That Sole Destroying Mountain

---

I found it actually slightly too cold at night last night which I hadn't really expected. Dalat is at 1500m above sea level though, so a fairly high altitude. Only about 100m lower than the HQ at Mount Kinabalu although Dalat feels much lower, probably because it's on a Plateau with various peaks, which get above 2000m, dotted around. It was one of those peaks that I wanted to visit today, Mount Lang Biang, which is the main birding site near Dalat and the plan was always two or even three full days here out of the four that I've got.



I didn't quite manage to get out as early as I would have done, partly because I was distracted by a Brexit debate over messenger for 20 minutes, but mainly because when I got downstairs the front door was locked and I had to find someone to unlock it. Once I was out and also stopped for a quick bahn mi op la (a baguette with fried eggs) it was almost 7. Not super late, but it could have been earlier. There's a bus to the mountain, so I walked over to where I thought the bus stop was. It wasn't quite there, but a quick Google produced 'near Eximbank' which was correct. When I got there, I tried to ascertain what time the bus would next show up, but I just got some vague gestures to wait here and something about 3. I believe this was either 'in 30 minutes' which would have been just before 8 or at 8:30.



A motorbike taxi then approached me, and if my relatives are reading I said no straight away because motorbikes are dangerous. You can skip the rest of this paragraph now, because it's some really boring stuff about zoos. The driver said 100,000 to Lang Biang and said the bus was 8:30 which was over an hour. I don't believe that, but I tried 50,000. He then agreed on 60,000 which is only about 3x the bus and a third of what I guess a taxi would be. I then agreed and we set off. He had a spare helmet for the passenger. It didn't have a strap, but it was there. He also went far faster than all other traffic in the road and although bloody terrifying at first, I soon got used to it and I didn't die once and got to the mountain by twenty to eight. When we arrived he decided I had misunderstood the price and it was now 80,000 (I hadn't, the negotiations were done by typing in his phone) but I gave him 60,000 and walked off.



Lang Biang is very touristy, there's a big Hollywood style sign and white horses painted like zebras because why not? Most people get a jeep to drive up the road to look at the view then go home again. There is, however, a trail but it's not exactly obvious. I found someone to describe where it was although I knew roughly where to go. It's down a muddy farming track outside the entrance gate and he said 'turn left at the small river'. This was very helpful because I would have struggled otherwise. It's actually immidiately after the stream and it doesn't look anything like a trakl. It starts as a muddy trail for a farmer to access his coffee plantation, then becomes a rain cut gulley Anne then becomes and obscenely muddy and rather steep trail. You can't avoid the mud either because there's barbed wire on either side to stop you going into the coffee plantations. The view was spectacular though with views across coffee plantations, greenhouses with strawberries, the town of Dalat, and the forested mountains behind. I soon entered the pine forest and started to see pine forest birds. The highlight has to be the White-faced Jays which are so amazing looking. I was seeing more of those grey birds from yesterday too, but I have realised that they were actually Verditer Flycatchers which are blue but looked slate-grey in the light. The pine forest really reminded me of birding back in Poland, woodpeckers and jays – albeit super weird jays – and trying to identify backlit tits at the tops of pine trees. It’s very interesting that there’s so much natural pine forest around that wasn’t planted. The trail was quite hard work though, and really slippery. With another three days at this rate, I’m probably going to end up breaking my coccyx, or, even worse, my camera.



I was mainly just passing through the pine forest to get to the main birding site which is broadleaf forest around the summit, and there is far higher diversity in the broadleaf forest although there are a few interesting birds in the pine forest too. A surprising bird seen was quite a large brown bird that landed on a tree which turned out to be a cute teeny weeny owl! It was an Asian Barred Owlet which is a species that is common and I’ve kept on missing – a bogey bird to use the terminology – odd for it to be in pine forest though.



I had restocked on my supply of boiled sweets yesterday which is something that I like to carry around with me while I’m birding as a sort of energy boost for while I’m going along. This was very useful for today! Quite a steep trail! All the tourists go up the road that goes up the mountain in jeeps that you hire at the entrance to an old radar station that is a view point. This isn’t actually at the real summit of Mount Lang Biang though, it’s at just over 1900m. The real summit is several hundred metres higher at 2167m and this was where I was trekking to, primarily because the last 1km (out of 4km total from the entrance) is through broadleaf forest that holds my target species at the Dalat Plateau, the top target being the extremely rare endemic Collared Laughingthrush.



The track through the pine forest comes out onto the road just by the start of the summit trail with a sign at the bottom with the usual ‘take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints’ but with the addition of ‘kill nothing but your time’ which is an interesting one that I hadn’t heard before. I did eventually get into the broadleaf forest which is pretty cool forest. It’s extremely high altitude and has generally quite low trees with lots of lichen and ferns and rhododendrons in the undergrowth, especially as I approached and passed the 2000m altitiude mark. There were a couple of other groups who passed me on the trail, the first was two guys playing extremely loud music as they walked past and carrying a ridiculous amount of ‘survival’ equipment like emergency heat blankets and clip on first aid kits and a satellite phone. I didn’t see any oxygen tanks, but it would have fitted in with the theme. I hoped it was totally excessive and unnecessary at least… (it was, but it did turn out to be a bit of a tricky climb).



The track was insanely muddy, as in, ankle deep (and, occasionally wrist deep when it got a bit too steep and slippery to do it just on foot) and the sole of my right shoe is starting to come off a bit (hence the title) which means mud was getting in through the bottom as well as the top. It’s not like unusably fallen off yet, and it should make it through the trip, but there are cracks at the sides that signal the gradual demise of my only four month old boots. The last few hundred metres to the summit were a bit of a challenge with big tall steps, some of them waist height, but it’s not actually all that long of a distance so I did make it to the top, no problems, where there is a little flat area of grass and low bushes and a sign. And, of course, a spectacular view of Dalat – which is bigger than it looks when seen from so high up – with surrounding farms and even more spectacular were the surrounding forest-clad mountains. There was also a view down to the other peak where all the tourists go to in their jeeps to take a selfie, claim to have achieved something other than waste 450,000 on an overpriced jeep, then get the ride right back down.



Anyway, the birding… it was tough. I mean, really tough. For the first few hours as I walked up to the summit I saw a couple of sunbirds and that was it. The forest was amazingly quiet. And by amazing, I mean depressing. There was nothing around! This area really suffers from poaching for the cage bird trade, so birds are really wary and depleted in numbers. You only see birds when there are very occasional bird waves, and I didn’t get any all morning. I saw a woodlouse. Although it doesn’t talk, so it’s scarcely replacement. I’ll have to go to a similar pet shop in Bolton to replace my… hang on I think I’ve got distracted. Right, birding.



Just before midday I sat down at the 360m to the summit marker in the middle of prime birding area to eat some coco pops, the closest thing to my ideal snack of a Nature Valley bar that I could buy in Dalat. I was feeling rather dejected at this silent forest devoid of birds, when all of a sudden the trees in front of me filled with birds! My first bird wave of the day, at 11:50, had arrived! In about 5 minutes I saw six new species and then it was gone. I tried to follow it, but with the terrain it had just gone and I couldn’t. I was pouring over the field guide, when all of a sudden I could hear noises behind me and a group of stunning Vietnamese Greenfinches with a similarly awesome Dalat Shrike-babbler was just in the tree above me. I even managed pictures of both! I actually came across another bird wave a hundred metres or so further along, but I struggled to actually get on to any of the birds in this one for some reason, probably because I was in the middle of a section of waist-high steps. I did get on to a Green Cochoa though, which is a cool bird that I think is quite difficult to find. I also saw some laughingthruses on the way up, not THE laughingthrush – these were White-cheeked rather than the much sought-after Collared – but nice nonetheless. There was an Eastern (=Maritime, although that seems like a weird name) Striped Squirrel with the first bird wave too.



After looking at the view for a little bit at the summit and having lunch, I headed back down. Also at the summit at that point was the only other group of people on the summit trail: an Australian guy who was a fan of hiking and his Vietnamese parter who very obviously was not a fan of hiking in the slightest.



On the way down, I got a really nice view of some Grey-bellied Tesias which are lovely birds, and I did pick up a bird wave with some more common species and the addition of Yellow-cheeked Tits. Then just after I had crossed a particularly nasty patch of mud, I heard some sounds from behind me. I had been hearing various sounds all along but since there is such a high poaching pressure on most of these species, the recordings of calls are blocked on Xeno Canto and other places to reduce the availability of high quality recordings and to try and reduce harassment. Not that this will stop poachers of course… So as I consequence I didn’t really know the calls of my target species. So I went back across the mud to see what it was, and eventually located a large shape moving in the undergrowth. I got my binoculars onto it, and the bright flashes of orange and red and black were obvious. I had actually found a Collared Laughingthrush! Two, it would seem. On my first day! It’s a good thing I managed to get some pretty poor but clearly identifiable ‘record shots’ because I would scarcely believe it myself! They are just such stunning birds, worth googling. And they’re endemic to the Dalat Plateu too (and highly threatened by poaching. I’m so stoked to have seen them on my first day, and well too!

I had left it quite late leaving the summit trail, it was about 3:30 when I saw the laughingthruses and it was after 4 when I left the broadleaf forest area at the summit, passing some green pigeons at the edge of the pine forest on the way, so when I got back to the bottom of the summit trail, rather than walking back down the trail through the pine forest and past the fields, I decided instead to go straight down the road because it was getting late and having just rained, that path would have been insanely slippery.



As I was walking down a woman pulled over and offered me a lift to the bottom on her motorbike. Since I ride on the backs of motorbikes nowadays I accepted. I was quite tired too. When we got to the bottom, despite the lift it was after five and I had just missed the last bus. I walked along a bit and tried to call a GrabBike but couldn't get one to come all the way out. When I walked back to the carpark, a taxi had appeared and I had no other choice. The ride back was actually cheaper than I would have anticipated at 137k. I'm not sure it was any safer than the motorbike however, because the driver was rather distracted by a football match between Vietnam and Korea on his phone on the dashboard. And by a bit distracted I mean, looking at the phone more than the road and yelling at the phone when anything happened in typical football supporter type style. When I went out for dinner, the large number of Vietnamese flags being waved by people yelling about something on their motorbikes and blowing plastic trumpet things suggests that Vietnam won. I had dinner in a slightly more expensive indoor restaurant to get away from traffic rather than sitting on the street. They had a 'most repetitive and irritating songs by Ed Sheeran and his ilk' playlist on. I prefer motorbike noise.



New birds:

Wire-tailed Swallow

Plain-backed Sparrow

Ashy Bulbul (sensu stricto)

Asian Barred Owlet

Black-throated Tit

Chestnut Bellied Nuthatch

Flavescent Bulbul

Mountain Bulbul

Mrs Gould’s Sunbird

White-browed Fantail

Himalayan Shortwinig

Ashy-throated Warbler

Indochinese Fulvetta

Grey-bellied Tesia

Short-tailed Scimitar-babbler

Dalat Shrike-babbler

White-cheeked Laughingthrush

Green Cochoa

Grey-cheeked Warbler

Spot-throated Babbler

Asian House Martin

Yellow-cheeked Tit

Collared Laughingthrush

Pin-tailed Green-pigeon



Mammals:

Eastern Striped Squirrel

---