Ta Cu Nature Reserve

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I only spent one day (two nights) in Saigon and then made my way to my next primate-spot, Ta Cu Nature Reserve. Also spelled Ta Khou or Ta Kou, this is a mountain just south of Phan Thiet and is best known for having a Reclining Buddha at the top. The Buddha is the longest in Vietnam, and the longest on any mountain in Asia. It was only built in 1962 and is made of concrete painted white to look like marble. It is a popular tourist attraction, for both foreigners and Vietnamese, and so there's a cable-car going up to the monastery above which the Buddha lies.

In an earlier post I mentioned Andie Ang's Primate Watching website where I had found out about where to go for Indochinese silvered langurs at Chua Hang. Her website -see http://www.primatewatching.com/t-margarita - was also where I found out about Ta Cu, specifically with regards to the Annamese silvered langur for which she gaves a chance of three out of five for seeing there and the black-shanked douc with a chance of four out of five. I have actually seen both these species before - at Cat Tien National Park in 2015 - but I hadn't even come close to getting photos of the Annamese silvered langurs and I figured I may stand a much better chance at Ta Cu given that it is a tourist spot and the langurs would be more used to people (as with the Indochinese silvered langurs at Chua Hang). Andie says on her site that "the area right around the majestic Reclining Buddha is a good spot to see the langurs". Also she had seen a pigmy slow loris there, which was a species I had never seen.

I wasn't too sure how this part of the trip was going to go. Andie Ang mentioned there was accommodation on the mountain, but that was literally the only reference I could find about this when originally planning the trip. The day before going to Ta Cu I did another google search and found a tourism site which said that there was a dormitory up there which foreigners needed police permission to stay at, and also a guesthouse. Fingers crossed then!

From Pham Ngu Lao I caught a city bus (#93) to the Mien Dong bus station, and found a bus heading for Phan Thiet at 9am which cost 135,000 Dong (NZ$8.50). This unfortunately was another sleeper bus, but the ride was "only" four and a half hours. Along the way there were dragonfruit plantations. Dragonfruit is my favourite tropical fruit, but I'd never seen the plants the fruit comes from before. It is actually a kind of cactus with long strap-like stems cascading down from the top of a short thick trunk. It is like a cactus-version of a small palm tree. The plantations ranged from small holdings around houses to large multi-acre fields.

I was a bit unsure about the accuracy of there being a guesthouse on Ta Cu Mountain, given that I'd only been able to find a couple of passing mentions about it, so I had half-decided to just stay in a cheap room in Phan Thiet and catch the bus up to the mountain and back each day. It would mean I'd be paying for the cable-car every day but if there was a guesthouse up there it would probably be expensive, so staying in Phan Thiet may be the cheaper option. However it was only 1.30pm when I reached Phan Thiet, so I changed my mind and went straight to the mountain. I figured that if I got up there and found nowhere to stay, at least I could hang around until the end of the day to look for monkeys and then find somewhere in Phan Thiet in the evening. No problem.

I knew that local bus #4 went from Phan Thiet to Ta Cu, and that it left from outside the Lotte Mart. At the bus station they told me the Lotte Mart was 2km away but a motorbike to there would only cost 20,000 Dong (NZ$1.30) so off I went. On my return trip I discovered that the #4 runs along the road around the corner from the bus station, so I could literally have walked a minute or two and caught it there. I also discovered that while the turn off to Ta Cu Mountain is about 29km south of Phan Thiet, the bus from Saigon goes straight past that turn-off. You could easily get dropped off there and then it's only a kilometre or two to the entry gate for the mountain. You could walk it, get a motorbike, or just wait for the #4 bus to come along if you have a bunch of bags. There are also several guesthouses at that junction point.

From Phan Thiet the #4 bus took about 45 minutes or so, and cost 16,000 Dong (NZ$1). At the entry point I asked whether there was a guesthouse on the mountain. I was told there was not - but I could stay in the pagoda (i.e. the monastery) for free if the monks gave me permission. That sounded fine to me. It was about 3pm by this stage and the last bus back to town was at 5pm. The cable-car to the top only takes ten minutes, so even if I couldn't stay at the monastery I'd still have over an hour to look around and then come back the next day. The cable-car cost 80,000 Dong each way, and then the entry fee was 20,000 Dong. There was also a 20,000 Dong fee for a shuttle to the cable-car. I had read this was unnecessary because it was only a couple of hundred metres, but the lady at the desk never mentioned this additional fee (although it was written up on the fee signage), and when I went in the shuttle was free anyway. Maybe you pay it if you read the sign, and don't if you don't.

The bottom of the mountain was all scrubby secondary forest but this quickly changed as the cable-car rose higher, becoming tall thick forest with big old trees which looked perfect for doucs. At the top cable-car station there was a restaurant, sitting empty. It looked like it was just closed that day, but at the same time you could see that the kitchen and wait-area were empty. I read that it had closed because there were no customers. The next morning while wandering around this area I found the guesthouse underneath, the rooms - like the restaurant - looking like they could be used easily but clearly haven't been for some time. The beds had even had plastic covers put over them.

I headed along the track from the cable-car station to the pagoda, stopped for something to eat (two-minute noodles which, as I quickly discovered, was all there was to eat up there except biscuits!), and enquired with sign-language about staying the night there. The monks were happy to let me do so and showed me to where I could sleep, a room empty apart for a mattress on the floor and a frog. I stayed two nights and on the second morning there was the addition of a couple of small rats. I'm not sure which species they were. Their tails weren't long enough for them to be juvenile black rats, but they didn't look like brown rats either. They may be one of the local Vietnamese rats. They were quite comfortable running right around my feet without fear, but as soon as I got out my camera they suddenly went all shy and I only got one photo.

From the pagoda there are some steps leading further up the mountain through the forest past various Buddha statues until you come to the very impressive Reclining Buddha. Forty-nine metres long and pure white. The same colour as Moby Dick but twice as long. The forest behind and around the Buddha is where I was hoping to see my langurs, however despite the abundance of fruiting fig trees there was little activity from birds and no sign of any monkeys at all. I stayed up there until evening. It got very windy later in the afternoon, but more birds came out, including a group of large woodshrikes and lots of blue-eared barbets. The next couple of days there was also a flock of yellow-vented green pigeons with long pointed tails and bright blue bills, feeding in one of the fig trees. I spent some time spotlighting after dark. It wasn't much fun in the strong winds, especially when you hear a branch crashing to the ground somewhere nearby, but I scored one good mammal when a spotted giant flying squirrel came gliding right past me, landed on a tree trunk and paused there for a minute before squeezing into a hole which looked too small to admit a large rat let alone a giant-sized squirrel. In a mammal survey of the reserve which I had found online (which I cannot re-find now) small-toothed palm civets are common up here. I was therefore expecting to see those, especially given all the figs in fruit, but I didn't see anything else at night there except that one flying squirrel.

One curious observation at night, when looking down from the mountain across the lowlands, is that there are all these huge rectangles covered in rows of lights. I couldn't imagine what these would possibly be. The best I could come up with was rice fields, with lights to keep the rice growing faster, but I knew there were no rice fields in this area because it is too dry. It wasn't until I left the mountain and was on the bus back to Phan Thiet that I realised they were the dragonfruit plantations! Each row of plants has strings of electric lights running alongside. Because a lot of cactus are pollinated by moths I figured the lights might be to attract moths. But I just googled it while writing this and in fact it is because the plants require short nights and long days to fruit effectively, so they give them a longer "day-time" to get a longer harvest period throughout the year.

Early next morning I was back up at the Buddha. It gets light here well before 6am but I was awake before then. The thing with staying in a Buddhist monastery is that they are chanting and banging gongs late into the night and then start again at 4am in the morning. Not suited for those people who complain about Muslim mosques starting up at 5am! There was a lot more wildlife around in the early morning. All around the area of the Buddha were Berdmore's ground squirrels. I had only seen my first one at Kaeng Krachan in Thailand a month ago, but here I gave up counting them after I reached seven because by then I couldn't tell which ones I had already counted. This must surely be the very best place to see this species of squirrel. There were also Pallas' (red-bellied) squirrels in the trees, and in the afternoon I saw a Cambodian striped squirrel as well.

The ground squirrels all disappear as soon as the tourists starting arriving, between 7am and 8am. I did see one squirrel at about 5pm but otherwise only in the early morning. Most of the foreign tourists don't spend more than four or five minutes at the Buddha. They just take a couple of photos and then go back down. Considering a lot of them must come from Mui Ne (the beach resort area further on from Phan Thiet) that's about a four-hour round-trip just to look at the Buddha for a couple of minutes! I guess the short length of time the tourists spend here explains why the guesthouse is no longer operating, and I suppose they are all up here for so short a time that they don't need to eat so the restaurant is redundant too.

Most of the foreign tourists are Russians, which was a surprise to me. They are everywhere! I had no idea Vietnam was such a big destination for Russians. Even the signage at all the tourist spots is trilingual in Vietnamese, English and Russian. A lot of them are on tours too, all lead by a girl in short shorts or a little skirt with a head-set giving a commentary in Russian. I actually saw one of these girls smile at one point, which for a Russian must be like an American burning the flag or an Englishman punching the Queen in the face.

Today turned out to be a good monkey day though, despite the presence of Russians. In the morning a troop of crab-eating macaques came out of the forest onto the platform with the three statues which sits halfway up the slope between the pagoda and the Reclining Buddha. This seems to be where they often hang out, waiting on people coming up to feed them. I was at the Buddha all day, mostly just watching the tourists come and go, but at around 3pm when there was nobody there but me, a small group of black-shanked doucs showed up. They were some distance off - not too far but not too close - and I inadvertantly scared them off trying to move closer across the slope of boulders which lies next to the Buddha. I had not expected them to be that shy here. The only photos I got were the initial ones which showed them as dots in a tree. At 5pm a long way off across the canopy I spotted some Annamese silvered langurs jumping between the trees. And I mean a LONG way off! If this was the first time I'd ever seen them I wouldn't have counted them, but for the purposes of seeing as many Vietnamese primates as possible on this trip, that'll do for now. Maybe I'll see them again at Cat Tien.

I'm not sure I'd recommend Ta Cu as the place to see black-shanked doucs. I think that while you may see them well at Ta Cu, a much better bet would be Cat Tien in my experience. Conversely, while I only saw the silvered langurs at a far distance at Ta Cu, I think you'd be more likely to eventually get much better views here (if they came near the Buddha area) than at Cat Tien where everyone seems to agree they are difficult to find. In either case I would still recommend visiting Ta Cu because it is a lovely bit of forest, albeit without any real trails (there is one up the mountain which you can take instead of the cable-car), and most especially if you really wanted to see Berdmore's ground squirrels!

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