Cat Tien National Park

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As previously mentioned I have been to Vietnam once before, in 2015. On that trip I started at Cat Tien National Park which is not far from Saigon, and I had travelled to the park the only way I knew of. First I caught a Dalat-bound tourist bus from Saigon's backpacker district of Pham Ngu Lao, getting dropped off at the town of Tan Phu, and then took a motorbike-taxi the rest of the way. This combination cost me 320,000 Dong. But when going back to Saigon I discovered that there is a local bus which runs directly between the park and Saigon's Mien Dong bus station. I think this may have been a fairly recent development at that stage because whereas I hadn't read about the existence of this bus previously, now that information is easily available. I was charged 120,000 Dong for the ticket at the park's counter by the river (on the opposite side to the park HQ itself) but assumed it was much less in reality because it seemed like the locals were paying around 80,000 or so.

So with all that in mind, on this trip I didn't bother with the over-pricing and hassles of the tourist bus-motorbike combo. Instead I went straight to the Mien Dong station, where I discovered that the bus ticket is just 71,000 Dong - almost half of what the park charged me in 2015. I think the bus goes every three hours because I got there at about 9am and the next bus wasn't until 10.30 (the previous ones being at 4.50am and 7.40am). Curiously, the bus going in the opposite direction, from Cat Tien to Saigon, runs every hour. I have no idea how that works! Also curiously, at the park I was told the return trip would be 80,000 - so either they got rumbled for their over-charging or I was just scammed on my first trip. Interestingly, that same lady also told me the direct bus from Cat Tien to Dalat (there's only one, at 6.30am) would cost me 160,000, but in the park HQ they told me 150,000. Does the lady just pocket the extra cash herself?

The day before I went I emailed the park to book a room in the Pheasant building. These are the cheapest rooms at 200,000 Dong for a fan-room, or 250,000 for A/C. The most expensive rooms go up to 1.1 million Dong. Checking their list of accommodations when I arrived at reception I see they also have dorms at 80,000 per person (but they need a minimum number of occupants) and a campsite where a tent costs you 200,000. The rooms in the Pheasant building have a shared bathroom so they don't seem to be offered to tourists unless you specifically ask for them. There was a dead bat on the bathroom floor when I arrived. Although really a dead bat is about the second best thing I could hope to find on a bathroom floor.

It takes about four hours to get to the park from Saigon, and it also took a while to accomplish all the checking-in and so forth when I arrived, so I didn't get out birding until 4pm. Still, in those last two hours of the day I saw quite a few birds including three species of drongo - first a hair-crested drongo alone in a tree-top, and then a mixed feeding-flock with lots of bronzed drongos and at least one greater racquet-tailed drongo, as well as a racket-tailed treepie which basically looks like an all-black magpie with a tail shaped like a spoon. Other nice birds were moustached parakeets, a white-browed piculet (a sparrow-sized orange woodpecker), and a pale-headed woodpecker. On the mammal front I saw a slender-tailed tree shrew by pure chance. I saw one last time I was here too, also by chance. They are tiny wee things and seem to live mainly in the stands of giant bamboo, so they are very difficult to find if specifically looking for them.

The park does night drives every evening. The largest of the trucks they use seats up to 36 people (!) - I was told that the night before it was full, it being a Saturday. For one or two people the night drive costs 460,000; for three to five people, 170,000; for six to eight people, 150,000; and so on downwards. The drive goes for a few kilometres along the road from the HQ which leads through grasslands and then comes back. It's not long, maybe 45 minutes, but last time I was here I saw a herd of gaur and an Indochinese hare, so I thought I'd try it out again. There were six people going, so it cost me 150,000. The drives are basically for tourists who don't see wild animals normally, and they always think it's great. For me, that's not always the case. The spotlight guy spoke pretty much no English. About the highest level of information you can expect on the drives is "deer", an identification which is pretty unnecessary to anybody over the age of three. On this trip all that was seen were several common muntjac, a lot of sambar, and a few common palm civets briefly. I've seen hundreds of sambar and muntjac so they're not exactly exciting any more. But the thing with night drives is that you never know what might be seen, so they are worth doing. Afterwards I went out along the road for a couple of kilometres in the other direction, through the forest, and found nothing.

It gets light here at about 5.30am. I was out first thing in the morning because I could hear buff-cheeked gibbons singing. Last time I was at Cat Tien I saw a family of gibbons in the trees right by the accommodation buildings, probably attracted by captive gibbons in the cages for rescue animals behind. I therefore hadn't been anticipating any difficulty in seeing the gibbons this trip, and so it proved. They were, as before, just swooping around in the tree-tops whooping their lungs out. An easy addition to the Vietnamese primate total. Today turned out to be a very good mammal day all round actually, with eleven species seen in total.

After breakfast I walked the road for 9km to the Crocodile Lake trail. The trail has a separate entry fee of 200,000 Dong which I'm sure is a recent development. Anyway, I had been to the lake on my last visit and so didn't feel the need to pay to go there again. It meant I'd miss a good number of water birds but they'd all be species I've seen before anyway. Instead I just looked for birds and mammals in the forest along the roadside. Over the course of the day I saw six or seven groups of black-shanked doucs, although they are so shy that I only got good clear views of a couple of them. There was also a possible Annamese silvered langur but it left so fast and the view was so brief that it could have been a douc as well. A lone pig-tailed macaque also had to be left as a "probable" when it disappeared as soon as I saw it. To add to the catalogue of "maybes" were three separate road-crossers which were most likely Berdmore's ground squirrels because apparently I just see those everywhere now.

Not all the mammals were so unreasonably fast though. There were easily identifiable wild pigs, common muntjacs, red-bellied squirrels and Cambodian striped squirrels, but best of all of them was a crab-eating mongoose casually crossing the road. In the late afternoon along this road, the red junglefowl and Germain's peacock-pheasants come out to forage in the grass on the sides. I had only seen my first peacock-pheasants at Kaeng Krachan about a month ago (they were grey peacock-pheasants) so it was great seeing my second species, especially because the one I saw was right out in the open in full view. I stayed near the trailhead until dusk and then walked back to the HQ in the dark to see what I could find, but literally the only result was the eyeshine of a lesser mouse deer which left before I could see it. In fact apart for the animals seen on the night drive, that mouse deer was the only animal I saw at night while in the park. I had been particularly looking for pigmy slow lorises but (not unexpectedly) I completely failed to find any.

The following morning I went to the grasslands instead of the forest. In the earlier stretches of the road near the HQ are some stands of giant bamboo, in which I saw a northern tree shrew. A bit later there was what was almost certainly a small Asian mongoose darting across the road but it was gone before I could even start to lift my binoculars. The birds were all the usual suspects. Racket-tailed treepies are very common round here; I saw many of them every day. A noisy flock of white-crested laughing-thrushes distracted me for a while, and there were also green imperial pigeons, Oriental pied hornbills, a common flameback woodpecker and other such fare.

There was a heavy rainstorm in the late afternoon which curtailed activity somewhat, but afterwards I went back out along the road to the forest. Not far from HQ I saw a macaque in a tree, mostly hidden amongst the foliage as the monkeys here usually are. My immediate thought was "pig-tailed macaque" because it was too large for a crab-eating macaque, and was a rich brown colour which is completely unlike the crab-eaters' greyish colour. But then it walked across a branch in the open, just briefly but enough for me to see that it had a short thick tail which came only halfway to its feet. This completely baffled me. The macaques in south Vietnam are the pig-tailed macaque, which has a very short curled tail like a pig; the crab-eating (aka long-tailed) macaque which has a very long thin tail; and the stump-tailed macaque which is much larger, mostly terrestrial, and has no tail at all. I was scratching my head even more when two younger macaques came following the larger macaque across the branch because these were very clearly crab-eating macaques. The best idea I had was that it was a big old male which had lost part of its tail. I wasn't happy with it, but what else could it be? The macaques disappeared behind the bamboo stands, and I stayed in the area watching for birds. After a while I saw the strange macaque again, passing over the road in the bamboo. I saw it better this time and it was most definitely not a crab-eating macaque, but yet also most definitely not a pig-tailed macaque. I was still puzzled but not for long because I suddenly remembered something I had read when planning for the first trip I made to Vietnam in 2015. Rhesus macaques, which are found naturally in the northern half of Vietnam, have been introduced to various places in the south of the country including Cat Tien (here they were confiscated animals released into the park by wildlife officers), and they have started hybridising with the native crab-eating macaques. I saw loads of rhesus macaques in India so I should have picked it straight away, but it just wasn't in my head as a possibility for here. More of the troop was following the rhesus across the bamboo bridging the road and while most were typical crab-eating macaques, some were larger than they should be and with only half-length tails (i.e. longer than the tail of a rhesus but shorter than the tail of a normal crab-eating macaque). I think these latter ones must have been hybrid animals.

In the evening I was in the park's Yellow Bamboo restaurant ordering my dinner, when the chap in the neighbouring table turned around and asked "Do you speak Vietnamese?"
"No," I said .
"Oh, I just heard strange guttural sounds and thought you must have been speaking Vietnamese"
"No, it'll just be my accent."
"Are you Australian?"
"New Zealand"
"Are you Israel?"

It turned out he was Peter Ericsson who is a well-known Swedish birder who lives in Thailand. I had met him back in 2006 in Malaysia but we hadn't met since. He motioned at his birding companion and said "I was just telling him about a guy I know who writes blogs where half the blog is just on how to get to the place".

I spent the final two days on the trails inside the forest near the HQ. The roads are easier when birding - you just walk and scan the trees ahead and above, whereas visibility is much reduced inside the forest - but there are various birds and mammals which you are not as likely to see on the roads. Oddly I did not encounter a single leech the whole time I was at Cat Tien, even with the afternoon rainstorms on the last three days of my stay. I tried spotlighting in the forest on the trails as well, but the foliage was just too thick. During the day you can see well enough but at night all you see are the closest trees of the understorey.

Amongst the more usual species when I was on the trails by day there was a couple of orange-breasted trogons (always worth seeing) and a female gibbon swinging through the canopy. Best animal of the trails was also up in the canopy. I just saw the movement and assumed it would be another red-bellied squirrel. However I always check squirrels out, just in case, and this was just as well because the animal was actually a yellow-throated marten. Although it was quite high up I even managed to get some crappy photos of it. Later in the day I saw what was presumably the same animal, running through the forest on the ground. A black giant squirrel made the twentieth species of mammal I saw at Cat Tien.

On my first visit to Cat Tien in 2015 I spent NZ$230 in five days, including transport to and from Saigon (an average of c.NZ$46 per day). This visit was cheaper at NZ$184 for five days (NZ$36.80 per day average). I'm not sure why it wasn't a lot cheaper than that though, because I stayed in a 200,000 room the whole time whereas last time the first night was in a 480,000 room, then two nights at Crocodile Lake which is 350,000 per night (plus I had to pay for transport to the trailhead), then only two nights in the 200,000 room. Also getting to the park from Saigon cost me 320,000 last time whereas this time was only 71,000. The return bus to Saigon last time was 120,000 and this time it was to Dalat for 150,000 so about the same. There was one night drive on each visit, costing 170,000 the first visit and 150,000 on the second. And as well as all that the exchange rate is better now - in 2015 it was about 14,500 Dong to one NZ dollar and now it is just under 16,000.

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