a visit to Hlawga Park

---

Outside Yangon is a place called Hlawga Park. You pronounce Hlawga (at least to my ears) as if the H is silent and the “law” to rhyme with “cow”: so “low-gah”. Park is pronounced “park”. This is a spot popular with visiting birders and what I understood was that it is a nature reserve surrounded by a fence but the operators have released animals in there to make it “better” (hog deer, sambar, muntjac, wild pigs and pelicans). It is actually a safari park – hence all the released animals – with a “mini zoo” attached. There aren't many exotic mammals in Burmese zoos which is why all the safari park animals are local species, apart for one hippo in a pen. You can get to Hlawga Park by taxi or by bus. In a birding trip-report from a couple of years ago the cost of the taxi was given as the equivalent of NZ$70 or so which was a bit rich for my blood. Instead I took the number 124 bus from just around the corner from my guesthouse for 300 kyat (less than 50 cents). Going by bus takes a little longer obviously – about an hour – but it is so much fun being back in a country with absolutely nutty bus rides. The bus is one of those old clatter-buckets, with one guy leaning out the door yelling the destination and another inside collecting fares. Each bus has a number on the front but it is in Myanmar script so you need to have it written down and compare each bus as it arrives with the squiggles you have on your paper. The buses appear to be on timers where if they sit still for more than twenty seconds they automatically start driving again, so when there's a few people getting on they all have to grab on where-ever they can and try to get in before falling under the wheels. If there's only one person at a stop the driver doesn't even bother stopping, he just slows down a bit, the passenger grabs the handle by the door, and is hauled physically on board by the two conductors. Even little old people bound in and out the door like langurs. I suspect the reason all the old people here are so sprightly is because the ones that aren't don't live long enough.

After an hour the bus dropped me off by the side of the road and I got a motorbike the rest of the way, twenty minutes or so down another road, for 4000 kyat which seemed a bit excessive. When I left the park later in the day I got another motorbike but to a road in the opposite direction which only took five minutes and cost 500 kyat (which was a true price because I asked at the park's ticket counter first). At the road I jumped on the first bus that stopped, after the conductor guy confirmed they were heading for Yangon. I didn't have a clue where in Yangon it was going, Yangon is a big sprawling city, but I worry about things like that later. I just look out for landmarks I recognise (which in Yangon would be almost nothing!) or get off at the end of the line and then see where I am. The trip to Yangon took two hours, twice as long as the trip out of Yangon, because of the late afternoon traffic. When we got to the city the end of the line in this case was the docks by the Yangon River at the very opposite end of downtown from where I needed to be. It would have taken me a couple of hours to walk it so I took a taxi.

Anyway, back to Hlawga Park. The entry price was 800 kyat (maybe NZ$1.50 or so) with an additional 500 kyat for the shuttle around the safari park. I had looked at the big map-board just nearby but not really been able to make head nor tail of it so I didn't really know what the story was with birding here. The lady at the ticket counter said you weren't allowed to walk into the safari park, you had to take the shuttle or a car, but once inside you could walk around and there were lots of birds. The shuttles only left on the hour so I had half an hour to wait and the lady suggested I go around the mini zoo in the meantime. I questioned whether half an hour would be long enough and she said yes because there wasn't much to see there. I asked if there were any small cats and she totally misunderstood my accent and replied “yes, yes, many small cages”. It turned out that despite the implications of the name “mini zoo” the animals were well housed here in spacious enclosures, far better than at the Yangon Zoo itself, except for the circular house for small carnivores which had small dimly-lit concrete cages. There weren't many animals in the zoo – it is indeed a zoo which is mini – but I ended up spending an hour because there were lots of birds in the trees (including rosy minivets and black-naped monarchs). I saw some red-whiskered bulbuls and thought I'd never seen them with such bright red faces before, and it is because the local subspecies has a much larger and hence more obvious red ear-patch than the ones I've seen elsewhere. Asian openbill storks were circling in a big flock overhead too (they breed at the nearby lake).

The safari park is basically a large area of dry broadleaf forest (dry as in bone-dry!) enclosed in a low wire fence with a one-way dirt road winding through the middle in a loop around a large multi-armed lake. It is easy to see hog deer and sambar but they can't be counted for my wild animal list. However there are rhesus macaques here too which I am counting on the basis that they occur naturally in this region, the low fence is in no way a barrier to them, and there are probably hundreds of them here waiting for free food. But mainly it was birds I was after. I think I got here too late in the morning though because I didn't see a lot. I walked the whole road and then back again which is a fair distance but I didn't end up with much of a list. Actually I didn't walk all the way back along the road because when I came around a bend there was a bull gaur blocking the way. I'm not much of a fan of free-roaming domestic cattle when I'm birding because even the bulls of those can be a bit aggressive sometimes, and a bull gaur is an altogether more gigantic beast! It was, no doubt, pefectly placid but nevertheless I waited for another shuttle to come by. It was a good day for minivets, with rosy and small minivets both seen, and then some other common birds like green bee-eaters, common ioras, ashy drongos, scarlet-backed flowerpeckers and red-throated flycatchers, but overall not much to show for the day. I didn't see even a whisker of Davison's bulbul. On the lake the only waterbirds seen were a couple of lesser whistling ducks, a little cormorant, a few little egrets and cattle egrets, and a white-breasted kingfisher (and a released spot-billed pelican which didn't count).

---