Indochinese Silvered Langurs at Chua Hang

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On the ferry from Phu Quoc Island to Rach Gia I encountered the endearing way that time is told in Vietnam. I asked the girl checking the tickets what time the ferry would get to Rach Gia and she said "three hours and forty-five" which I took to be the length of the trip. I thought that we would therefore be arriving at 4.30pm. Instead what she was saying was that the arrival time would be 3.45pm. If you see a time written down on a schedule this would be written as "3H45" (or, more usually in the case for pm, "15H45").

Something I really like about Vietnam (and this has nothing to do with anything before or after this paragraph), every hotel or guesthouse, no matter how cheap it is, will always have free soap, shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, comb, towel, and shower jandals. If you were going only to Vietnam on holiday you wouldn't need to take any toiletries with you. In India, in contrast, you're lucky if your room has a plague rat for a pillow.

Literally a couple of minutes walk from the Rach Gia pier is a row of cheap guesthouses. Apparently the best of them is the Lang Du Inn, so I headed there. Their rooms are 150,000 Dong (about NZ$9), they have WIFI (although I was on the third floor where it didn't reach so I had to sit in their noodle-house on the ground floor to use it), and the owner speaks English well enough. The pier is at the mouth of a river, across which is a road-bridge with locks underneath, so the water is still like a pond when the locks are closed. There were a dozen or so white-winged black terns hawking over the water, directly outside the guesthouse.

There were two places I wanted to visit in the Rach Gia area before heading off towards Saigon, both roughly 50km away but in opposite directions to the north and south. To the north was a site called Chua Hang which is where I hoped to see Indochinese silvered langurs, and to the south was the U Minh Thuong National Park which is a remnant of what the Mekong Delta wetlands used to look like before everything was converted to farming.

I visited Vietnam for the first time in 2015 but it was just for three weeks and it was at the worst possible time of year (August) so the animal-related results of that trip were not astounding. One of the initial drives for visiting Vietnam was the number of primates found there (25 species in total). On that short trip I managed to see five species and failed to see about the same number again. On this trip I am covering the entire country, south to north, and have a lot more time to spend on it. Nevertheless, I am definitely not going to be able to see all the primates in Vietnam, mostly due to the level of hunting and the consequent rarity and inaccessibility of a lot of the species. I think I have a good chance of seeing at least twelve species, which is roughly half the total. Of the 25 species, I have already seen seven in the wild, either in Vietnam or elsewhere in Asia.

A couple of years ago I had found a website called Primate Watching by a Vietnamese primatologist named Andie Ang. It's a work-in-progress so there are still lots of gaps, but it was through there that I found out about Chua Hang as a reliable site for Indochinese silvered langurs. The website isn't exactly specific about the details of the place, giving only a vague "Kien Luong" (the name of the whole district) as where to go. (See http://www.primatewatching.com/t-germaini for the website). It took a bit more digging on the internet before getting better directions. Halfway between Rach Gia and Ha Tien is a little peninsula on which is the town of Hon Chong. A few kilometres from the town, at the bottom of the peninsula, is Chua Hang which is where a Buddhist temple is found (I think chua means temple or pagoda). The temple is at the base of a forest-covered limestone outcrop, and the langurs live in the forest there. According to Andie Ang on the Primate Watching site the langurs are easy to see because they are habituated to the many Vietnamese tourists who come to the temple. She rates the chances of seeing them as four out of five.

I further found that there are buses to Hon Chong from Rach Gia. According to various travel sites the direct local buses are infrequent, so most likely I would have to catch one of the Ha Tien bound tourist buses, get off at Ba Hon, and then take the remaining 16km by motorbike to Chua Hang.

Rach Gia's central bus station isn't far from the pier. After breakfast I walked over there and it only took ten minutes. Well, it took ten minutes to get to what I thought must be the bus station but was actually a big covered market. There was a coach parked out front, which confused me because it did look like it should be a bus station. If I had continued walking along the road for another 100 metres I would have found the station, but instead I asked some people where the bus station was. No-one spoke English but one woman seemed to understand the words "bus station" as I pointed at the coach, and she enthusiastically pointed me off down another road. I'm not sure what she thought I was looking for, but it wasn't the bus station, and of course as soon as I got off the road I was meant to be on I got lost in the maze of little streets. It took me twenty minutes more before I finally stumbled across the station. As luck would have it though, there was a direct bus leaving for Hon Chong at 7.30am, and it was now 7.29am. Perfect.

It took about three hours to get to Hon Chong - I think between 2.5 and 3 hours is normal. I had been expecting that I would then have to get a motorbike the rest of the way, but it turned out that the route doesn't terminate in Hon Chong, the bus goes all the way to Chua Hang and stops there. Even more perfect! I wasn't sure if there was only one bus per day or not. The bus I was on had the schedule printed onto the interior of the bus (7.30am from Rach Gia, 1pm from Hon Chong) which made it seem like there was just one bus, and the conductor told me to be back at 1pm. Still, it was now 10.30am which gave me 2.5 hours. That would be ample time to see these habituated used-to-tourist langurs, right?

Chua Hang is a temple built at the foot of a huge limestone outcrop. It isn't a mountain because it is too small, but it isn't a hill because it is entirely made out of rock. These outcrops are dotted all over the Kien Luong district, like islands in a sea of farmland, and they are the only places where forest still remains. This particular site is obviously a major attraction. From the parking area to the temple entrance is a complex of stalls and restaurants, mostly selling seafood. Today was a Friday and quite quiet, but I imagine on the weekends it would be packed.

I strolled through the stalls up to the temple and scanned the trees on the cliffs with my binoculars. No langurs. Well maybe I wouldn't see them in the first two minutes but that was fine. It's not going to be hard to find them. I wandered all around the temple grounds, checking the cliffs above. No langurs. Hmm. Maybe round the other side, where there was another path through more stalls to the right of the temple gate. This path wound along the beach. I could see the cliffs here and there between the cloths shading the stalls, but no langurs. A northern tree shrew was scuttling around amongst the rocks on the edge of the forest. When the path ran out I returned to the temple and checked the cliffs there again. I even asked a few of the stall-holders but none spoke English, and even if they understood the word "monkey" I didn't know if their answer was "yes they are everywhere!" or "no we have eaten them all already".

I walked off to the left, away from the temple following a dirt track through shrimp ponds which skirted the other side of the outcrop. Still no langurs, and it was getting jolly hot out here. There wasn't really anything to do except keep walking back and forth, checking the trees high above, and ruminating on why I was even doing this.

Back at the temple I finally found a lady at one stall who spoke English. When I asked about the monkeys she immediately replied that they are here every day - at 3pm! During the day they are back in the forest "on the mountain" (i.e. somewhere on the outcrop beyond sight from the paths). I looked at my watch. It was only 11.30am. The bus would be leaving at 1pm. The monkeys wouldn't be here until 3pm. The times were not good.

I thought it most likely that there was only one bus per day between Chua Hang and Rach Gia, so if I didn't catch that then I would have to be paying for a motorbike to get back (at least to Ba Hon 16km away, or possibly all the way to Rach Gia 50km away if it was too late to get a connecting bus). On the other hand, if I did catch the 1pm bus and hadn't seen the langurs I'd then be paying the bus fare to return here tomorrow to try again. I decided to hell with it, I'd just stay until I saw the langurs and then figure out how to get back later. Who dares wins.

I had some lunch, and then took to walking around the outside of the outcrop again. Round the temple area, then around the right side through the stalls, then way off around to the left side through the ponds. Finally back to the temple. And hey, there were some langurs! It was 1.10pm. I knew that would happen. The langurs were in the trees right behind the temple, although quite high up so the photos were basically "point the camera at the trees and maybe something will come out". I had seen the langurs now - would the bus be late leaving? I didn't want to just rush off after only seeing the langurs for five minutes, but a motorbike exit would be expensive, so I hurried back through the stalls to the parking area. There was a bus sitting there. I ran the rest of the way, expecting it to pull off just before I got there, but no, this bus was leaving at 2pm (its schedule was 10.30am from Rach Gia with a 2pm return). Perfect again!

I had 40 minutes more for watching the langurs, and two of them came down from the trees, climbing over the crags until they were on the rocks right beside the temple. I think the photos should come out quite well, unless the sun was throwing too much shadow over them.

I think Andie Ang's recommendation of this place for the Indochinese silvered langur is correct (although her site could do with more specific directions), but I also think that her four out of five success rating would be dependent on the time of day. I think probably early morning and late afternoon would be good bets - the middle of the day not so much.

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