Day 1, 2012
Heathrow Airport, on the plane.
Exhausted! We've been travelling all day and we're not out of England yet. Took a grotty old Harrogate train to Leeds at 9.45 this morning. It was a pleasant sunny day, and the highlight of the trip so far was two red kites circling alongside us as we crossed the Crimple Valley viaduct. We took the Transpennine express from Leeds to Manchester airport. There was a sprinkling of snow over the Pennine Hills. Then we flew from Manchester to Heathrow. I'm wondering now why we didn't just book our flight from Heathrow in the first place and get the train down to London? Such a long time ago when we booked it, I can't remember what our reasoning was. Only another 16 hours or so and we'll be in Saigon....
Day 2, 2012
Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam
Well, we're here now. I'm utterly exhausted. A couple of hours of broken sleep on the plane between London and Hong Kong is all I've had since early yesterday morning. It'll be about 4.30pm back home now... The flights all went without a hitch though. We went with Cathay Pacific, the Hong Kong airline. Their staff are all wonderfully polite and helpful. Hong Kong airport is spotless. They've got an underground train that takes you between terminals.
We took a taxi from Saigon airport to our hotel. The roads are terrifying in this city. There are people on scooters swerving in front of you everywhere. Millions of scooters. The driver dropped us on Pham Ngu Lao, the main drag for the backpacking community, and waved us vaguely in the direction of some travel agent shops. No sign of the Hoang Phong Hotel where we'd paid for a reservation. A lot of questioning and confused searching took us down a grubby looking alleyway between the travel agencies, and we finally found a neon sign for the hotel in the most unlikely looking back alley. Trouble was it appeared to be pointing at the Golden Winds Hotel. Both very very tired and confused, and nobody we asked seemed to have heard of the Hoang Phong. But we eventually figured it out: Hoang Phong means Golden Wind in Vietnamese! Obvious, eh? Not when you haven't slept for 33 hours...
The room is very good though for about £20 a night, so mustn't grumble. We've been out for a great vegetarian meal and sat drinking a beer at one of thousands of bars, watching the vast herds of scooters zipping about. You sometimes see a family of four riding a single scooter. And once we saw a lady carrying three dogs on one. Beer is about 50p a bottle. I'm gonna like this country...
Day 3, 2012
Saigon, Vietnam
I'm getting to like Saigon, as we get used to it. The biggest challenge is crossing the road. There are thousands upon thousands of scooters buzzing along every street, every alleyway, and pedestrians have no rights whatsoever. The trick is to step out into the road confidently when the flow eases off slightly, and keep going at a steady pace in a straight line. So long as you don't do anything unpredictable, the cars and bikes will steer around you. You have to walk along the edge of the roadway most of the time because the pavements are all cluttered with goods for sale, noodle stalls and parked scooters. But even if you do find an unobstructed footpath it doesn't help you because the scooterists will be riding along that as well... You might be wondering how the native Saigonese deal with it. They don't have to. They've all got scooters! Only tourists walk anywhere.
But the people are lovely. Always helpful, always polite. Everybody we've had to deal with has spoken enough English to get by...lucky that, because I don't know one word of Vietnamese yet (note to self: look up the words for hello, goodbye and thank you). There's people trying to sell you stuff everywhere, and cyclo riders wanting to whisk you away on pedal powered suicide machines, but unlike in certain countries I could mention, they know what the English word NO! means.
We did some sights today. There's a park of sorts across the Pham Ngu Lao river of death from where we're staying, which is mercifully traffic free so we walked along it to the Ben Thanh Market. Eurasian Tree Sparrow was my first birding tick therein. Some quite large butterflies fluttering around the acacia trees too, but they wouldn't keep still long enough for a look. We've seen swifts & parrots today as well, but I can't be specific because if I get binoculars out of my bag I'll soon get flattened by some motorised vehicle or other. One has to be alert at all times.
The market was a gigantic covered hall, a riot of colour and activity within. You name it, they sell it. "Weasel Coffee" seems to be one of the favourites to sell to tourists. They feed the coffee berries to weasels as soon as they're picked...work out the rest yourself...yeugh!
After the market we had a quick look inside the city's only Hindu temple. Very colourful and Disney-looking, the gods and goddess' all had a slightly Chinese look to them. Choking fug of incense smoke even though it was all open to the air.
Then we walked to the Independence (Reunification) Palace. The seat of the President of South Vietnam during the war, the original 19th century building was bombed by the communists in the 1960s, and it was rebuilt as a modernist 60s type building, all open-plan and lots of big glass windows. But very impressive as such architecture goes.
unch for me was a big bowl of noodle soup with eel in it, in a quite smart looking restaurant across the road, but as always it was very reasonably priced. There were tanks of live fish stacked up in the entrance...choose your own dinner...! Robbie had veggie rice rolls with beansprouts and lots of strange leaves which she enthused over. No problem finding vegetarian so far...
Then for more "war nostalgia" we went to the nearby Museum of War Remnants. I knew what to expect but nonetheless it was very saddening and still shocking even though I've seen most of the more graphic images before. It was all anti-American propaganda and very one-sided, but the displays of photographs of US atrocities and post-war victims of agent orange were nonetheless horrendous. Outside were a number of tanks, planes and helicopters, exciting no doubt to those that are excited by such things. I've never seen a Chinook up close before - never appreciated just how massive they are.
We got kicked out of the museum at 5pm prompt, and walked back keeping to the parks as much as possible. They're just dismantling all the Chinese New Year decorations right now - huge polystyrene dragons coated in yellow dried flowers. It must've looked great if we'd been here last week.
A rest at the hotel, then we booked our onward journeys to Cat Tien forest and Dalat at a travel agent at the top of our dark alley. If it works out, we've done it for less than half the price the Forest Lodge Guest House wanted to charge us. We walked to the market at the other end of the park for dinner at a veggie restaurant that was Lonely Planet recommended, but when our first dish came out it was stone cold and not at all what we'd ordered. The staff just couldn't be bothered, they were closing up the shutters on us, so we walked out and went back towards Zen, the place we ate last night, but then got waylaid by another restaurant offering vegetarian a few doors before it. Not as good as last night, but quite OK for about £7 for two people, including three beers...
Day 4, 2012
Saigon, Vietnam
Nice sleep-in this morning. Boy, did I need it! I had an iced coffee for breakfast this time - it's what the locals drink and it's like a shot of amphetamine. The hot coffee is revolting because they use sickly sweet treacly condensed milk in it, but I've discovered the proper way to drink it here now. A glass filled up with crushed ice and a tar-like substance poured over it. As the ice melts it slowly turns into an invigorating ice-cold sweet and bitter coffee. Like Coca Cola for real men.
Thus motivated, we strode out into the street at the crack of 11am, and hired a taxi to take us way out, into the outer city to see the Giac Lam Pagoda. This cost us a whopping 2 million Vietnamese Dong. I have to keep reminding myself that that is only about £7, and then I'm getting so used to the cheapness of this country that I also have to remind myself I paid nearly that for a taxi just to get to Harrogate station on Wednesday, because it felt like a huge amount of money. We came back on the bus from that part of the city for only 10 thousand Dong (nothing at all).
The pagoda was a fascinating place. A Buddhist monastery as well, it dates back to the 18th century. The inside was full of wood carvings, shrines, gods, bells. Barely any other tourists there at the time, but the monks and worshippers don't mind you wandering all over the place taking pictures. It had nice gardens too with old trees, a huge white Buddha, statues and tombs, and a pond with kitschy little tableaux of model Buddhas and gods on little islands.
We then bravely brushed off the advances of all the motorcycle taxi men and did the crazy tourist thing of walking nearly two miles in the midday heat along an outrageously busy thoroughfare to Cholon, the Chinese district. We're still new enough here to be fascinated by all the scooters and the life of the city, luckily. In Cholon we visited three Chinese pagodas, a bit different, all similar looking but each unique in it's own way. Dense clouds of incense smoke, plus each one has a blazing brazier in the centre of it where they burn offerings (mostly bits of paper). The air is choking. Some fantastic carvings along the eaves of the roofs of gods and demons and what-have-you.
We found a cafe that did a decent stir-fried leaves with rice for lunch, looked at a row of dried herb shops, and then felt very pleased with ourselves on locating a local bus that took us back to within a couple of blocks of our hotel. We're getting to feel like natives (not).
We've come back to the Zen vegetarian restaurant for dinner, where we ate the first night. It looks a little bit shabby, but the food is first rate. Robbie is enjoying their tofu, and they do an almost convincing soya meat-substitute in this country (I think some of the more serious amongst the Buddhists actually are vegetarian). I'm just enjoying an abundance of novel, strange tasting and weirdly shaped vegetables.
Day 5, 2012
Can Tho, Vietnam
I think we're suffering from delayed jet-lag now. Neither of us managed more than a few hours sleep last night. We had to get out to the travel office at the end of the alley for 7.20 this morning. A car picked us up and took us somewhere else in Saigon, God knows where, and we were transferred into a small shuttle bus. We carried on, just the two of us, thinking we were the only passengers, but no - silly - the driver did several more stops in decrepit anonymous suburbs and it started filling up. So we moved ourselves to the front seats beside the driver which gave us a bit more leg and bag room, but only one of us had a seat belt. Rather worrying later on, when the driver was rattling along the motorway, horn blaring, hurling the bus at any gap between the vehicles in front no matter how narrow, all the while either eating, smoking, or gabbling on his phone, or all three at once. I tried not to take any notice and didn't attempt any communication with him because I didn't want to distract him further.
The landscape was a prairie of rice paddies. Saw a few egrets but so far this trip has been very disappointing for birds. We crossed a number of small rivers, branches of the mighty Mekong, and then there was a huge and very modern bridge just before we had a 20 minute break at a bus garage, which I think was in the town of Vinh Long. We crossed another gigantic bridge a half hour later and we were in Can Tho. The driver let us out before the bus station and waved us vaguely up a side road. A helpful man hanging about on the pavement told us it's a couple of kilometres to our hotel, so we got in a taxi and soon we were here, the Kim Lan Hotel. We've got a very nice room, four floors up, with a view over the city, and blissful air-conditioning.
Rested a while in the room because we were both dead beat, then ventured out into a quite considerable heat and humidity for a late lunch. The old woman who's the resident boat-trip-to-the-floating-markets tout was on to us like a rocket. We shook her off, but having been down to the quayside to check out the competition we decided we might as well go with her as with anyone else - they're all selling the same package - so that's what we're doing. 5.30am tomorrow. Aaarghh!
The river front is interesting with all sorts of boats chugging to and fro. There's a passenger ferry to the other bank and lots of ships loaded with dredged up silt heading down towards the sea. We saw a long procession of boats packed with people, one of them had two Chinese dragons and drummers on board. Don't know what that was about. There was a barge carrying a massive load of loose rice, must've been hundreds of tonnes of it, loaded into a funnel shaped container that was wider than the boat itself. I had a fish soup for lunch that was excellent, at the Sao Hom restaurant right on the waterside situated inside the former market hall.
Looked inside yet another Pagoda. More incense and sparkly gods. Robbie's getting rather upset at these so-called animal loving Buddhists for their practice of keeping swallows packed in tiny cages at the gates of their temples, so that people can pay them money to set one free. I keep telling her don't be blackmailed - they'll just go out and trap some more, the callous bastards. About the only wild birds we've seen today have been a couple of rather bedraggled looking swallows swooping over the river. I wonder if they're ones that have just been released from the temple. Where are all the birds in this country? Not a vulture in the sky, not a gull or a cormorant on the river, not even city pigeons. Have they eaten them all?
We were so hot and tired we came back to the hotel again after lunch for a siesta. Went to the Sao Hom again for dinner but mine was a bit disappointing compared to lunch. I had fish in a clay pot with plain rice, but not much of it, and not a vegetable in sight, for a whopping hundred thousand Dong. The place was packed out with European tour groups. We talked with two retired English couples on the table next to us. It's always pleasing to discover we're not the oldest backpackers in town.
Day 6, 2012
Can Tho, Vietnam
Another night of non-sleep last night, not just due to the jet-lag and having to get up at 5am for the trip to the floating markets, but also because the air-con unit started dripping water on to my bed in the middle of the night. I had to rearrange the furniture to drag the bed away from the wall. The receptionist tells me it's fixed now, but I think all they've done is to drain all the water out of it, because it only seems to work as a fan now.
Our guide was a young lady called Phu'i. She took us down to the river front and an older lady emerged from the darkness driving a little wooden boat with an outboard motor. Most of the small-boat related jobs are done by women on this river. We puttered down-river for about an hour to reach the first floating market. Sorry to report that the Mekong is not a terribly pretty river. People regard it as a convenient rubbish disposal system, chucking out all their domestic waste, catering waste, polystyrene noodle cartons, etc. into the water. The rafts of water hyacinth along the banks are choked with plastic, and the sea must be full of it. The propellors of the boats keep getting tangled up in plastic bags, but they just cut it off and throw it back in the water to ensnare the next boat that comes along. They don't seem able to recognise there is a problem. I know I make this complaint about every country I visit, Britain included, but it seems to me the rivers and seas of the entire world are being rapidly destroyed by plastic. When is the UN going to start talking about it?
The floating market was a gathering of boats belonging to local farmers, selling their fruit and vegetables. To be honest it wasn't as big or bustling as I'd expected it to be. Phu'i told us that it's "not a good day for selling" today, but I get the feeling that floating markets are on their way out now and farmers sell to wholesalers who come round in trucks. We ate a pineapple that Phu'i carved into a spiral lolly shape with a big knife for us, and she wove us bracelets out of reeds, and gave us a reed-woven grasshopper and a swallow that another of the boat women had made (I think she's still learning herself...she's very young).
We cruised down a side channel next and visited a rice paper and noodle factory. This was interesting. A small family business, they make up a paste of rice powder and flour, spread it out flat and steam it quickly over a fire of rice husks. Then they lay out the rice papers to dry in between woven reed mats. At last, we heard many birds twittering in the trees as we walked around the little village, and we saw several pied fantails. They have characteristic white throat lines that make them look like vicars wearing a dog collar. Also a fleeting glimpse of a pair of sunbirds, but they were gone too quick to separate them to a species.
Further down the river we stopped at another floating market, but this one was only a handful of boats. It got a lot nicer after that because we came back mainly by way of the back-water creeks. Muddy mangrove river banks with mud skippers skipping about over them, through palm groves and paddy fields. We got out of the boat and walked along the bankside path for half a mile while the boat lady went ahead to meet us. We had to negotiate a "monkey bridge" - a rickety narrow plank bridge with just a bamboo hand-rail to steady yourself. Still no birds but we did see some wonderful butterflies. A huge black and iridescent blue one, and pretty black-and-white speckled ones that were obilging enough to settle for a photograph. We walked through a swarm of dragonflies in one place.
There was a restaurant at the end of the walk where all the boat tourists were stopping for breakfast, so we had some stir-fry and rice. There was only one male boat guide and he was showing off to the ladies, clowning about singing karaoke with a floor-brush guitar.
Phu'i put the sun shade up on the return leg because it was very hot by then, and I managed to doze off for about 20 minutes sitting bolt upright on a hard wooden seat. Why can't I do that in bed at night? We returned to the hotel at about 1pm, and both of us passed out for a couple of hours. Woke up feeling terrible. We wandered down to the river again and discovered a market along the riverside road, that was far more colourful than the floating market had been. When we could stand the crowds and scooters no longer we took sanctuary in the compound of a large church. Some youths were playing volleyball on a court in there, and a wedding party was arriving for a marriage, the bride in a gorgeous pink sparkly trouser-and-tunic affair. There was a modern concrete open bell-tower holding some old-looking bells that somebody occasionally tolled. We sat on some outdoor pews in front of a leafy shrine to the Virgin and relaxed for a long while.
Then we wandered back up into tourist territory. Had a beer on a pier outside the Sao Hom then dinner at the Cappuccino Italian across the road. Cheaper than the Sao Hom but my chicken curry lacked heat. Robbie enjoyed her egg-plant and sweet potato curry.
Day 7, 2012
Chau Doc, Vietnam
Thankfully we both slept well last night so are feeling more sprightly. We breakfasted in the restaurant of the Kim Lan hotel, which is a little glass penthouse hut right up on the 8th story. Great views of an unpretty town. Phu'o'ng Trang, the bus company we were travelling with to Chau Doc sent a shuttle vehicle to our hotel to take us to the bus station for the 9am bus. Can you beat that for service? The journey took three hours, then they delivered us by another shuttle to the Trung Nguyen Hotel here in Chau Doc, and it all cost us about £3 each. We've got a rather small room with a huge balcony overlooking the central market hall. There's a funeral party going on outside one of the shops opposite the market at the moment (9pm). They're banging drums and playing pipes and there's a hundred or so people feasting out on the street. The coffin is inside the shop, surrounded by great standing displays of fresh flowers.
We walked through the market hall this afternoon and it is so colourful. They have big conical towers of fish, I don't know whether they're smoked or pickled or what, but it's all very beautifully arranged in slimy glistening pillars. We picked our way through the crowds and puddles of fishy water, dodging the scooters (yes, they even ride straight through the crowds in the market halls!) and found our lunch at a small but very noisy cheap joint near the ferry terminal. Looked like the crowd on the next table were having an office party, they were knocking back some clear spirit and getting very loud. We went back to the hotel by way of another Buddhist pagoda in the middle of town. A red collared dove feeding two fledglings in an old tree in the middle of the compound felt like a rare and precious sighting, but there were also three dead swallows dumped in the pond at the foot of one of the icons. Grr!
Later in the afternoon when it started to cool off we hired a boatman to row us up and down the river for an hour. It's very peaceful on the water, there's not all the boats you get at Can Tho and it looks more rustic. There's a whole village of floating houses along the banks, supported on empty oil drums, with businesses like shops and mechanics too. The poor man was rowing standing up, that being the way they do it. I was sweating just sitting in the bottom of the boat. We gave him a good tip.
We'd noticed a riverside park from the water so we went there next. At long last we saw some birds! Five chestnut-tailed starlings were feeding on nectar in a flowering tree, and we saw a delicious pair of olive-backed sunbirds - delicate scimitar shaped bills and a blue iridescent throat patch. There were swallows martins and swifts over the river all afternoon but we haven't sussed out which ones yet, apart from the barn swallows. A group of boys were playing a game kicking a shuttlecock-like object back and forth. The more proficient amongst them did it by twisting their leg behind them and hitting it with the sole of the foot.
Then in a decadent mood we had a relaxing sundowner on the river-front terrace of the Victoria Chau Doc Hotel, the smartest joint in town. A fantasy of colonial elegance comes at a price of about £2 for a beer in this town - about three times what we'd normally pay in Vietnam. We availed ourselves of the stately washroom facilities to make sure we got our money's worth. Individual freshly laundered hand towels, and a rack with golfing magazines in the crap stalls. Dinner by contrast was a budget affair in the town centre. I had an eel hotpot, which came to the table on the boil mounted on a portable paraffin stove.
Day 8, 2012
Tra Su Forest., Vietnam
At last we've found where some of the birds are hiding! We hired a car and a driver to take us to the Tra Su Forest bird reserve. It took 45 minutes via the Sam Mountain, the local holy hill that rises out of the flatness of the delta. Our plan was to spend all day tomorrow climbing up the Sam, but there's a right grotty looking town grown up at the foot of it and I doubt we'll get much peace and quiet up there, so we'll just leave it till the afternoon.
The Tra Su forest was a fantastic birding place. It's an area that was devastated by the Americans in the war, but they've flooded it and reafforested it, and there's now huge great lagoons full of freshwater mangroves and water lilies. We went on the boat tour they do. Massive problems with communication because nobody there spoke English and the office had no literature, maps...nothin' in fact except a load of blokes sitting about doing bugger all. They had a small cage outside in which was cooped a massive coiled up python, and a very uncomfortable looking duck. I guess the duck was intended to be the snake's next dinner when it wakes up from digesting the last one. A boatman took us off in a power boat across the lagoons. Egrets, darters, cormorants, swamp hens all went flying off in every direction as we approached. Perhaps we should've asked the boatman to stop for a bit. Like I said, communication was a problem all day. But he deposited us in the centre of the reserve, and from there a woman took us in a paddle canoe into the heart of a heronry. Even under oar power, the birds were reluctant to allow us to come anywhere near them. All birds in this country seem to be deeply traumatised. Black crowned night herons were the ones that allowed us the best views, and Chinese pond herons were so abundant we got some good looks at them. They're brown when perched, but taking to the wing they transform into a gleaming white egret. Hard to make judgements on all the egrets in nests in the trees because they were difficult to see through the branches, and if you can't see the colour of an egret's legs you don't have much hope anyway. But I'm pretty sure that over the course of the day we got the full set of egrets: cattle, little, intermediate and great. The water was rank and smelly under the heronry, and a big bird shit that landed next to the boat just bounced off the surface scum and splattered all over me. Nice!
The people lazing in hammocks around the paddle boat landing vaguely waved us up a track next (this wasn't the most diligently escorted bird tour I've been on...!) and a few minutes walk brought us to a big concrete watchtower. We climbed up it and spent a good hour on top. It had a roof over it or we would've fried. Not as many birds as we'd seen out on the lagoon, but patience rewarded us with a purple heron with it's sinuous tiger-striped neck, psychedelic purple swamp hens, bronze-winged jacanas with their over-sized feet, white breasted waterhen, olive-backed sunbirds in the tree tops below us and numerous drongos: black birds with long fish-shaped tails. My best guess is they were crow-billed drongos but they're a devilish group to differentiate and there might've been more than one species. There was a "snack bar" below us with apparently nothing for sale except a few very warm bottles of pop, and a building a bit further up the track that might've been a ranger station, but nobody looked like a ranger or was offering any assistance to us, the only two visitors. A group of adults and children were sitting outside making a hell of a racket, shouting and playing the radio, which kind of explained why there were not many birds around. A steady stream of scooters were moving up and down the track to it, I don't know why because there was nothing there of interest to non-birders. A noisy tour group appeared eventually - the only other visitors we saw all day - so we decided to go for a walk as no-one had made clear when or if we were expected to return to the boat. We walked along the track right to the edge of the reserve, which is all surrounded by lush green paddy fields. Despite the irritating scooters that kept buzzing past us, we did better with birds along here. We had white-throated kingfisher and black-capped kingfishers, which are both stunning. Twice the size of our kingfishers at home. Greater coucals were abundant if hard to see - related to cuckoos, they're big magpie shaped birds with long tails, dark irridescent blue bodies with fiery chestnut wings that burst into flame when they fly. A common tailorbird showed itself well but had us scratching our heads until late this evening - our bird book, Birds of Southeast Asia by Craig Robson, is quite annoying at times. No distribution maps and totally confusing descriptions of range and abundance, but even so it's still the best of only two field guides I know of that cover Vietnam. I should've remembered seeing tailorbirds in India a few years ago.
We walked back to the other end of the track where they've got a few deer in pens. No idea what deer nor why, but I think one of them was a Chinese musk deer - big glands on the side of it's nose. We got bitten to buggery by mosquitoes while we were admiring the sweet flea-ridden animals.
We returned to the boat at 4pm and a different man took us back to the entrance. Thankfully he cut the engine and punted us over the lagoon, so Robbie got a few good photos, but the birds were still very flighty. From the entrance we walked some way along the straight perimeter track which goes along a bund planted with eucalyptus, paddies on the left and bird lagoons on the right. Got some good views of herons and kingfishers.
The man with the car was waiting to take us back at 5pm. We've had dinner at a place across the road from the hotel here - a traveller's hang-out with a large vegetarian selection but the food was pretty dull. I don't think this town has a really good restaurant, apart perhaps from the very exclusive one in the Victoria Hotel.
Day 9, 2012
Chau Doc, Vietnam
We've had an angry day. A couple of cyclo riders (a sort of passenger trailer attached to a bicycle that they use as rickshaws here) picked us up from the local tour agency office at 9 this morning, and took us to the river for a boat tour of the Cham minority village across the water. Robbie was in tears by the time we got on the boat: I hadn't noticed it, being in a different cyclo, but she'd seen a woman near the market selling live egrets trussed up on the pavement, for killing and cooking. This explains why the paddy fields are all but empty of egrets. We found her again walking back after the boat trip, and made plain our displeasure. She'd sold all the egrets but she had her foot on two black-crowned night herons, just about alive and trussed up. She also had a pile of live turtles marooned on their backs, and a cage crammed full of sickly swallows. Do they eat the bloody swallows here too?
But anyway, the boat trip was pleasant enough. We went round many floating houses - the ones downriver are more picturesque than the upriver ones we saw on Tuesday. We saw a few terns flying downriver, the only seabirds we've seen yet. Keep going you sweet things! Don't stop till you get to Australia! We visited a floating fish farm. They keep fish in big cages underneath the floating building. A hatch was open where our boat man threw in some fish food pellets and the water just erupted with thousands of thrashing fish.
The next stop was a Cham village where they do hand weaving of cotton. A woman was working a loom, and there were lots of cotton goods for sale, of course. The village was all built on 10 foot high stilts along the water's edge, to keep it above the regular floods. We walked along raised boardwalks to the road and visited the village mosque. (Most of the Cham people are Muslims.) The mosque was white painted and fairly plain.
We cruised upriver for another hour looking at floating and stilted houses, and we saw a lovely collared kingfisher sitting on a washing line hung out above the river - a small and delicate blue and white bird. Then we returned to town for the aforementioned argument with the bird woman. You'd think it not possible to have an argument with someone you share no common language with, but we've done it twice today...
We returned to the hotel for lunch, then we hired some cyclos and went to the Sam Mountain. Scary ride along a busy straight road for six kilometres in baking heat and dust. The riders only wanted 40 Dong each (£1.40) but we paid them a bit extra. Looked inside a couple of pagodas at the foot of the mountain, which is a sacred pilgrimage site for Buddhists. All the usual incense, bells and icons, and whole roast pigs being laid at the foot of one of the goddesses. There were numerous dead swallows discarded with the ubiquitous garbage inside the railing around another icon. Our blood pressures began to rise...
We climbed our way up the steps and paths above the pagodas in the blazing heat of the afternoon. There were temples and shrines every few yards of the route nearer the bottom, higher up they mostly gave way to shops selling drinks and offering hammocks for rest. There was a really gaudy dragon model coming out of a rock face, and a blue dinosaur (!?) We saw the only "Please put your litter in the bin" signs we have yet seen, but nonetheless the whole route was thickly blanketed in litter. Sacred mountain? Bollocks! Nothing is sacred to this fake religion. Vietnamese Buddhists defile every part of the world they touch. When we reached the summit it was a wasteland. Then the you-know-what really hit the air circulating machine when we went to look at the little shrine right at the peak, and they had many cages crammed full of swallows and finches. Some of the swallows were obviously dead already, many more dieing of heat and starvation. Robbie flew into a rage and started haranguing one of the vendors and well, OK, I got pretty cross too. I managed to get her down from there before the temple police were called. I'm sure such a cruel and brutal cult as Buddhism must keep some really vicious cops hidden somewhere. Yes, like I said, we've had an angry day...
On the plus side, we saw quite a few small wild birds on the ascent and descent. Not able to identify many because we lacked the strength to lug the bird book up there with us, and the birds are all very wisely secretive. A pair of beautiful green bee-eaters were the highlight, sweeping and diving after insects, exhalting in the ecstasy of their freedom. Buddhists take note.
We squeezed the two of us into one cyclo to come home, having haggled the rider down to 80,000 Dong. Then we had to give him the 100 he'd been asking because we felt guilty about making him do all that work. Local people often go 3 to a cyclo though, and I bet they don't pay that.
We had dinner at the Bay Bong restaurant near the ferry landing again. Very lively in there, mostly travellers, and the food's pretty good. I had fish hotpot cooking at my table on a blazing stove.
Day 11, 2012
On the bus to Cat Tien
We're having a stressful couple of days. Yesterday morning in Chau Doc was relaxing enough, we just poked about the market and had lunch at the local vegetarian place - TVP imitation chicken skin in my "chicken noodle soup" ...mmm...? Phu'o'ng Trang bus service sent a shuttle bus to pick us up from the hotel at 1pm. The bus to Saigon was full this time. (We'd been 2 of only 5 passengers travelling from Can Tho to Chau Doc on Tuesday.) Travelling through the Mekong Delta feels like you're going through one massive conurbation because they build alongside the roads all the way, but really it's mostly rural.
We crossed a wide branch of the river by ferry after a couple of hours, and then we saw some countryside. There were lagoons full of some sort of water lilies with big pink flowers, evidently grown as a crop. And ginormous paddy fields.
We stopped for a half hour break at the biggest bus rest-stop I've ever seen. Like an aircraft hanger with a whole market inside it. There was a huge carpet of red chillies laid out to dry on the tarmac of the car park. An hour later the bus broke down on the hard shoulder of a motorway. It looked like they'd run out of diesel because the driver and his mate got a 20 litre fuel can out of the luggage hold and siphoned it into the tank. But the bus still wouldn't start. We sat there for half an hour. I don't know what they did but the driver then got back in, started the engine and we were off again.
We got to the Saigon bus terminal just after 8pm. No idea what part of the city we were in and as soon as we stepped off the bus into the non-air-conned heat we got mobbed by taxi men. They all had Phu'o'ng Trang badges on and we weren't sure if this was another free hotel transfer. But the one we went with charged us 160,000 Dong when he dropped us off at the Hoang Phong Hotel, so evidently not. That or he pulled a fast one on us. We were both very hot, agitated and irritable by this time, but we chilled out a bit with an excellent meal at the Zen vegetarian. A group of mixed nationality TEFL students were in there having a celebration, knocking back bottle after bottle of Dalat wine and making a heck of a racket. But they were funny.
This morning the formerly faultless Hoang Phong Hotel let us down by taking half an hour to serve us breakfast when we had to catch our bus at 8am. We got hot and agitated again. But we're on the bus now which is another Phu'o'ng Trang service, not too crowded and nice and cool, so we're relaxed. We've just crossed the Saigon river.
Day 12, 2012
Cat Tien National Park
We're in Cat Tien National Park now. It's a birder's paradise.
The bus yesterday dropped us off half way to Dalat at a nowhere town. The previous town must have been a centre for Christians, because it had at least five big churches, and we saw many very elegant houses which all had life-size statues of the virgin Mary looking out from their upper balconies.
At the bus drop-off there was a taxi waiting for us, exactly as arranged by the agency in Saigon. We shared it with a French bloke who spoke Vietnamese, but sadly his English was no better than my French. (That is to say, crap.) The taxi dropped us at the park entrance on the bank of a river. We bought a ticket from the Ranger's kiosk and a man took us across the river in a boat. At the other side there were a few buildings but no-one about. It was a scorching hot and humid midday. A sign pointed right saying Forest Floor Lodge 1.3km so we strapped on our heavy packs and started walking. The French guy headed off in the other direction towards the park bungalows (“barely habitable” I'd seen them described as, on Tripadvisor, so we'd gone for the luxury ecolodge instead.) Half an hour of back-breaking, sweating slog along a concrete road through dense jungle in unbearable heat and we arrived. The butterflies kept me going. There's hundreds of them, in every colour, and they're all beautiful. “Why didn't you phone us, we'd've picked you up?” asked the teenaged receptionist. Because English mobiles don't work in Vietnam.
The place is nice, although it seems to be staffed totally by teenagers with limited English apart from a young English surf-dude type behind the bar whose uncle is one of the owners. The restaurant overlooks the river and we saw Oriental pied hornbills from there as soon as we went to investigate it.
Once we'd recovered we walked back along the road to the ferry landing and the park HQ. This time the walk took us about two hours because the afternoon sun was cooling off and the birds were coming out. So many, many, birds along the road. My favourite was a Japanese paradise flycatcher, black body with a long, blousy tail.
At the HQ we booked a couple of tours because they're a lot cheaper from there than booking the same thing from the Lodge, which is a shocking price. We stayed at the HQ and had a quick and cheap dinner at the Yellow Bamboo restaurant, then went on the "night walk" at 7pm. This was rubbish. We raced along a forest road on the back of a smoky, rattly old truck with a dozen or so other visitors, a guide sweeping the forest with a spotlight. We saw numerous Samba deer and one Muntjac deer, and nothing else. The only information the “English speaking guide” gave us was: "Samba!" and "Muntjac!" I'm glad we'd only paid 300,000 Dong for it (about £10). The other two guests at the Forest Floor Lodge were on it too, they'd booked through the lodge and paid $25 each, and all they got that we didn't was a lift there and back on a golf buggy.
We walked home in the tarry, buzzing, peeping and beeping darkness. They shut down the generator at 11pm here, so there's no late nights. Good thing, because I was knackered!
I'll have to post today's doings tomorrow, because I'm tired again and the Wifi here is very slow.
Day 13, 2012
Cat Tien, Vietnam
Yesterday morning we got picked up at the Lodge after breakfast for a guided trek to "Crocodile Lake". We travelled down the road a few miles on the back of a truck, the road soon turning into a bumpy dirt track. Our guide was a young bloke not much older than twenty. The truck dropped off us and the guide after ten minutes or so and continued on its way to drop off other groups. The guide lead us down a narrow jungle path deep into thick forest. He was good on some birds, but my confidence wavered when he told us a coucal calling from high in the canopy was a moorhen. However, he did find us two species of monkey and a brief glimpse of a civet in the trees, so I let him off. Birds were calling all around though very difficult to find in thick forest as usual, but after a couple of hours walking we reached the lake and there was lots to see.
We walked along raised boardwalks to the rangers' station, where the rangers and some Vietnamese visitors were swinging in hammocks and making a heck of a noise. But we sat in their watchtower overlooking the lake for an hour or so, and we were very lucky to see a small croc raise it's head above the reeds closest to us and eat a fish. They're the Siamese crocodile which is almost extinct in the wild, and they've been re-introduced to the lake here. It's a beautiful lake, fringed with reeds and water lilies and surrounded by virgin forest. We saw jacanas, egrets, purple heron, crested serpent eagle soaring overhead, and I think a rufous winged buzzard settling in a tree far over the other side. There was a stunning pair of scarlet-backed flowerpeckers in the foliage level with us, tiny shiny blue birds with a vivid wedge of scarlet from their crowns to the rump.
Coming back from the lake we saw an amusing ants' nest - a hole in a bank with what looked like a mud chimney sticking up out of the ground above it. The monkeys we saw on the way out were Northern pig-tailed macaque with short thread-like tails held upright, and the one the guide spotted just before we reached the road again was a black-shanked douc (I think) with a long trailing white tail. The civet was the briefest of glimpses through thick leaves, a bit raccoon-like and quite high up in the canopy. He pointed out flying lizards too, but we didn't see them flying.
Other mammals I should mention we've seen here are Pallas' squirrel with a great bushy and banded tail, and a tiny striped squirrel with a thin tail, a bit rat-like in profile - I haven't worked out yet whether it's Eastern or Cambodian. Can I mention that the Japanese paradise flycatcher we definitely saw on Saturday isn't on the park list and our guide today says they don't occur here? I think we've seen a first!
The same truck had been waiting for us on the forest road, and it took us back to the Lodge. Later in the afternoon we ambled down to the HQ again, birding along the roadside which is much more profitable than deep-forest birding. We booked a river trip for today, then walked back in the twilight and saw lots of Great-eared nightjars coming out of the trees just past a little bridge that's the half-way point along the road. They're huge for nightjars, wingspan must be well over half a metre, and they make a great pip-pee-wooo noise that I managed to record on my phone. I'm getting a great collection of forest noises here.
Dinner was expensive and not really good enough to be worth recording. There's a party of eleven Germans staying here now who sit at their table barely talking at all. I think we're the only guests tomorrow night - that won't be much different.
Day 14, 2012
Cat Tien, Vietnam
Oh dear, I'm going to be one day behind with this blog for the rest of the trip, I can tell. Yesterday we got up early for a 6am breakfast. The gibbons in the primate sanctuary across the river set off singing as we sat gazing into the dawn-lit forest from our restaurant balcony. I was sure I could hear one gibbon answering them from our side of the river, and this was confirmed by a Brit know-all birder we met later in the day who said he'd seen a wild one along the road between here and the Park HQ. We should've gone out earlier instead of stuffing ourselves with toast, and we might've seen it ourselves.
We walked down to the HQ and got in a boat for our river trip at 7.30am. Our guide was a fairly old chap called Xin, and he was excellent. He knew all the birds and gave us an interesting tour around the Ma indigenous village downriver. The lad at the hotel tells us that he is the best guide the Park Service has, and he is ex-Viet Cong.
We saw lots of birds along the river bank from the boat. The river is the Park boundary, and you can see everything going on at all levels of the forest from the water. Dollarbirds, rollers and bee-eaters were abundant, and pied kingfishers were absolutely everywhere. I saw silver backed needletails, the first time I've seen these fascinating swift-like birds. They look like they've got no tail at all, just a rear end tapering to a point. An osprey was hovering over the river looking out for fish.
We landed at the village and Xin showed us around the "Ethnic Cultural Centre" (big building with a lot of old photographs on display.) The Ma used to be a nomadic tribe of slash-and-burn forest dwellers, until the Americans made them settle here during the war so they could do their best to destroy the forest and anyone still left in it. We had a look around their paddy fields, which were small, mixed in with reedy areas and diverse crops, and brimming with bird life. Such a contrast to the Mekong Delta which is a monoculture of rice for miles on end, and ecologically dead. We looked inside a bamboo church (the Ma seem to be mainly Christian) and watched a woman doing some hand-weaving in her house, stretching the loom out with her feet. She had a jar of rice wine on the floor, inside which were steeping lots of dead lizards and scorpions. We bought a scarf off her. A little dog followed us all around the village and then returned to his house on the river bank where the boat-man was waiting for us. We saw a good amount of new birds just walking in the village: wood swallow, wood shrike, black collared starlings with gleaming white heads, rufescent prinia flitting amongst the reeds. The boatman had a heck of a job getting his outboard motor started again because it had been sitting baking in the sun, but eventually we were speeding back to the HQ.
We had an early lunch at the rather unenticing Yellow Bamboo Restaurant at the HQ, service with a scowl, but I did see a couple of monkeys creeping along branches between us and the river. We walked back to the Forest Floor Lodge along the "Tree Walk", a lovely trail through dense jungle passing numerous ancient forest giants with huge buttressed roots. After a brief rest and freshen up, we plunged back into the jungle opposite and continued northwards past many more ancient buttress-rooted behemoths, reaching the road near a particularly massive 700 year-old Reddish Wood Tree, christened "The Uncle Dong Tree" after a former Vietnamese leader who had visited it. I laid myself down and took a nap in the crook of Uncle Dong's Brobdingnagian roots. Walked back to the Lodge again along the road. Saw an Asian Paradise flycatcher, lovely chestnutty brown colour, picking flies off the surface of a pool in one of the dried up creeks. Then we did a circuit through the "Botanical Garden" area of the park. Just before returning to the main Park road the most magnificent male jungle fowl strutted out onto the track ahead of us. The jungle fowl is the wild ancestor of all domestic chickens. "What's so magnificent about a wild cockerel?" you could justifiably ask. Well...you should've seen it...the plumage was quite stunning!...the great-granddaddy of all chickens!
Dinner at the lodge, then we did our own free, DIY night walk along the road outside using the flash lamp from our room. We thought we saw a Binturong civet up in the trees, but it was mainly a pair of glowing eyes. The frogs in the Lodge's frog pond were making a huge racket. The nights are so noisy here!
Day 15, 2012
Dalat, Vietnam
Waiting for the bus to Dalat.
Yesterday morning we went out birding before breakfast again. We walked along the road as far as the Uncle Dong tree, and saw quite disappointingly little considering how early we'd gone out. The gibbons were barely singing. But just before the Uncle Dong we saw a Siamese Flameback cock with two hens. It's a gorgeous black pheasant type bird with a sickle shaped tail, a funny bobbly crest and iridescent gold feathers sometimes visible on it's back. Even the hens looked handsome. That was worth getting up for.
We went back to the Lodge for breakfast and set out walking again a bit later. We walked along the Botanical Garden track and it was lovely. Mostly fairly open forest with bamboo, and there were butterflies everywhere. I'd photographed the Lodge's common butterfly identification sheets on my phone, so we were able to put a name to some of them.
We reached the Heaven Rapids by lunchtime. Walked through a bamboo grove down to the rapids, ate lunch and had a snooze on the rocks. Saw a possible stork-billed kingfisher flying upriver, and what might have been two wood sandpipers opposite us. A douc monkey was in a huge tree not far away.
We continued walking along the track, through some of the most beautiful forest I've ever seen. Towering straight trunked trees filtering a soft and golden light. Pity it was so bloody hot and humid. We saw brilliant vernal hanging parrots: budgie-sized, dazzling green with vivid scarlet rumps and no tails. Also a tiny and cute heart-spotted woodpecker, special for Valentine's Day. Plenty of hornbills near the junction with the road at dusk again - I think they must roost communally around there. The only people we met all day were a couple of elderly American birders with their guide. No motorbikes! It was blissful.
We had dinner at the Lodge, alone except for one Vietnamese couple. I had three courses and drank a bit more beer than normal, it being my birthday, but the food's not great there - greasy, expensive and not much of it. The wine costs more than at home, so we didn't touch it.
This morning we were out at dawn once more. The gibbons were singing full force, and we could hear a single wild one in the forest to our left as we walked to the HQ. Got some great views of a big douc monkey eating leaves and swinging through the trees. Then we met a party of English birders with Xin as their guide. One of them we were talking to was from Pocklington, and his friend was from Cottingham, both towns within 10 miles of where my mum lives in the East Riding. Small world. They were seeing birds all over, of course. We really are part-timers at this game, Robbie and I. At the HQ there's a bear sanctuary for endangered sun bears. We've never seen the bears in the enclosure, but the viewing platform above it makes a good spot for looking for forest birds. We saw an Asian barred owlet from there.
Returned for a big greasy breakfast, which I'm now regretting as the bus weaves it's way lurchingly along the highway to Dalat. The hotel shuttle buggy took us back to the ferry crossing at the HQ, and taxi was waiting for us on the other bank, all just as arranged by the Sagotour agency back in Saigon. This country is very good at some things. The taxi dropped us in the grubby nowhere town on the main highway, and we waited nearly an hour outside a mobile phone shop until our bus turned up, the manageress vainly trying to sell us onward bus tickets from Dalat, keying out hilariously inaccurate messages on a google translation app on her big-screen computer.
Later.
We're on the bus now. We've just had a lunch stop at a very pleasant bus rest stop. It had a Japanese water garden with a waterwheel and goldfish pond. There was a fight started at the cafe across the road when we arrived. One guy was swinging a heavy stick, then a waiter from our restaurant went running across the road to join in and was sent packing by the manager of the cafe opposite. Family feud? Bitter rivalry between neighbouring eating establishments? Who knows... We chatted to a Vietnamese American from Oregon, over here to visit his family.
Later this evening:
We arrived in Dalat at about 3.30pm. The bus had climbed up a winding mountain road with great views and quite a lot of forest on the steeper slopes - although mostly secondary forest (that's what's left after the old forest has been logged for timber) and plantations of non-native trees by the look of it. We saw several giant Buddha figures, and big new churches and pagodas, some still under construction. The churches are all ultra modern in design and the pagodas ultra traditional, emblazoned with dragons. I get the feeling that Buddhists and Christians are fighting a battle for souls through architecture in this country.
Then we crossed a plateau for a couple of hours where they were growing both tea and coffee. Lots of houses had coffee beans drying in their front gardens. I don't think I've seen tea plantations since I was in India 24 years ago. They look like vast rows of neatly clipped privet hedges.
We passed through several towns, then we were climbing again along a winding mountain road up through pine forests with crags and gullies. At times I'd think we'd been teleported to the Scottish Highlands, until I'd see a clump of bamboo.
Good old Phu'o'ng Trang buses provided us with a free shuttle to our hotel again (I'm even more convinced now that the driver in Saigon last week pulled a fast one on us). And what a hotel it is! The Best Western Dalat Plaza Hotel. We'd booked it on Expedia and kind'a assumed it was a fake Best Western because copyright piracy is a way of life in this country, but I think now it must be the real thing, because it's like a 5 star hotel back home. Spotlessly clean, huge room, great view out over the nicest part of the town, and B&B for a trivial £25 per night. We've spent the evening grumbling even more about the rip-off Forest Floor Lodge. (We left a little note to the management about the state of the bathroom when we left...)
I love Dalat already. It's a big town and it tries to be Las Vegas with its neon lights, but it's got a relaxed feel to it, a real mountain retreat. There's scooters here of course, but they don't ride on the footpaths and you can cross the road without dying if you stay awake. There's a nice looking park across the road from us, and a huge lake just up the road, and there's flower beds all over. Roses! And it's cool! We went out this evening wearing the jackets we'd thought we'd pointlessly lugged all over South Vietnam. Hoorah! My only grumble is that it was pouring with rain when we arrived.
We walked the streets for a long while before deciding on a restaurant for dinner, but we hit on a good'un. Da Quy (Sunflower) restaurant. They've got a whole page of veggie dishes on the menu for my little veggie friend, and my chicken and chinese mushroom dish was exemplary. We downed a bottle of Dalat red wine which was only 125,000 Dong (about £4). They mix the local grapes with mulberries. It's not fine French wine, but it's light and perfectly drinkable. We bought a bottle in a shop to drink in our room and it was only 45,000 Dong.
We walked home through the central market which was still going on at 9.30pm. Lots of food stalls selling sizzling I-don't-know-whats. I'm happy and relaxed this evening.
...OK, some readers will know me well enough to understand that's code for “Full of wine”.
Day 16, 2012
Dalat, Vietnam
We've had a wacky architecture day. Started off with a buffet breakfast to die for, and I nearly did, here at the Dalat Plaza Hotel, a place that is just too good for the likes of us. The restaurant is a whole floor of the hotel, with a wall-length window through to a bonsai rock-garden populated with kitschy little Chinese figures. I concentrated my attack on the more Full-English type items on the breakfast spread, but I might experiment with the Vietnamese noodle & stir-fry dishes tomorrow.
We walked up the hill some way, to the "Crazy House", passing on the way the central post office's gigantic Eiffel Tower replica radio mast, one of the town's main landmarks. The Crazy House is a treat. Somewhat Gaudi-esque and fairytale-ish, it's been under construction for over twenty years and they're still building it, owned and designed by an eccentric female architect who's the daughter of a former leader, who was Ho Chi Minh's successor. It really is crazy - a tangled convolution of concrete walkways, model animals, bird cages, fake grottoes, twisting staircases and uneven floors. We passed an excited hour or so delving into its nooks and crannies, and I bought myself a quite brassy embroidered red shirt for my next poetry reading at Harrogate Theatre.
We then walked across town, along the shores of the pleasant lake that is at the heart of Dalat. I'm glad to report that there were a few egrets and pond herons along the banks, and even a common sandpiper and a scaly-breasted munia, a tiny finch-like bird feeding on a reed seed-head. We made our way to the Cremaillere Railway Station, from whence a little mountain railway train rattles off along the tracks a few kilometres to the next village which is called Trai Mat. We found there wasn't a train until 2pm so we mooched around the station for an hour. Dalat is Vietnam's City of Love, where people come to get married and honeymoon, and there was a young bride and groom there having their wedding photos taken. It was rather funny. The bride was in a big lacy flouncy bright yellow dress, and they had her posing perched on the fender of a greasy old steam engine, and sitting down on the tracks with her dress splayed out around her.
The train journey took twenty minutes, trundling along very slowly yet generating dense clouds of diesel smoke. The carriages had wooden bench seats longways inside them. We only got 40 minutes at Trai Mat before the train went back again, but it was just long enough to see the pagoda there, which was our second architectural wonder of the day. The complexity of the buildings defy description. They were all decorated with intricate designs in broken crockery. There were dragons and people and turtles, and a three story high woman, made of yellow dried flower heads. There was a seven story tower with a seven tonne bell in it that the faithful were tolling with a swinging bamboo mallet, and the main temple was just mind-boggling. Some huge carved-wood fat Buddha figures had me in stitches.
I'll finish this tomorrow - we want an early start in the morning...
Day 17, 2012
Dalat, Vietnam
Yesterday after seeing the pagoda we got back on the train and trundled back to Dalat. The countryside inbetween the village and the town is terraced but almost completely covered in agricultural growing tunnels. Not pretty at all, but the crops inside looked very lush and healthy. Every vegetable you could think of, a few you couldn't, and a lot of cut flowers too. Arriving back in town it rained very heavily. We took shelter in a roadside cafe and drank tiny glasses of thick treacly and potent coffee. They bring your coffee in a little metal filter contraption that sits on top of your glass, very slowly dripping a black tar-like liquid onto a dollop of sweet condensed milk. The glass itself was in a noodle bowl full of hot water. A very complicated process.Once the rain had eased off a bit we donned waterproofs and went back to the hotel. The locals take these rainstorms in their stride - they all seem to carry cheap plastic ponchos with them that come out as soon as it starts. There's a big motorbike version of the poncho too - the pillion passengers ride around with the back of the rider's poncho over their heads so they can't see where they're going.
Later on we went for dinner at the Da Quy again. I had braised squid with ginger. Coming back we booked ourselves a car and a driver from an agency called the Groovy Gecko, to take us on to Ho Coc Beach on Sunday. It's a place that nobody seems to have heard of, and it cost us 3 million Dong, about £100, but I don't know how else we can get there.This morning we got up bright and early at 6am to go to the Tuyem Yam reservoir south of the town for some early birding, but the best laid plans of mice and men... After laying in to the steaming vats of noodles and stir-fries on the breakfast buffet, we set out for a local laundry and to pay the remainder of our booking fee to Groovy Gecko. Whilst there we got talked into booking a tour tomorrow around some local villages and a waterfall, for one million Dong. Having now used up almost the last of our cash, we both drew some money at an ATM outside a bank near our hotel. My old travelling companion, Mr Muddlehead, took charge of events from thereon. Back in our room I was putting the money in the room safe when I wondered where my bank card was. Still in the machine I realised, that's where it was! The ATMs here don't automatically spit out your card when you collect the money, you have to confirm that you have finished, and I hadn't. I sprinted down the stairs, out the lobby and down the road. Someone else was already using the machine which was in a glass kiosk. I don't know what he was doing but he was in there five minutes, me dancing about on the pavement in frustration, peering through the glass trying to see if he was using my own card. But he wasn't, and when he came out there was no sign of my card anywhere in the kiosk. I went in to the bank. The first cashier I spoke to directed me to the foreign exchange counter, but there was a lengthy transaction going on there, and I was hopping about in even greater agitation. Finally a friendly cashier noticed me turning purple and asked if she could help. I explained my predicament. "Do you have identification?" No of course I didn't, I'd rushed out of the hotel in such haste it was lucky I was wearing trousers. So I dashed back to the Dalat Plaza and begged my passport off the receptionist. (You have to leave your passport as security in hotels in this country.) Back at the bank, the lovely lady produced my bank card from behind the counter. What relief! Maybe I'll get the hang of this foreign travel business one day...!
And then we walked to the cable car station, which turned out to be a lot further than anticipated and up a steep hill, so it was about 11am before we got our good early start.
The cable car ride was very high up, above the pine forests, and took about 15 minutes. The trees looked lovely although there was the usual piles of dumped rubbish and they're making a new road across the forest, bulldozing all before them.
That was the story with the reservoir too... must've been lovely once but they're frantically cutting down much of the forest to build a new "resort", and the roadside litter problem is just sickening. We did see some good birds though, adding fourteen new ticks to our list. There's a pagoda beside the cable car terminal with some nice parkland grounds, and we saw a whole flock of dazzling firetailed sunbirds in a blossom tree there, tiny yellow bellied birds with very long bright scarlet tails. There were shrikes all over the place, and when we found a decent path off the road leading through the pinewoods we got some excellent views of a great hawk-cuckoo perched on a branch. We walked down to some fields and ponds right underneath the cable cars, where women in conical hats were tending a crop of yellow flowered Hypericum bushes. Saw a cute little falconet of some sort when returning to the cable car, and an even cuter black and white pigmy woodpecker.
The cable car conductor hustled us into a pod at 4.30 when we were hanging around the station birding, and as soon as we got to the other end it stopped for the day. We'd been expecting it to keep running till 5pm, so it was lucky we hadn't got stranded at the reservoir. There were black and yellow Vietnamese greenfinches perched along the cables coming back, birds we'd had extreme difficulty looking at in the forest all afternoon.
We jumped on a really grotty long-distance bus to get back to town. The seats were ripped and there was puke all over the floor and one of the seats, which I very nearly sat in. Vietnamese people struggle more than any nation I've encountered to keep their food down when travelling.
We ate at the Art Cafe this evening. Nice food - I had a chicken in caramel sauce, but I've been suffering from mouth ulcers for several days now and can't really enjoy good food like I should.
Day 18, 2012
Dalat, Vietnam
We got picked up at the hotel this morning for our tour of the local villages. Our guide was a young man called Linh who spoke good English, and we had a driver too. They drove us out of town into the pine forests, and our first stop was one of the flower farms. We looked inside some growing tunnels which were all framed from bamboo. They had acres of Gerberas, roses and Sweet Williams inside.
At a viewpoint further on we got a good look at a pair of black bulbuls; near-black birds with bright red bills and legs. It was the day's only new tick. We drove on. Still quite a lot of forest, both pine and broadleaf, but sadly much evidence of logging and forest fires, and the ubiquitous litter dumped in festering heaps along every roadside. In a few years the trees will be all gone and the country will be one vast rubbish tip.
Next stop was a coffee plantation. We're familiar with coffee berries and beans from visiting Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama and Peru, but when we continued on to a processing shed, we saw proof of the infamous Vietnamese twist on the production technique...yes, there were weasels in cages (some kind of civet I think, they were mink-sized); yes, there were sacks full of weasel shit with coffee beans in it...and yes...I did drink some. It was OK actually. I usually won't touch coffee without milk and a pinch of sugar, but this was smooth enough to enjoy black and unsweetened. They were distilling rice wine (actually a spirit) in the same place. Boiling the rice, fermenting it in mucky looking buckets then boiling it in a very primitive boiler from which a pipe passed outside and through a big water tank, and then a fine dribble of alcohol ran out of a tap in the wall into a plastic canister. I tasted some and it wasn't nearly as rank as some cheap spirits I've come across in my travels. I don't know how they make sure they're not getting too much methanol...it all looked very hit and miss to me...
Next we visited another pagoda. This one had several giant Buddhas inside it. One was a lady Buddha with thirty-six arms, eleven heads and one thousand eyes. Outside was a two story high "Happy Buddha". He was pale green with a big fat stomach and little children climbing on him.
Below the pagoda was Elephant Falls, a huge waterfall over basalt columnar rocks. We scrambled down slippery pathways to the foot of the falls, and I was able to walk almost behind the curtain of water before I got too soaked.
We politely declined Linh's invitation into a lunch cafe since the place was buzzing with flies and decided we'd prefer hunger today to food poisoning. We looked around a hand-weaving place run by some of the tribal minority people, then went on to a silk factory. This was fascinating. They were unravelling the silkworm cocoons, spinning it into threads on ancient machines and then weaving it on Victorian-looking power looms, programmed by punched-card templates. The noise was terrible. The poor girls tending the machines had no ear protection. They'll all be deaf by the time they're my age.
We looked in at mushroom farm where the mushrooms are grown in thousands of plastic bags full of sawdust, suspended from the roof of thatched bamboo sheds.
The final stop was a cricket farm. Yes, they farm crickets to eat, thousands of them hopping about in big boxes full of leaves. And yes, I did eat some, stir-fried. They don't taste too bad - a bit like crispy bacon with legs on it. The owners were all sitting around in their house eating and looking like they'd had rather too much rice wine already. I got more rice wine forced upon me, and given some barbecued meat to eat. I hope it was pork, that's what it tasted most like, but somebody joked it was dog. At least...I think he joked!
They dropped us off back at the hotel. Robbie's ATM card got swallowed by the same machine that nearly had mine this morning but you don't want to know about that, it's a horrible story. We're down to two working cards now. The annoyance is that you can't withdraw more than 2 million Dong per day (£70).
Dinner was at the Da Quy again. We're unadventurous I know, but it is good there. The food is superb, several vegetarian options and the service is attentive and professional. We came out and it was "walking city Saturday". They'd banned all motorised transport from the town centre until 11pm. What joy! We danced down the middle of the road all the way home.
Day 19, 2012
Ho Coc, Vietnam
We got picked up at the hotel this morning at 8.15 by our driver who was called Le Hoa. He took us out of town the way we'd come in on the bus, through the pine forests, but then took a country route towards the coast. We drove through some very extensive forests, some of it dense tangled broadleaf jungle, so we started to forgive Vietnam a little bit. There were some picturesque little paddy fields in the flat areas, and we got Le to stop several times for photos and looking at birds. We found he was very good at spotting birds in the trees for us as he was driving along, once he'd realised that's what we're interested in. There were lots of bee-eaters around, and blue-tailed bee-eater was a new one for us. There were several of them swooping around over some paddy fields. Healthy numbers of egrets in the paddies too. We saw striated swallows from a viewpoint, only the second bird of that restless family we've identified, and one of the fish eagles with a shining white rump soaring overhead. There were some rather rustic villages where litters of piglets roamed the streets, but I'm sorry to report that as usual the other sort of litter was what dominated the scenery.
After several hours we descended from the plateau and it became hot. Le had bought us some vegetable rolls for our lunch, included in the price of the journey I suppose. After eating it I spent half the afternoon dozing off. The journey took eight hours in all, and once we were down from the plateau it was rather boring. They were growing a lot of cactus plantations, for the "dragon fruits" which are scaly red fruit with lots of little black seeds inside a white water-melon-ish flesh.
Although we were travelling the coastal road, we never saw the sea until we'd almost arrived at Ho Coc. The hotel here, hotel Ven Ven, is nice for the £12 or so per night we're paying, but sadly Ho Coc itself is a big disappointment. A huge new expensive resort has swallowed up all the beach to the north of us and the rest of the beach is partitioned between smaller and grubbier resorts and restaurants. And the whole area is obliterated by a thick crust of litter.
We've got a chalet type room in a wooded garden of sorts, and the hotel has very recently expanded and built a very smart looking new block, but God knows who's going to stay here, because we're the only guests tonight. The place is across the road from the sea, and I'm not sure if we've got any legal access to the beach. We just brazened it out and walked straight through the gates of the nearest resort to get to the beach, but it wasn't nice at all. There were hundreds of weekending Vietnamese in the sea, mostly teenagers. They go in the sea fully clothed. A threesome of young girls all insisted on having their photos taken posing with me. Am I famous over here? Wearing my backpack, binoculars and hiking trousers I wasn't looking my most glam. They didn't want Robbie's picture because Vietnamese people don't think she's exotic. A lot of people have been talking to her in Vietnamese refusing to believe she is English.
We rolled up our trouser legs Yorkshire-style and had a quick paddle. It's bearably warm, but the water consisting as it does of about 50% plastic solids, I wasn't too tempted to swim. The beachfront properties become increasingly littered and sordid as you head southwards, and about a mile on they're building a massive tower block right on the seafront, which resembles a nuclear power station. But who in their right mind is going to want to come here? We chose Ho Coc as our beachside location at the end of the holiday because it has a protected forest inland of it for several miles, so we'll investigate that tomorrow. What I've seen so far of the forest though, it looks charred and belittered, so I'm not holding out too much hope.
Poor Robbie is battling disappointment. We ate at the restaurant here this evening. She ordered the only two vegetable dishes they have on the menu, and they both turned out to be the same leaf stir-fried, one flavoured with ginger and one with "fermented bean curd" which we'd assumed meant tofu, but no, it's just some yeasty sauce. I had carrot in the salad with my slightly under-cooked fish, but after lengthy discussions with the management it appears that vegetarians aren't allowed to have carrot with their wilted leaves, because that's not on the menu. Did I mention we're the only people staying here tonight...?
I hope we'll feel more positive in the clear fresh light of morning.
Day 20, 2012
Ho Coc, Vietnam
This morning we both slept in because we'd got thick heads from the Dalat wine we'd drunk last night. The Ven Ven hotel is quite nice really for the trivial amount of money we're paying. There's a short path into the forest where there's a shady bench and table, and the buildings are all surrounded by trees and bourgonvillea. They've preserved the original forest trees as much as they can, and built the open sided restaurant around one of them. There's an elderly gardener who potters about, trying to graft epiphytic orchids onto the tree trunks. I think we had a civet on our roof last night - something with scrabbling claws woke us up. But eating at the restaurant is just a pain. We're still the only guests here and the family that own it outnumber us 3 to 1, which just feels really awkward as the two young boys who serve (shouldn't they be at school?) stand staring at us as we eat. This morning we ordered bread and omelette for breakfast, then the girl came back and said they have no bread. OK, just omelette then...but bread came out with it, very stale and hard.
When eventually we got moving we walked along the road behind the hotel into the forest until we found a track into the thick of it. It was very, very hot, humid and sticky by now, and the birds were all keeping out of sight. We found a stagnant pool in a dried up creek bed full of marooned fish. A Chinese pond heron flew away from it, and we could see huge trotter prints of some animal in the mud. A giant wild boar? There was the usual rubbish dumped along the roadside and even into the forest, and we couldn't stand much walking in such heat, so we came back to the hotel and had a siesta under the room fan.
Later on we walked into the massive, posh Ho Coc Resort. It stretches along the coast for about a mile with four restaurants, bars, pools, flower beds, an ostrich farm (?!) and, we discovered walking home in the dark, a crocodile breeding pool rather like that one in the James Bond movie. We had a drink and an ice cream and lounged in their shady deck-chairs since nobody knew we weren't staying there, but there were no other guests around. It was spooky, like a tropical beachside version of The Shining. Of course the beach was covered in rubbish. They had a tractor going along it with a sand sifting device attached to the back of it to sieve out the rubbish, but even that was fighting a losing battle when each wave brings more plastic up onto the beach.
Surprisingly, we saw more birds than in the forest. There were little sanderlings scuttling all over the beach, and large-billed crows were the first corvids we've seen in this country. We got a brilliant view of a great thick-knee on the beach margin, with it's large yellow unblinking eye. And there were blue cheeked bee-eaters on the beach following some pipits around. Still haven't seen a sea gull though, which is odd.
Further along from the resort there were some traditional fishing boats pulled up on the sand, hulls of brightly coloured fibreglass over a framework of woven reeds. There were round coracles too, woven reeds on a wooden frame coated with some sort of tar. A man was dredging the sand along where the waves break with a big net, and filtering out masses of small shellfish. We saw many crabs: little ones scuttling sideways out of our path, and great big ones with eyes on stalks that peered out at us from burrows in the sand.
We ate dinner in one of the restaurants there. It was a mighty wood-constructed cathedral, and we were the only diners. A French family we'd seen on the beach came in for drinks and left again. I think they are the only guests there. Robbie got a good plateful of steamed veg but my chicken and mushroom stew was all skin and bone and very tough. I'm still having to go for the blandest sounding food I can see on the menu because my lips are a torture chamber of ulcers. Something in this country doesn't agree with my mouth.
Day 21, 2012
Ho Coc, Vietnam
We got up early this morning to go birding in the forest. It was hot and sticky already outside at 6.45am. We walked along the road half a mile and were rewarded with a sight of two hoopoes flying across our path, but most of the birds hadn't woken up yet. We found a side track away from the road (which was quite busy with motorbikes for the hour of morning), and it lead us to a rather grim looking dam that held back a black and stagnant pond. It had been built recently and the ground was all churned up, but we sat on the dam for an hour staring at the forest edge, and despite the gloomy appearance, it proved to be an excellent birding spot. OK, the vast majority of what we saw was small, green or brown, and fluttering indistinctly deep in the leaves, but we did manage to sort out crimson sunbird and ruby cheeked sunbird, both dazzlingly colourful little things and new for us.We came back for breakfast when the heat became too much to bear. Another bridal couple were getting wedding photos taken around the hotel garden, and we saw a beautiful black-rumped flameback woodpecker in a tree next to the restaurant while we were munching our omelettes. They had some fresh bread this morning. We did a protracted negotiation with the proprietoress for a car back to Saigon tomorrow, then sat at the table in the forest for a while, but the birds had all gone back to sleep by then.
So we packed our towels and cozzis and went to the posh resort and bought a ticket to use the salt water swimming pool as day guests. It was so hot to start with that I was even too hot in the water, but in the afternoon it clouded over and there were a few half-hearted drops of rain. I much preferred that. We had the whole huge pool to ourselves for a few hours, but then a few other guests arrived. I don't know how the place keeps going. There's staff hanging about waiting in all the resort's facilities, (4 restaurants, 300 rooms...) but no guests staying. I lounged on a lounger for an hour or so reading DH Lawrence on my kindle (The White Peacock - it's beautifully written but not much has happened yet, 7 chapters in). To be honest, Tim and Robbie are not much good at resorts, swimming pools and beach-bumming, so when we'd got thoroughly bored we dressed again and wandered off along the coast with our binoculars.
We walked the grotty beach the length of a long scummy-watered lagoon that stretches along behind the beach. So much rubbish washed up out of the poor abused sea. As well as the plastic crap, there were quite a few big glass lightbulbs, no doubt thrown overboard from boats, and even some neon strip light tubes. We saw a few terns over the lagoon and got very confused about pesky small plovers; there was definitely Kentish with their chestnut caps, but might've been a couple of similar species there as well - such a difficult group to sort out.
We reached some prominent rocks at the limit of our view, and on the other side there was yet another bridal couple getting their photos taken, posing on rocks with sea spray erupting behind them. It was raining a bit now, as well as being windy.
There were a couple of men floating out in the sea with polystyrene floats strapped to themselves, trawling the water with hand-held fishing nets and catching a surprising number of small fish. We retraced our steps in the dusky light and ate once again at the cavernous resort restaurant. The pillars supporting it are all about 40cm thick, at least 30 foot high and perfectly cylindrical, each one obviously turned from a single trunk of a forest giant. The place calls itself an Eco-resort. They must've destroyed many acres of rainforest to get all that timber. Robbie's steamed veg plate was not a patch on yesterday's - wilted leaves and uncooked okra, much the same as what she would've got here at Hotel Ven Ven. And my fish in clay pot was dried out and stuck to the bottom. Sorry, I'm having another moany day!
I hesitate to say it, but think the mouth is not quite as excruciating as yesterday. I was reading the long list of possible side-effects on our Malarone anti-malaria tablets today, and one of them is mouth ulcers. I have found a likely suspect!
We walked back through the long dark and deserted promenades of the spooky resort. There's two other guests staying here at the Ven Ven tonight, and one of them is yawning extremely loudly in the next room now.
Day 23, 2012
Saigon airpot, Vietnam
We're at Saigon airport now, waiting for our flight to Hong Kong. Yesterday morning we went out early birding again. It had been raining in the night and the birds were quite active, but it was difficult to identify that many. We got a good look at a hoopoe and an Asian barred owlet along the roadside. Came back to the Ven Ven for breakfast. Then we mooched around the hotel grounds until noon, packing bags and so on. We travelled with the proprietress to the town of Bin Lau on the edge of Saigon. She was going to visit her new grand-daughter, and her driver dropped her off at her son's house then took us on into Central Saigon through dense traffic. We were not remotely pleased to be back in the city.
We checked in to the Hoang Phong Hotel again. Saigon had had rain in the morning and the air was a little bit fresher, but that's relative. We had a late lunch of seafood roll and coconut loaf at a bakery just around the corner from the hotel. We walked along the park alongside Pham Ngu Lau which is the only way to make any progress in this crazy motorbike infested city, and continued past the cental market, fighting our way through the maelstroms of traffic, and into the smart bit of town where all the expensive hotels are. Looked at the beautiful French colonial Hotel de Ville and Opera House, then wandered down to the Saigon River. We sat drinking iced coffee and lemon tea at a waterside cafe, watching ridiculous tourist cruise boats coming up the river, designed like pagodas with dragon prows. As the sun set hundreds of bats appeared from somewhere and went skimming over the surface of the river. We fought our way back to Pham Ngu Lau through the traffic and the bright lights of the night-time city. A big fruit bag was swishing around a tree in one of the main shopping streets, diving within inches of our heads.
Very unadventurously we ate at the Zen Vegetarian once more. The service is Cuban-style there - very sulky and couldn't-care-less - but the food's pretty good.
This morning after breakfast we walked out in the same direction again, and spent the morning in the Fine Arts Gallery. Some interesting Vietnamese takes on modern art in there - they do a lot of lacquer paintings on wood, but not the most inspired artists I've ever seen. A lot of it was politically correct pictures relating to the American war.
Then we bummed about wasting time, drinking ice coffee, looking at the market again and having lunch once more at the Zen. Robbie thought her zucchini was a bit rotten. This is reckoned to be the best vegetarian in town by Lonely Planet...
It was steaming hot by now, and we sat in the shade in the Pham Ngu Lau park watching people working-out on bizarre public exercise machines. They've got a mechanical walking contraption, presumably because it's not possible to actually walk very far in this city. We picked up our bags from the hotel at 4pm and Sagotours provided us with a taxi to the airport. The staff there and at the hotel all remembered us straight away, which is nice. At breakfast in the hotel the girl serving us even remembered that Robbie doesn't have sausage in her omelette. The people in this country are often just wonderful when they're working for private concerns. Those that work in Government-run businesses are sulky as anything.
So that's it then. I leave Vietnam wearier but wiser. I've liked the people, and Cat Tien was fantastic, but I have that despairing feeling that often accompanies me home from foreign trips, a hopeless feeling that this planet is rapidly being buried under piles of rubbish and concrete, the natural world is getting damaged beyond repair, and that the burgeoning human population is soon going to choke all life from the earth. Maybe it's time I gave up travelling, take care of my own garden and bury my head in the sand while the rest of the world goes to pot...I'm just not that sort of person, that's the trouble!
Sweet dreams everybody.