End of Vietnam

---

I was leaving Bach Ma for Danang today - my second-to-last day in Vietnam - and had decided to walk down the mountain to the HQ rather than pay for a car. Bad idea. A very very bad idea.

It had seemed like a good plan in my head. Firstly it would save me a lot of money. Secondly I could look out for doucs along the way. Thirdly I could easily stop off at the Pheasant Trail on the way. It was all downhill to the HQ and 16km is an easy walk. Maybe three hours tops. Not a problem.

The first hour was a doddle. I was still high up so the temperature was amicable and the sun hadn't come over the mountains yet. The next three hours however, not so much. Lower down the temperature was back up in the high thirties, the sun directly overhead, not a lick of shade, and worst of all the road was made of pale grey concrete off which the sun's heat just bounced straight back upwards like a furnace. It became a gruelling death-march, if such a thing existed in Vietnam. Almost at the bottom, at about km6, I met a group of local tourists doing the walk up - crazy people - they already looked like they weren't going to make it. I'd hate to think how long it eventually took them, if it took me almost four hours coming down!

Before that though, when the idea still seemed non-suicidal, I had passed the English-speaking guy from my villa, a few kilometres down from the summit coming back up from the village on his motorbike with more beer for the retaurant. He said he had just seen a troop of doucs further down the road. They were gone before I got to see them. I didn't pay a lot of attention to birds on the way down, noting only Puff-throated Bulbuls, Dark-necked Tailorbird, and what I think was a Mountain Hawk-eagle. Also a Black Giant Squirrel and a cool black Tiger Beetle looking like some humungous killer ant as it patrolled the road.

The Pheasant Trail is at about the 8.5km mark. It starts with a steep set of steps, but once up them you find that the trail goes downhill. There were masses of mosquitoes but no leeches at all, the complete opposite of the summit trails. There were also none of the silver-legged harvestmen. The trail is 3km long but I only did half of it, partly because there was literally not a single bird to be seen and partly because I knew I was going to have to be walking uphill all the way back to the road which did not appeal to me at this stage of the day! It looked like it should be good for an early morning visit though, so next time I'll try for that.

When I finally reached the HQ, I got a motorbike the last three kilometres to the highway, and almost immediately got picked up by a bus bound for Danang (two hours, 55,000 Dong). There had been an Italian guy going to the highway on a motorbike at the same time as me, so naturally we ended up on the same bus, and equally naturally ended up sitting next to each other - because our legs were too long for us to sit anywhere except in the two seats right by the door. Part way through the journey he is chatting away about something-or-other when suddenly his eyes almost popped out of his head and he yelps "Holy Cow! There's a massive bug on your back!" (He actually did say "Holy Cow"). He and a Vietnamese guy sitting on the other side both swatted away at it and apparently it went out the door. I was just disappointed that I didn't even get to see it. For all I know it could have been living on my back for days. It could have been a Time Beetle. The Italian guy said it looked like a beetle but "this big" (holding his thumb and forefinger apart) and it had claws (holding his hands up like a dinosaur). I guess it was a stag beetle. A whip scorpion would have been cool though. Yeah, but he was freaked out. "I'm ready to get off this bus now!!" he said.

In Danang I got a city bus to the Han Market where there were supposed to be cheap hotels. There were not. I spent quite a long time wandering around, finding rooms ranging from 300,000 to 2,000,000 but nothing less. Eventually I ended up back at the very first hotel I had gone into, the Thoi Dai, because the girl at reception gave me a good offer.

It was about 4pm by this stage, so I had a shower and changed my sweat-drenched mountain clothes - how the heck can a person lose that much water from their body and not keel over as a dessicated husk?! Then I took off for Nui Son Tra, a forest-covered peninsula on the edge of town, for my last shot at finding Red-shanked Doucs.

In one morning in 1819 a ship's crew in Danang shot over 100 doucs at Son Tra before breakfast. During the American War the US soldiers in Danang used doucs as target practice and captured them alive in order to torture them to death for amusement. Surprisingly, in light of these sorts of depredations, Son Tra is still home to doucs and it is supposed to be a reliable place to see them.

Unfortunately the guy I got to take me there on a motorbike was one of those ones you end up with sometimes where instead of doing what you want them to do, does what he thinks you ought to want to do. First we went to a beach. I said no. Then he needed petrol so we went in the opposite direction. At the petrol station I made it clear, again, that we were going up to the top of the peninsula. This he attempted to accomplish by driving around the coastal road instead of, you know, up the road which goes to the top of the peninsula! Once I finally got up to the top it was extremely difficult to get him to not drive at top speed around the roads. The upshot of it all was that I did not see any Red-shanked Doucs nor, indeed, even any of the macaques which are supposed to be swarmingly common up there (I have read both Rhesus and Assamese Macaques live there and I have never seen wild Assamese Macaques before, so the trip was a double failure).

No-one else was seeing any monkeys either, so it wasn't just me. A Dutch guy saw me with my binoculars and came over to ask if I could tell him where all the monkeyes were. Sadly, I could not.

---