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Published: March 6th 2017
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After Chua Hang the next place I wanted to visit in the Rach Gia area was the U Minh Thuong National Park. I had been really looking forward to this - it was possibly one of the national parks I was most wanting to visit in Vietnam. Unfortunately it was a major disappointment.
There were several specific reasons I wanted to visit, and all of those reasons were mammalian. Although the park is probably a paradise for wetland birds there wouldn't be anything there I hadn't seen elsewhere. On the mammal front, though, there was a mixed colony of Lyle's and large fruit bats; small-clawed and hairy-nosed otters; fishing cats; and pangolins. The last three are nocturnal which meant I had to stay inside the park to have any chance of seeing them.
There is little usable information on the internet about U Minh Thuong. There is general information about the park's environment and wildlife of course, but for information on visiting I was just sifting through bits and pieces. Several sources said there was a guesthouse and restaurant in the park, so my plan was to stay there for at least a couple of nights. The park is
only very small (12 km by 6km), and I imagined I would be able to walk trails between the channels and canals, hopefully at night for spotlighting. There were also, I knew, boat rides through the wetlands.
The main thing I couldn't find out was how to get there. The park is (apparently) hugely popular for local fishermen, with a reported 2000 visitors per month, but of course they don't need instructions on the internet how to find the place. For foreign visitors the best I could come up with was to catch a bus heading south, get dropped off on the highway, and then try to hitch the rest of the way.
When I went to Hua Chang I had just walked to the central bus station ten minutes from my guesthouse, but the buses from there service the routes north of Rach Gia so for U Minh Thuong (which is south) I needed to instead catch a bus from the Rach Soi station which was 7km away. This meant I had to take a motorbike there for 50,000 Dong. Coming back I discovered that I could have caught one from the central station after all, going
first to the town of Tac Cau and then getting a second bus from there. In fact getting to U Minh Thuong from Rach Gia cost me 145,000 Dong (NZ$9) in total - getting back via Tac Cau without needing motorbikes for transits only cost me 31,000 Dong (NZ$2).
When I got to the Rach Soi station I was directed to a mini-van heading for the town of Vinh Thuan. It was just about to leave (at 8.30am), cost 45,000 Dong, and as it happened went right past the junction for U Minh Thuong, from which the park gate is only 3km. Nice and simple. There are motorbikes waiting at the junction so no need to worry about how to make the last stretch. It cost me another 50,000 to get a bike to the park from there.
So far, so good. But when I got to the gate it all fell apart. Firstly, there is no guesthouse - the closest is a couple of kilometres away - and you aren't allowed in the park at night. That basically meant almost everything I wanted to try and see was impossible. There was a map of the park on
the wall, and the guard at the gate showed me where I could go. There was a road for a few kilometres straight through the middle to a small circular lake with a path around it. To that point the ticket cost 10,000 Dong. After that point I could only go by boat - for 600,000 Dong (NZ$37). As for the bat colony, that was in a part of the park which could not be visited. It was pretty much a wasted trip really. I couldn't go in the park at night and there were no trails anyway, just the access road and too-expensive boat trips on a set route.
I continued on to the lake on the motorbike. Maybe there would be some birds at least. It was around 10.30am by this point. I hadn't tried to get here early because I had been going to stay and go birding early next morning, but now that meant that it was a bit too hot for many birds to be around. I walked round the little lake. That took all of five minutes. I was going to give up on it and just go back to find a bus
to return to Rach Gia, but I met a guy from Saigon who spoke some English who was also alone and looking to share the boat cost with someone (the 600,000 is for the whole boat, which seats ten people). I knew there was very little chance of seeing small-clawed otters in the middle of the day here (and no chance of any of the other mammals), so I wasn't keen on paying 300,000 to see common wetland birds. He also thought 300,000 was too expensive for him. We decided to wait and see if some more people turned up. Despite the park supposedly being very popular on weekends, and today being a Sunday, we were waiting a fair while. Eventually a couple turned up who wanted to go on the boat and were willing to share, making it 150,000 per person, and away we went.
The boat trip was pretty rubbish. It was roughly an hour and a half, but most of it was along an arrow-straight canal covered in blankets of water hyacinth and water lettuce (two invasive aquatic plants from South America), with the banks just thickets of tall sedges, meaning there was absolutely nothing to see. When we turned off into a side-channel it became a bit more interesting because we were then going through floating meadows followed by a small area of swamp forest. The point of the trip was that we came to a dead-end pool where we got out of the boat and climbed up a swaying watch-tower to see a distant breeding colony of waterbirds - openbill storks, little egrets, little cormorants, grey and purple herons, and glossy ibis. Even with my binoculars the birds were too far back to be interesting. And then we just went back the way we had come onto the canal and back to the road. Potentially if you could do the boat ride very early in the morning or very late in the afternoon you might see something good, but the noise from the boat's motor seemed to make even that unlikely, and with the cost of it you really wouldn't want to be doing it repeatedly!
It hadn't been a really expensive outing, but I was a bit saddened at how disappointing the park was for me. Probably more so because I had been so looking forward to it. Anyway, the Saigon guy gave me a ride back to the main road on his motorbike (saving me the fare I'd have had to pay otherwise) and I caught a bus which was going to Tac Cau. This cost 16,000 Dong and took an hour, and there I (and everyone else on the bus) transferred to another bus going to Rach Gia which cost 15,000 and took about an hour and a half. This bus ended at the central bus station, meaning I could walk back to the guesthouse instead of paying for another motorbike ride. The Lang Du Inn only had air-con rooms available (200,000 as opposed to the 150,000 for fan rooms) so I went along to the Thien Trang Guesthouse a few doors down where I got a room for 130,000.
The next morning I caught a bus to Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City or HCMC). There is another wetland reserve which I had had on my plans, called the Tram Chim National Park, which was set up to protect sarus cranes. You can get there from Saigon, but for me it would have made more sense to go there from Rach Gia, and then on to Saigon afterwards. However it really has the same problem as U Minh Thuong, where you can only get into the reserve with boats on set routes for specific lengths of time, and the boats are even more expensive at 800,000 to 900,000 Dong (NZ$50-56). I decided to give it a miss because I'd have to just be hoping there would be other people there to share the boat costs, and even then I'd just be seeing birds I'd seen plenty of other places before. There would be better places to be spending my money.
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