - the mudflats between the mangroves were still under water so no waders were to be seen - but we saw a nankeen night heron (his first night heron), a couple of purple herons, some little egrets, a blue-eared kingfisher, and a handful of common passerines. Really there wasn't much around. In the trees outside the entrance as we left, we saw plain sunbird, orange-bellied flowerpecker, and dusky munia. That last one meant that Mr. Andy's last bird in Malaysia was a Bornean endemic.

After Mr. Andy left for the airport I moved house, into a ten-bed dorm at Borneo Backpackers. We had been staying in a flash room at the Capital Hotel, which was the first "skyscraper hotel" in KK (built back in 1967 when the town was called Jesselton), because Mr. Andy needs comforts which I don't. And I basically did nothing much the next day, and then the morning after I flew out of Borneo via Kuala Lumpur, bound for India.

 

birds and one mammal seen in Kota Kinabalu here: 2016 Big Year

 

First country is done, so here are the first of the trip stats.

1192.10 Ringgits spent over eleven days (NZ$397.50, US$284.85, UK£232.90, €261.70) - not including flights because they were already paid for.

Average spent per day: NZ$36.10, US$25.90, UK£21.20, €23.80

114 birds seen, 2 lifers

23 mammals seen, 2 lifers

 

yeah, I'm a tad late for the birthday - but birthdays don't count unless you're overseas anyway so it's all good.

The reason I left later than August is because Air Asia came back to New Zealand and had some opening deals, so I took the date on which I could find the cheapest fare.

 

I would like to get up to 600 birds, but it is unlikely because it is already so late in the year. I might get to 400 but I'm not really sure. It depends on how India treats me.

 

My flight out of Kota Kinabalu was scheduled for 12.30pm and left at 1.30. It's two and a half hours between KK and KL so I arrived at 4pm, and then my next flight on to New Delhi in India was at 7pm. So far all my flights except the first (between Christchurch and Auckland) have been with Air Asia. Like the old saying goes, if man wasn't meant to fly there wouldn't be Air Asia air hostesses.

There were quite a few white girls in the departure lounge dressed in "Indian hippy" style. They look like they have walked into an Indian clothes shop and said "just dress me in everything you've got". It's almost like a weird form of racism. I mean, all the Indians are dressed in normal clothes and these white girls are layered in wraps and sarongs like kids at a dress-up party. I'm not sure if they think it makes them blend in (hint: it does the opposite) or if they think it makes them "one with the country" or some hippy nonsense.

For Delhi I did two things I don't normally like to do when travelling. The first was booking a hotel ahead of time and the second, which was truly uncharacteristic of me, was arranging a pick-up from the airport to the hotel. I generally prefer just finding a place to stay when I arrive but my flight was landing at 10pm and I figured by the time I got into town to the backpacker district of Paharganj it would be closer to midnight, so I booked at a place called the Smyle Inn. Paharganj is chock-full of budget hotels, probably hundreds of them of varying quality or lack thereof, and trying to choose one sight-unseen off the internet is fraught with difficulties. Smyle Inn seemed like a good choice - not the cheapest I could have found but still a good deal, especially compared to some of the reviews of other places. And I was only going to be in Delhi for five nights (which actually means just four days) so better to have an acceptable base than to waste time looking around for a substitute.

There is a really easy and cheap way to get to Paharganj from the airport, and that is to take the Metro train which stops just nearby. However from all accounts trying to find my way for the first time from the Metro station to and then through the alleys of Paharganj was not something to be taken lightly at midnight. So I bit the bullet and said I'd take the pick-up (which was only about NZ$10 so not the end of the world). It was a good decision - even during the day I had trouble finding my way back to the Smyle Inn amongst the confusion of alleyways.

I have only been to India once before, back in early 2014 when I went to Assam (via Calcutta). Assam is pretty much the same as southeast Asia - it's not really India at all. Calcutta was basically a big rubbish dump with people living in it - I suspect that is more typical for India. New Delhi started out looking pretty normal on the ride from the airport, but once the taxi turned into Paharganj it suddenly dipped into slum territory, with ugly skinny dogs lurking in the shadows and melancholy cows shuffling through the garbage along the sides of the road. During the day it looked better, but probably only because you couldn't see more than a few feet past the hundreds of people and auto-rickshaws.

The weather forecast for the next few days in Delhi was 35 degrees and "smoke". Other forecasts said "life-endangering smog" - I'm not joking. Also I had just found out that the Delhi Zoo had been temporarily closed due to avian flu. Then there's India being the rabies capital of the world, what with their stray dog problem (though all of the many many dogs I encountered in Delhi proved to be less threatening than sleepy bunny rabbits). And have I mentioned the monkey problem? Because they are protected and fed for religious reasons, rhesus macaques are out of control. Apparently there are 1000 bites per DAY reported across Indian cities (I say "apparently" because after a few days in Delhi I have seen no more than six or seven macaques). In 2007 the deputy mayor of New Delhi was killed when he went over a balcony trying to fight off a macaque attack at his house. They have been declared vermin in Himachal Pradesh and allowed to be culled because they are so dangerous. There's a tourist town there called Shimla which records 400 bites a month, and one local girl was actually killed by a mob of macaques when she tried to chase them off her farm. I think I'd rather be attacked by a dog than a macaque. A dog only has rabies, apart for the general ripping-you-to-pieces of course, but macaques carry rabies, hepatitis, Herpes B, tuberculosis and heaven knows what else, and they usually have a whole gang of mates behind them as back-up.

Why am I going to India again?

I'm not sure what to expect from this part of the trip, whether I'll leave India thinking "I loved that" or "I hated that, never going back". I think the latter is most likely, to be honest. I have a feeling I am a southeast Asia person and not a south Asia person. But we'll see how things go. (This was mostly written a couple of days ago - after three days in Delhi I'm feeling fine about it; I'll get back to you after a month...)

 

My first day in New Delhi I left as a "get used to New Delhi day". Basically I wanted to just wander round the alleys and try to get a sense of where everything was (the metro stations, restaurants, etc). I found a little bookshop which had the new edition of Vivek Menon's Indian Mammals Field Guide for 850 rupees (about NZ$17, much less than what it would have cost me to order it online before I came to India). The smoke/smog issue didn't seem too apparent to me, although there was a definite haze across the sky which cut out the sun a bit so it didn't feel like 35 degrees at all. The dogs, as I said earlier, are all perfectly well behaved. I saw a langur man - that's a person who has a pet hanuman langur on a leash, who hires himself out as a macaque scarer (macaques are scared of langurs). Male hanuman langurs are huge! If I was a macaque I'd be scared of a langur too - although I'm already scared of macaques so it stands to reason I'd be scared of langurs as well.

The friendliness of everybody here is a bit disarming, even for a New Zealander, and one is never sure if they are just friendly passers-by or if they are tourist agents. More often than not it is the latter. They engage you in conversation - usually starting with "I like your beard" or "I like your hair" (I haven't seen anyone else here with long hair at all, and surprisingly nobody has a longer beard than me) - and walk along with you, then suddenly "oh, here is my shop, I'll get you a map" and then they put in the hard-sell for tours and tell you that where you are going is no good. One guy got really angry with me because half way through his spiel I said I wasn't interested in tours, I just like to wander where I want, and he launched into a tirade about "that is what is wrong with New Zealanders, you make up your own mind and think you know better than an Indian person and then when things go wrong you blame India - you don't know what you want to do in India, only I know because it is my country" etc etc.

Another guy in the street refused to acknowledge that I was just wanting to walk around. All the shops here are closed (everything opens very late in Delhi), I should go to a particular store which is open, that auto driver there will take you. I wasn't sure if he was trying to be helpful or if he was in cahoots with the driver. Either way I repeated that I wasn't shopping, I was just walking around seeing where everything was, and he kept repeating that everything was closed and I needed to go to this particular store. After a bit I was just like "yeah, okay then" and walked off. I always try to be polite but it gets a bit wearisome when you are being harangued about how you don't know what you want. Pretty much that same conversation happened repeatedly through the morning with different people. Surely they couldn't all be agents of that particular shop?

Wandering the streets I saw a few birds, as well as lots of five-striped palm squirrels (tiny, stripey, cute; what more could one want in a street mammal?). Black kites swirl in clouds everywhere above the city, while even greater numbers of house crows and feral pigeons fill the lower levels. I haven't seen any sparrows, but I did see one collared dove feeding with some crows, and Indian ringnecks and jungle babblers were seen in some roadside trees.

The next morning was my first birding foray of Delhi. I was heading for a place called the Okhla Bird Sanctuary which is on the Yamuna River which flows through the city. I'd left it until the second morning so I wouldn't make a hash of getting there on the first morning, but it turned out to be dead-easy to reach so I should have just gone yesterday after all. The start-point is the Rajiv Chowk metro station which is about ten minutes walk from the Main Bazaar where my residence is. On the way I saw all the birds of the day before, as well as a female koel.

The metro train system is as easy to use as anywhere else, albeit more crowded (!). From Rajiv Chowk station I travelled to the Botanical Gardens station (note: I don't think there actually is a botanical gardens there, it is just a name, like the next station which is called Golf Course for some reason). A minor hiccup was that the route I was on had a junction point, with one line going off to Noida City Centre (the route I wanted) and the other to Vaishali (er, the route I ended up on), but it was an easy fix - I just jumped off before the junction station and waited for the correct train to come along a few minutes later. It's thirty minutes from Rajiv Chowk to Botanical Gardens, and then from there you have to take an auto-rickshaw for the next 3km to the sanctuary's gate. I didn't know what this should have cost me, so I got ripped off (naturally) but at least not by as much as their starting price which was 350 rupees, "because it is 18km" - I bluntly told them it was 3km, and got them down to 120 rupees; on the return trip, flagging down an auto-rickshaw from the side of the road, it cost me 60 rupees, and I think even that was inflated. I expect the real price is probably about 20 or 30 rupees.

I got to the sanctuary's southern gate just after 7.30am and paid the 350 rupee entry fee. Their website says there is also a 1000 rupee camera fee (about NZ$20) but nobody mentioned it so I didn't either. The sanctuary is mostly ten-foot-high reed-beds with scattered areas of open water. From the southern gate there is a three or four kilometre walk along a paved path to the northern gate. This path isn't very interesting because a lot of the water is screened by a narrow strip of dry forest inhabited almost solely by house crows. There were a few rhesus macaques near the gate too, but they declined to attack me. They must not have been reading the right newspapers. Where water was visible it was mostly empty. I think I must be just a touch too early for the southwards migration of waterfowl and wading birds. There were a lot of little and Indian cormorants, and a few common cormorants and Oriental darters. The feeding parties of cormorants were shadowed overhead by small flocks of black-headed gulls. Ducks were sparse, although I saw reasonable numbers of spot-billed ducks, northern shovellers, Eurasian wigeon and common teal. The only wading birds I saw were various common herons and egrets, an Asiatic black-headed ibis and a few red-naped ibis. The latter were a lifer for me (one of only four today, out of 54 species seen) but they were all out of camera range.

At the northern gate the paved path ends and a dirt track begins, with some narrow trails leading off that through the reeds. There are a couple of watch-towers along here, although they mainly overlook thick reeds and one in particular feels decidedly unsafe with the degree to which it sways when you are standing on it. I got a lot more passerines and other "land-y" birds along these trails, some of which were unexpected like rufous treepie, yellow-footed green pigeon, common starling, Eurasian hobby, and blue peafowl.

The only mammal I saw in this second half, cows excepted, was when I was walking along a narrow trail through the reeds and heard a smashing noise which I assumed was a cow feeding. Instead it was a bull nilgai, which looked at me in bewilderment while I exclaimed in surprise, and then he turned and charged away through the reeds. They are rather large when wild and only a few feet away! That was my first new mammal for the Indian part of this trip (the palm squirrels I'd already seen in Calcutta and Perth; and the rhesus macaques in Assam).

 

weeeeeelll...

India: Men Playing The Monkey in Delhi to Protect Lawmakers from Real Simians

There's another story here about the actual langur men (the ones with real langurs): Delhi’s 30,000 unruly monkeys steal stuff, terrorize people and even kill

 

My next birding stop in Delhi was the Sultanpur National Park which is just outside the city. This is almost (but not quite) as easy to get to by public transport as the Okhla Bird Sanctuary, but it is totally worth the small effort. As yesterday, the start point was the Ravij Chowk metro station, from where I headed to the Huda City Centre station in Gurgaon (an outlying district of Delhi where the local street animal is not dogs or cows but pigs). This takes just over an hour and costs 25 rupees (there's approximately 50 rupees to one NZ dollar). From there I had to take an auto-rickshaw to the Gurgaon Bus Stand from which Mr. Internet had told me there is a Haryana bus route which passes the park. In India a "bus stand" is what any other country calls a "bus station". All the auto-rickshaw drivers outside the metro station told me that it was 100 rupees for the trip because "it is 18 kilometres" - 100 rupees and 18km seems to be the standard tourist line, no matter how close it is. I could only get them down to 70 rupees - no idea what the real fare is.

Once at the bus stand I encountered an issue in that there was no English anywhere; every sign and bus destination was written in Hindi, and there is usually a mutual exclusion of understanding between my English and the Indian English. I chose a ticket window at random, asked which bus went to the park, then wrote down the name of the park because they couldn't understand me - and it turned out that the random window was the actual window I needed. The bus cost 20 rupees, took about half an hour (black-winged stilts seen en route), and I was dropped at the roadside at the park gate. The entry fee for Sultanpur is 40 rupees and camera fee 25 rupees - a substantial difference from Okhla where the entry fee is 350 rupees and the camera fee 1000 rupees. (Quick note: the park is closed on Tuesdays, so luckily I didn't leave it a day or it would have been a trip for nothing).

It was about 8.30am by the time I eventually reached the park, and while the temperature was okay to start with that soon changed. There was no smoke haze over the sky when out of the city, so it felt like the full 35 degrees. Whereas Okhla is mostly reed-beds, Sultanpur is a mix of flooded grassland and bone-dry open forest, with stretches of open marsh in the middle nearest the gate. It is fairly small and you are free to wander about on foot as you please because there are no dangerous animals there. India has all sorts of strict regulations around its national parks and reserves, and in most of them you can only enter after paying hefty fees for entry, camera, guides, and vehicles, and you cannot walk at all in many of them. As much as possible I am going to be trying to avoid the expensive parks - a lot of them are well outside my budget anyway. I will have to visit some of the "jeep safari parks" because those are the ones with all the big animals, but I won't be making a habit of it.

I had barely even entered the park when I saw my first lifer, a common hawk-cuckoo, a species which I then saw numerous times over the day. I generally find cuckoos to be difficult to see, so that was a nice start. A couple of minutes later my second lifer, with a knob-billed duck, aka comb duck, a black and white goose-sized duck with a big caruncle upon its bill. There were a lot of waterfowl at Sultanpur, far more than seen at Okhla, but unfortunately most were not close enough for me to ID properly except the shovellers with their oversized bills, the lesser whistling ducks with their long necks, and the spot-billed ducks like big ghost mallards. If they had all been southern hemisphere ducks I would have been fine but at a distance I wouldn't know a gadwall from a garganey. Amongst the ducks were lots of little cormorants, a few great cormorants and Oriental darters, and many moorhens, coots and little grebes. The local grey-headed purple gallinules were everywhere, looking very different to the NZ pukeko (most birders split purple gallinules into several species, but I can't be bothered). And right in the middle was a big colony of painted storks. I have seen painted storks in Singapore and Malaysia but never counted them on my lists because they are all from free-ranging birds at local zoos, so I never know if I'm looking at real wild ones or just wanderers. These Indian birds are therefore my first official wild painted storks.

There are paths going from the gate to either side of the marshy area, I had taken the right-hand one to start with. At various points were smaller tracks heading off towards the water. On one of these I heard what sounded suspiciously like cranes bugling from the head-high grasses. At the end of the track, where the water was, I saw a black-necked stork on the far side. I turned to scan the flooded grass to the right and realised there was a group of female nilgai wading through it. I tend to think of nilgai as arid-country antelope, so it was strange seeing them acting like lechwe. Some males were visible far back, but only the females were close enough for photos. To the right of the nilgai, right on the edge of the grasses, was a pair of sarus cranes with a juvenile. I got some photos of these as well but they're pretty poor.
Just past here was the start of the really dry open forest, and this was alive with birds including some lifers like the appropriately-named large grey babbler, Hume's leaf-warbler, black redstart, and red-throated flycatcher. Then there were house sparrows (looking somewhat not like the English variety of house sparrow), Indian ringnecks, yellow-footed green pigeons, plain and ashy prinias, and lots of hoopoes.

Once I'd reached the end of that path I reversed direction and went round the other side of the park where as well as pretty much everything I'd already seen I added coppersmith barbet (curiously I never heard any calling, but they were certainly around), several shikras, blue peafowl, rufous treepie, common woodshrike, and a couple of larks which remained unidentified. At a broken tree branch I spied a spotted owlet, which when I looked through the binoculars turned into two owlets, then three owlets - wait, four, no six. It was actually a pair with well-grown chicks tumbling out of the nest-hole onto the branches.

Next to the park is a small resort called the Rosy Pelican, so I popped in to the restaurant there for some food before I left. Getting back to Gurgaon was a little trickier than arriving - I stood on a shadeless roadside for almost an hour. No buses. Luckily it's a dry heat here and not a humid heat. Eventually I picked up a ride in a shared-rickshaw for 20 rupees. Auto-rickshaws are the same as tuk-tuks. If you haven't seen a tuk-tuk, imagine a three-wheeled motorbike with a little cab over top, about the size of a Volkswagen I'd say, and that's about it. They are fine with two people in the back, but when used as shared-rickshaws (i.e. acting as longer-distance taxis) they squeeze eight people in the back, two or three in the front, and then sometimes a few more on the back. It was, to put it mildly, a really uncomfortable ride back to Gurgaon wedged against a metal support on one side, and my head banging off the metal bars in the roof with every one of the hundreds of bumps and potholes and judder-bars along the way. One girl who got in yelled at me for not moving over more. I literally couldn't go any further over. It's not my fault they're only the size of twelve-year-old boys and that I don't fit inside their tiny toy vehicles!

Back at the Gurgaon bus stand another auto-rickshaw driver told me it was 100 rupees to the metro station. I told him (not entirely truthfully) that it only cost me 50 coming here, to which he replied (equally untruthfully) that it is 50 to the bus stand but 100 going the other way. Whatever, I found a city bus which went past the M.G. Road metro station which cost 10 rupees (this station turns out to be closer to the bus stand than the Huda City Centre station, so would be a better choice to get off at for anyone else going there; also the metro fare would only be 23 rupees so you could save yourself about half a cent.). I'll be back in Delhi in mid-November so I may even return this way myself - there are a lot more birds at Sultanpur which I did not see, and hopefully more winter-migrants will have turned up by then.

 

The latest Big Year birds from around Delhi here: 2016 Big Year

And now I'm all up to date with the thread.

 

I've just put a few photos in the Malaysia and India wildlife galleries.