Day Two: Cat Tien National Park
Cat Tien National Park lies north of Saigon. It is dead easy to get to. From De Tham Street the tourist buses heading to Dalat will drop you at the town of Tan Phu three hours away, and from there you get a motorbike for 45 minutes to the park. The local name for the park is Nam Cat Tien - there is apparently a town further away which is called Cat Tien so best to add the "Nam" to avoid confusion! My pre-trip researches, such as they were, had told me that the bus from De Tham Street would be 220,000 Vietnamese Dong (there are about 14,500 Dong to one NZ Dollar, so roughly NZ$15) but the one I got was 120,000. However the motorbike should have been 120,000 but I ended up paying 200,000 so it actually worked out nearly the same total amount. When I was coming back from Cat Tien to Saigon I discovered there is also a local bus which goes direct from the Mien Dong bus station in the city to the park, which takes about the same journey time but costs a third or half the price. It should be easy to find at the station - it has "BX Nam Cat Tien - Mien Dong" written in big letters across the top of the windshield.
The entire three hour bus ride from Saigon to Tan Phu was almost devoid of wild birds. I think I saw four individual birds. Even roadside pools which in Thailand or Malaysia would have had egrets and pond herons were completely empty of anything but white ducks.
There was a Swiss couple on the bus, going to Dalat. They said they had thought about going to Cat Tien but had been put off by the bad reviews written on Tripadvisor. I suggested that the people who write those sort of things are idiots and to just go see for themselves, but they declined. I had read one particularly funny one before (it was posted September 2014) and I'll just quote the whole thing below to show how stupid backpackers are. All the responses to the post were along the lines of "Thanks for letting us know. I was going to go but now I won't bother".
Writing this to help you decide whether a trip to Cat Tien is right for you, and if you do decide to go, some bits of advice!
We planned to go to the National Park for three/four days as the Lonely Planet South East Asia book highly recommends a visit and we are keenos for nature. However, we ended up leaving after three days as it just wasn't what we expected. The Park is very disorganised, not really visitor friendly and a nightmare to get to.
Getting there from Ho Chi Minh City, you take one of the big orange FUTA buses (get a ticket to 'Bao Luc', it's cheaper than Dalat) and ask them to stop at the national park, where according to Lonely Planet, there are plenty of motorbikes waiting to take you to the park entrance- there aren't. You get dropped off at a petrol station on the main road and we asked the bus conductor which way it is and he just shook his head and got back on the bus which drove away. Just start walking and asking around for the national park which only 30% of the locals actually know exists. Eventually you'll find a guy with a motorbike who will take you there for 150-200,000 Dong.
Once in the park, after paying a small boat fee, there are only Park bungalows to choose from (there's a "forest lodge" aswell but 1km from HQ) and there's some variation. We went for the most expensive as it's the only one with wifi and to be fair the room was nice. There are two "restaurants", one is a big open hut with miserable staff and semi-decent food, and the other is in a run down building with a rubbish menu, basically don't expect to have any decent meals here.
Lonely Planet says there are some elephants, leopards, bears and rhinos - there aren't. The last rhino there was shot in 2010, there are no leopards, one bear and the few elephants left are in a corner of the park which you can't get to (info from a staff member within the park). What you will see are lots of butterflies, deer and if you're lucky, gibbons and monkeys (but 10km from park HQ). The trails are easy to follow, make sure you rent bikes, but you're completely on you're own.
If you do decide to go, I recommend a trip to the endangered primate centre as we really enjoyed it, it was our favourite bit of the park and made it worth our time. You can't go up close to them but if they start making their calls it's amazing. Ran by some Brits who were very nice, informative and clearly passionate about their work.
Crocodile Lake. The most recommended activity by Lonely Planet and the Park itself. Whereas the journey there was quite fun, the overnight stay was one of our worst experiences ever (make it a day trek instead). A 10km bike ride (or car journey) followed by a 5km jungle trek, both of which are fairly easy and is best opportunity to see the monkeys and gibbons. These weren't the problem, it was the "accommodation" which was a shack open to the elements with three grim dirty beds and rammed full of insects and lizards (after returning from dinner we found a foot-long gecko on our bed and several massive spiders lurking above). The rangers (the only other people there) tell you to keep your windows open, so you only have a mosquito net as protection. There's no electricity, so no light after 6pm, no fan, no hot water if you're brave enough to use the shower, and a creepy shared toilet a walk away from the room. A really nice dinner is cooked fresh by the rangers, but not good if you don't like fish. The view over to the lake is great, but not much to actually see as it's quite far away meaning that you won't see any crocodiles which was disappointing as it the reason why we came!
If you are a keen naturalist who likes being autonomous and doesn't mind roughing it, then Cat Tien would be great for you. If you are, like us, interested in nature but like organisation and comfort, then definitely look at one of the many other national parks in Vietnam, you're going to be disappointed as we were.
Hope this helps!
Yeah.... I guess if it keeps the numpties like that out of the National Parks then job well done.
Anyway, on with my story.
Before going to Vietnam I had emailed the park to organise my stay there. Vietnam is quite a cheap country, but like anywhere the National Parks tend to be more expensive places to stay than if you're in the cities. At Cat Tien I had been told that the HQ accommodation was 480,000 per night (about NZ$33) and at Crocodile Lake 350,000 per night (about NZ$24), so those were what I booked. When I got there I discovered that there were much cheaper rooms at the HQ, namely 200,000 for a fan room and 250,000 for a room with air-conditioning; they are cheaper because the toilets are separate from the rooms. Those cheaper rooms were full that first night, but for my last two nights after coming back from the lake I got a 200,000 room which represented quite a saving.
After checking in at reception, putting my bag in my room (the 480,000 Dong one, which was sort of like a woodland cabin and had a Tokay Gecko somewhere in the roof who I would hear calling at night but couldn't see) and then getting some lunch, I headed out to look for animals. It was around midday and swelteringly hot and humid so I wasn't expecting much, but if you don't look then you don't find. August is probably the worst time to visit Vietnam. It is the hottest month of the year and also the middle of the rainy season, although as it happened I only had one day (at Mang Den later in the trip) when rain caused a problem. Most of the time if it rained at all it was only for half an hour or so. Also there were a few times when night-time rain curtailed spot-lighting efforts but overall there were no real issues. There were a surprisingly large number of tourists at Cat Tien though, including an Australian who was going back to Saigon because "there's not much to do here" (he had been to Crocodile Lake "for half an hour and I didn't see a thing"). I think most of the tourists, judging from what I saw, stay at most for one or two nights at the HQ, make a day-trip to Crocodile Lake, and then leave. Generally you only see them either around the HQ area or cycling along the road.
The park is bordered by a narrow river (with a little ferry taking visitors back and forth) and the HQ area is right by the jetty. A sealed road leads north and south of the HQ, parallel to the river, and there are various trails leading off the road into the forest. I walked up the north road for a kilometre or so to a ford (which I suspect is dry when most birders visit because I hadn't read anything about birders having to walk through it when birding the road) but there wasn't much around in the heat. On the way back I tried out the trail to the Ancient Tung Tree, mainly because right inside the entrance I had spotted a group of Green-billed Malkohas with an accompanying Red And Black Broadbill. After those first sightings I did not see a single other bird in the forest there, but I did (too my complete astonishment) find a Black-shanked Douc! I had only been at the park for three hours and had already found my first target primate there. That had to be a good omen.
The douc was a male, all alone, and he did not seem terribly concerned at my presence. He was very much larger than I had been expecting. I have seen Red-shanked Doucs in zoos and I didn't remember them being that big. The Southeast Asian mammals field guide gives the same measurements for both species, so I'm not sure if this was just a particularly big individual or if it is one of those situations where it just seems much bigger because it is being seen in the wild. The photos I took were all rubbish unfortunately. It is so hot and humid there that when you lift your camera the viewfinder immediately fogs up, so I had it on auto-focus. But the camera doesn't realise that the monkey is what you want to take the photo of, and instead stubbornly focuses on everything
except the monkey. In retrospect, given that this monkey was relatively placid and every other monkey I saw in Vietnam took off like it had been shot out of a cannon, I have a suspicion this one may have been a released animal from the park's rehabilitation programme. But it was a good start, and I ended up seeing doucs on every day I was at Cat Tien.
In contrast, I met almost no leeches at Cat Tien. Even in the leechiest parts I came across there wouldn't have been more than a handful. I had expected in the rainy season the place would be teeming with them, but no. On the Ancient Tung Tree trail I saw just one leech. On the next two days on the Crocodile Lake trail I didn't see even that number!
South of the HQ the road leads through grasslands. Birds are a lot easier to see here than in the forest, although the heat is a lot more intense out in the open. Not far along the south road was a fruiting fig tree which was collecting a number of birds, including Oriental Pied Hornbills, Lineated Barbets, Stripe-throated Bulbuls and fruit pigeons. I thought the latter were Pompadour Pigeons but later started second-guessing myself that they might have been Thick-billed Pigeons and ended up thoroughly confusing myself, so in the end I left them off the list entirely.
The best bird of the day were the Racket-tailed Treepies which are like all-black magpies but the long tail spatulates out at the end like a spoonbill's beak. Really cool birds.
At night I saw only a Lesser Mouse Deer while spot-lighting. They have night-drives at the park which head south into the grasslands area to look for Sambar and Gaur, but I was told there were none going out that night.
Birds seen today:
Tree Sparrow
Passer montanus
4) Spot-necked Dove
Streptopelia chinensis
5) White-throated Kingfisher
Halcyon smyrnensis
6) Greater Racquet-tailed Drongo
Dicrurus paradiseus
7) Oriental Pied Hornbill
Anthracoceros albirostris
8) Black Drongo
Dicrurus macrocercus
9) White-rumped Shama
Copsychus malabaricus
10) Red And Black Broadbill
Cymbirhynchus macrorhynchus
11) Green-billed Malkoha
Phaenicophaeus tristis
12) Dollarbird
Eurystomus orientalis
13) Blue-bearded Bee-eater
Nyctyornis athertoni
14) Barn Swallow
Hirundo rustica
15) Lineated Barbet
Megalaima lineata
16) Stripe-throated Bulbul
Pycnonotus finlaysoni
17) Hair-crested Drongo
Dicrurus hottentottus
18) Great Iora
Aegithina lafresnayei
19) Racket-tailed Treepie
Crypsirina temia
20) Greater Coucal
Centropus sinensis
21) Black-headed Bulbul
Pycnonotus atriceps
22) Oriental Darter
Anhinga melanogaster
23) Chestnut-headed Bee-eater
Merops leschenaulti
Mammals seen today:
1) Pallas' (Red-bellied) Squirrel
Callosciurus erythraeus
2) Black-shanked Douc Pygathrix nigripes
3) Lesser Mouse Deer
Tragulus kanchil
