Which Trail is it Now?!

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Today marks 100 days of this trip. 13 more to go.

I had to wake up someone at the accommodation to open the door today again. Apparently they open the door at 6:30 which suggests I was a bit late getting out yesterday because the door had just been opened.



Anyway, after breakfast of an 18,000 dong bahn mi op la (eggs and baguette - that's about 59p) I walked up the road and for a taxi. I don't have to feel guilty about getting a taxi this time because there's no bus, and I needed a taxi rather than a motorbike because I needed a metered vehicle because I wasn't sure that the drop of point would be so obvious and with a pre-negotiated fare you can't get them to drive around if you said the wrong spot. I also needed to arrange for the taxi to come back to pick me up.



Today I was visiting Ho Tuyen Lam Lake (reservoir) and I got the taxi to take me to Khu Du Lich Da Tien or Da Tien Tourist Area on the shores of the lake. From there I would be walking to the forest. The area is back around near Datanla where I went on my first day. In fact, it's a few Kms beyond Datanla, a similar distance from Dalat to the mountain at 10-15kms. The taxi I got today was the cheapest so far, although only marginally so at 11800/km rather than 11900.



Although called a 'tourist area' it's rather in the middle of nowhere. The road around the lake to it disintegrates into gravel several times. Th lake is quite pretty, as an artificial reservoir that has flooded a valley it's all oddly shaped and jaggedy and is flanked by pine forest all around. Higher up on the ridges around the lake is broadleaf forest where I was headed. It seemed very birdy from the car with birds on wires - shrikes and bulbuls and such.



I was dropped off at a totally deserted tourist resort and arranged for the driver to come back at 4:30. The journey cost 150k on the way there. The whole place was empty, apart from a couple of poor sad looking macaques chained up and son rather terrifying loose barky dogs. They never actually attacked but scared me out of my wits which is I suppose the point.



I had step by step instructions of how to get to the trail and they soon found me to a rubbish tip and construction site. There seemed to be no way around. So I walked back up to the car park and some staff had now appeared. I showed them my map and did the universal birding symbol of holding up binoculars and they pointed me back where I'd just came. So I walked back down there. The construction site was not go-through-able but I suppose the rubbish tip was... The things I do for birding. So I walked through the rubbish tip, avoiding any of the copious amounts of broken glass, then walked through a spiky bush, then some more, then a grove of lantana and a path appeared. Briefly. It soon disappeared again. It did quite a a bit of this, I don't think anyone been down the trail on months. My arms took the brunt. Do bird guides really walk their customers over a rubbish tip?!



I was walking through some pine forest with dense undergrowth paying attention on not loosing the trail when all of a sudden there was an explosion of sound and bird - rain quails! It was actually quite birdy, all the usual pine birds and some waterbirds like grebes and kingfishers and some grassland birds like prinias.



My instructions then said, "cross three small streams". I would have phrased this as "ford three massive rivers" but each to their own. 'Cross' makes it sound almost like there's a bridge. By this point, however, something I would actually describe as a trail emerged. Whaaa? I've literally had to cross a rubbish tip and force my way through lantana and there's a trail all of a sudden? That bit wasn't on the instructions! This whole adventure, coupled with being scared half to death by dogs, and all the scratches that the plants had inflicted on my arm meant I was rather tired. I had no choice: break out the emergency snickers bar.



I kept up a fair clip through the pines, and at a bit of edge of broadleaf forest I found a spot with heaps of Mrs Gould's Sunbirds including some stunning males, a few Bulbuls, and my first Vietnamese Cutias which are supposed to be common but I missed them at Datanla and the mountain. While still at the same spot I also found a pair of the recently split (by proper taxonomists, not just me) Annam Barbet. Then the little forest glade surrounded by pines exploded with birds! There were more birds in view at any one time than I had seen all day yesterday. It lasted for about 20 minutes while I stood there trying to see and ID as much as possible. Then, all of a sudden, "sharp intake of breath* the Crocias! This was probably my second most desired Dalat bird after Collared Laughingthrush and the Grey-crowned Crocias is a really rare super localised endemic that I believe was rediscovered in this area relatively recentlyish. Wow. It wasn't even 8:30 yet! And as I was about to leave the area and continue along, a couple of Orange-breasted Laughingthrushes appeared. Awesome! This was a species I thought I might not be in the right habitat for.



I was back in pines for a bit and quite soon into the broadleaf forest proper. At the start of this forest was a sign saying 'trek to'. To where...? I had taken a wrong turn at some point, I was no longer on the trail described, but I had reached broadleaf forest now so it didn't really matter. There's a loop described that you can do, but given that it describes several of the sections as 'undefined trails' and the bit that I had done was not one of those undefined sections, I was just going to go until an appropriate time and then turn back the way I'd come.



The distribution of pine and broadleaf forest is quite interesting. Generally, pine forests occur in the valleys and lower down while broadleaf forest occurs on ridges along the tops of the valleys. You also get fingers of broadleaf forest that go down into the pine area, either along low ridges or in extra low valleys, often along streams. I guess it's rain and moisture dependent? With pines in the dryer areas? But then it's pines all along the lake edge because that's low but there's plenty of moisture. It's most definitely not just altitude or just water though. The trail I was on kept cutting through pine and these fingers of lower altitude broadleaf which actually resulted in really high diversity of species and I was constantly on the ecotones. Amazingly, I saw three species of nuthatch today, making five species on this trip. Given that I had only seen one prior, that's a six-fold increase on my nuthatch lifelist.



I had some "just like homemade" chocolate chip cookies for the walk, and they were remarkably homemade. That is, of course, assuming your home is a mass-production industrial cookie factory. They also did a remarkable job of individually wrapping each cookie in such a way that it looked three times the size that it actually was.



The birding was generally very good, quiet at times of course, but plenty of stuff around. It was also much less steep and muddy than Lang Biang by a long way. The trail that I was on ended up looping back around to the lake before fizzling out so I retraced my steps to try a different turning. "Just retrace your steps" sounds simple enough, but at times it was far less obvious than ideal. Along the way back, I went down a little side trail into an isolated but seemingly high quality patch of broadleaf forest and it was teeming with birds! Heaps of fulvettas, fantails, warblers, more cutias, erpornis, and two species of oriole - maroon and slender-billed - flitting about.



The path continued through this forest and back into pine forest and my intuition told me that this would take me back near the first big bird wave. This was correct. While going down this path, I passed loads of bulbuls, and a massive flock of White-cheeked Laughingthrushes flew past right out in the open. Where at Lang Biang I had seen a few obscured in the undergrowth, here I saw a small army right in great view. A couple of striped squirrels chased each other around a tree too.



It turned out that I was now back on the path that my instructions described. The issue had been at a major fork, one branch went up into forest and the other went to a rubbish tip at the back of a second restaurant. The actual route, naturally, goes through the rubbish tip. I should have known. It's all good though. The birds don't know which trail is the official one for birding. The trails all seem to eventually rejoin one another or come out along an access road so as long as you note that if the lake is on your right you're going away and if it's on your left you're heading back, you can't really get lost.



I ended up having to make my own path through the pine forest, but I did reach the two branches of a stream described in the instructions. The water level was high indeed, but that's ok I can get wet. What was more of a concern was the group of four water buffalo. The broadleaf forest was directly across from the streams but also beyond a massive swampy area that I couldn't cross. So I backtracked again to take a different trail a bit further in from the lake shore. It's quite tough to work out the right trail, because the trails are also used by fishermen so th most well-trodden trail was generally not the right one.



The upshot of all this, apart from getting covered in scratches from the vegetation (I used my hand to cover my binoculars a d given how blooded my hand and wrist were, I doubt the binoculars would have fared well) was that it was rather late by the time I got to the main broadleaf forest. It didn't really matter because I'd been passing through pockets all day, but I think for my final day tomorrow, rather than trying another site on the otherwise of the lake I'll come back here.



As I was making my way along yet another track that I hoped would finally take me to the right place, I decided to stop for a bit of a rest. I was sat on a fallen log when all of a sudden, I heard something interesting coming towards me. I looked up and there was a flock of six Black-capped Parrotbills! This is a species I had really wanted to see, but didn't expect to because my understanding is they're super random and nomadic. But here they were, a decent sized group very active and out in the open. So showy in fact, that I was able to get some pretty good pictures. The vast majority of my Dalat bird pictures have been way too small and far away and in dense vegetation to be worth anything. Probably only about half a dozen species are anything beyond 'record shots' including the jay and - seemingly on the back of the camera at least - now the parrotbills. Really lovely birds. Similarly lovely to the only other parrotbills I've seen: Bearded Tits in Europe.



I was actually on the right trail when I saw the parrotbills and reached the main broadleaf forest at about 1. i.e. it took me six hours from taxi drop off to entering forest. It's about an hour walking directly, which is why I'll definitely be coming back to the same spot tomorrow.



In the forest, I was immidiately greeted by a wave of fantails, fulvettas and warblers. A good start. Of course with a taxi pickup arranged for 4:30, I only had about two hours in the main forest block, but that's ok because I'll have all day again tomorrow and the side patches of forest had most of my bird targets anyway. But from then, the trail was obvious and matched exactly my instructions. Bird waves here seemed incredibly numerous. Especially compared to yesterday but generally I was picking up one or two per hour. It's really good fun walking along with a bird wave and trying to pick out as many species as possible, including the occasional new species.



At one point the trail opened into a clearing on top of a hill. There were birds all along the forest edge of course (heaps of minivets), and I could see all around that I was no in a vast expanse of broadleaf forest with a view down to the pine forest dotted with broadleaf that I had been in all day. From the clearing I could also see across to another clearing on top of a distant hill. There were three people on top of it, and through my binoculars I could see that they had nets and large boxes. I'm quite sure they were bird trappers, poaching in the broadleaf forest.



You hear about how there's so much poaching pressure, but there they were. I assume they were not taking their pet nets and boxes for a walk through impenetrable forest. A group of bird poachers is definitely the last thing I want to come face to face with. I'm glad they were on a far off hill. Well I'd rather they weren't there at all of course. There was quite a lot of smoke from a fire coming from over one of the hills too. Quite a large fire it would seem, although it looked to be controlled.



Despite an inviting flock of Black-headed Sibias just across the clearing, time constraints meant I had to turn back pretty soon, especially as I didn't really know exactly how much time I needed to allow to walk directly back. When I passed back through the clearing, some fires had been set in the clearing opposite where the poachers had just been. It looked like they were clearing the scrub. As I crossed the clearing the fire got bigger and I could really hear the sound of burning vegetation very loudly. I really hope that fire was controlled. I'll find out tomorrow I suppose.



On the way back through the broadleaf forest, I added a Rufous-bellied Woodpecker and also saw a Yellow-throated Marten crash away from me through the trees. The latter is a mammal that I've been in range of throughout my time in Asia but hadn't seen on this trip until now (I'd seen it previously last year at Kaeng Krachan in Thailand). The Marten seemed quite closely followed by a Black Giant Squirrel. I'm not sure who was chasing who!



It took me only a little under an hour and a half to walk back, and having allowed just over two hours, I had a bit of a wait before the taxi was due to return. I was absolutely exhausted by this point though. I haven't been as tired as this in a very long time. My arms were absolutely covered in scratches too, the lantana especially stings when you get scratched and there was a thorny vine that was quite common. Today doesn't feel like it should have been quit that tiring, but I suppose I did cover a heck of a lot of ground in tough terrain. I had kind of been planning to visit the Crazy House when I got back which is a tourist attraction in Dalat. But yeah right. That was certainly not about to happen.



So I just sat in the car park for a while. Hence how I had time to write so much. A small number of tourists had appeared, but not all that many. There were a few people working there about too unlike this morning, although I had technically arrived before opening time. My boots are getting bad too. I can put my finger between the sole and the upper on my right boot and touch my socks. I think the left one will be that bad by tomorrow. It will be ok for the rest of the trip though. Tomorrow may be my last really intense hiking day.



Today's birding was wonderful though.



Lots of motorbikes came and went while I was waiting for the taxi to show up. I gave him twenty minutes. Then after half an hour, I decided he wouldn't be showing up. So I asked the car park guard to call and he couldn't get through and so I went down to the restaurant area and found someone to call a taxi. I should have just done that from the start. The taxi took a whole three minutes to arrive and I got one of the green ones which I have determines are the cheapest at 11500 per km out of I think five taxi companies in Dalat (green, gold, red, blue and white, just white).



I don't know why I've found today so tiring. When I got back I could hardly walk up the stairs, and I was perilously close to just skipping dinner because I couldn't be bothered. (I didn't in the end, having of course just had snacks for lunch I needed a proper meal). I'm extremely happy with today though. Great birding. Spending 300k on taxis does concern me slightly given that's roughly the same as my food and accommodation combined for a day, but the fact remains that 300k is less than £10.



New birds:

Brown Prinia

Rain Quail

Vietnamese Cutia

Annam Barbet

Grey Bushchat

Yellow-browed Tit

Grey-crowned Crocias

Yellow-billed Nuthatch

Orange-breasted Laughingthrush

Besra

Maroon Oriole

Slender-billed Oriole

Black-chinned Yuhina

Burmese Shrike (missed off)

Grey-capped Pygmy Woodpecker

Black-capped Parrotbill

Rufous-winged Fulvetta

White-bellied Erpornis (should already be on the list from Bukit Fraser but appears missed off)

Long-tailed Minivet

Rufous-bellied Woodpecker



Mammal
Yellow-throated Marten

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