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Published: August 7th 2007
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Day 91
Taking the open bus tour down through Vietnam has been amazing value for money, however the drawback of it is that it takes you to all of the touristy places frequented by every other traveller. Nice for meeting similarly minded people but sometimes you want to get off the beaten track and see the real side of the country. With this in mind we wanted to plan a road trip exploring the area away from the coast and the open bus route.
We bought ourselves a map Vietnam, spotted a National Park within reachable distance, hired a bike, packed our day packs, bought a picnic and set off. Mark and Chrissie were on a road trip in Vietnam! How exciting!
Cat Tien National Park is around 200km from Dalat. We planned to drive there in a day (with some stop offs) and stay the night, stay a day in the park and drive back on the third day. Sounds good until you take into consideration our transport was both of us on one 100cc motorbike! 200km becomes quite an adventure.
Strapping our pack to the bike and filling up with fuel we were on
the road by 7:30am. 25 km away from home we stopped off at a waterfall (sorry we can't remember the name!) for breakfast. Back on the road and another 20 km down the road and we were ahead of schedule so decided to take a 12km detour to see the Pongour Waterfalls. We had seen pictures of this in the hotel and on postcards and it had looked amazing, however we had heard that construction work underway on a dam upstream had reduced the amount of water flowing over the falls. When we got there instead of the raging Victoria falls style waterfall in the pictures it was much less impressive but beautiful none the less.
Driving through numerous small villages and towns and battling through every type of rain Michael Fish has ever forecast, we finally arrived at the entrance to the park. Leaving our bike we had to cross a river to get into the park and board a small motor boat which faught against the current to take us across.
Checking into our bungalow and the start of our Eco Tourism experience in Cat Tien, we had a bite to eat, booked our activities for
waterfall
and our view for breakast the following day and erected our mozzie net (the bug count was a little high for Chrissie's comfort) before sleep.
Day 92
Cat Tien is around 74000 hectares and mainly jungle with hundreds of species of animals including many which are listed as endangered. The park is busier in the dry season and as we'd arrived at the start of the wet season there were not many visitors there - perfect! We had chosen a 10km trek through the rainforest to the Crocodile Lake and a night spotting 4x4 trip for which we hired a guide and car.
After breakfast we met up with our guide for the day who was to take us on our trek whereapon he handed us two pairs of leech socks. These are christmas stocking sized socks made from thick material which you put on inside your shoes and tie (tightly) at the top, not forgetting to smear a ring of industrial strength leech repellant a couple of inches from the top. Not looking forward to a leech attack we followed the instructions to the letter!
A short 4x4 ride in the back of a ute later we were dropped off
at the start of the walk. Our guide was amazing, without his eagle eyes we would have missed a lot of interesting trees insects and birds. He also became Chrissie's hero moving spiders webs from our path and de-leeching any of the little suckers before they could climb too high. En route we had our first down pour which was amazing as you could clearly hear it approaching across the treetops, however it didn't last too long before it died off. We also saw two of the biggest spiders of the trip so far (and hopefully ever) which were nonchalantly sat in their giant webs across the path and which were easily the size of a man's outstretched hand - neither Mark or Chrissie were big fans!
Arriving at Crocodile Lake it became apparent that Mark had a talent for attracting leeches with an impressive amount having to be removed from his shoes before he could remove them to enter the ranger's station.
The station has a fantastic view over the lake where over 60 adult (and an unknown number of junior) crocodiles live, hense the name. We didnt see any crocs (however our guide said he saw
one when he went for a cig by the lake) but we had a great time taking in the view and watching some of the endangered species of birds around the lake including an osprey swooping for lunch.
Whilst we relaxed in the comfort of the station, our host had gone out on the lake in his canoe to catch us some lunch which was immediately prepared and cooked. It was really tasty and we'll probably not have fish quite that fresh for a while! Donning our leech socks once more, we headed back along the path in the pouring rain (we really found out why they call it a rain forest) and were picked up in the truck which took us back to our bungalow.
Back in the safety of our room, we had just had a shower when Chrissie spotted a monkey sat on the floor about 4m from our front door. Quickly getting dressed we went out to sit in the chairs on our porch to watch him/her play in a tree and make short work of a hug jackfruit. We were chuffed to have seen our first monkey of this trip.
We had
Detour to Pongour
Road under construction decided that if the rain was to turn bad we would not bother with the night spotting as we would be unlikely to see anything, however the weather was on our side and when 7:30 pm came around we had a nice clear evening. Climbing on the back of our 4x4 again (this time with our guide sporting a high powered searchlight) we left the station to see what we could find. We were fortunate enough to see a Porcupine, a rabbit, a tree shrew, a number of birds and about 10 deer in the hour that we were out - even the guide was surprised at how much we'd seen.
Day 93
Checking out and getting the boat back across the river, we once again mounted our bike and started our 200km back to Delat. We were hopeful that we would have a dryer journey, but unfortunately they dont call it the wet season for kicks.
Climbing the road back to the Central Highlands plateau we had an interesting incident with a bus coming stratight for us on the wrong side of the road - which we dealt with well albeit leaving the road for a
little while - other than that the journey passed quickly with us arriving back at 3:00pm shattered and aching, only able to get some dinner, watch some tv in our room and bed.
We had an amazing couple of days which for Vietnamese standards were a but pricy (but when you convert it to pounds it all seems much better)
300k VND (£10.00) Bike hire for 4 days
100k VND (£3.30) Petrol
300k VND (£10.00) Room (for 2 nights)
100k VND (£3.30) Park entrance
Trek
120k VND (£4.00)Guide
200k VND (£6.60) 4x4
70k VND (£2.30) Lunch
170k VND (£5.60) Night spotting
100k VND (£3.30) Other food etc
6k VND (£0.20) leech socks and repellant (worth its weight in gold!)
£24.30 per person for 4 days. Not bad but a little over budget so we'll be lazing on a beach for a couple of cheap days in Mui Ne!
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