Dalat birds, part one

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Dalat is an interesting little city. From a distance - up on the hills from where you can see the whole town - it is actually quite big with a lot of high-rise sort of buildings, but when you are in the middle of it the feel is more of a small hill station. Some buildings look typically Vietnamese, some are obviously old French colonial, and then there are the newer ones which are just kitschy and quirky, like the town is just messing with visitors. Apart for all the tourists everywhere it is a very pleasant place. I could have just stayed there quite happily for the whole rest of my trip.

My bus from Cat Tien dropped me right in the centre of Dalat. I saw a couple of hotels on the road above so headed up that way and walked along the street asking at each one until I found the cheapest one, the Nam Chau at 150,000 per night. I'd recommend this hotel. It's cheap, clean, friendly. However there's not really much English spoken and the other guests are mainly Vietnamese or Chinese, so if you're after socialising with backpackers then it wouldn't be your sort of place.

Then I went to find some food because all I had eaten since 6am were a few bananas and it was now midday. I settled into a nearby restaurant and ordered something cheap. While waiting for that to arrive I perused the menu for future reference and decided I wouldn't eat there again. I like my wild animals to remain alive and uncooked, not poached. There were various preparations of softshell turtles which was just sad because I like softshell turtles when they are alive. Then there were frogs which were also sad but not as sad because the photo didn't really look like frogs whereas the turtles were literally whole steamed or fried turtles sitting on a plate. Presumably because they have soft shells you can just eat the entire animal.

Roasted sparrows were novel, and there were several pigeon dishes (including pigeon porridge) plus more regular wildlife like wild boar and deer, and all sorts of different interesting fish and shellfish. But then I found grilled and stir-fried porcupine which put me completely off the place, followed by the strangest of all, weasel steamed with lemongrass. Seriously, who eats weasels? A bit later I discovered that Dalat is the centre for Vietnam's production of "weasel coffee" which uses farmed civets to produce their version of kopi luwak, so I suppose the weasels on the menus are ex-farm ones and not hunted ones.

The one dish I was most intrigued by, though, went by the name "Pourred Greasy On Chicken".

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There are three main sites for birding in the Dalat area, all 10km or so outside town: Ho Tuyen Lam (forest around a reservoir), Ta Nung (forest around a village), and Mt. Lang Biang (forest on a mountaintop). Today was Friday and I had read that Mt. Lang Biang gets very busy on weekends because it is the main tourist attraction, so I decided to visit Ho Tuyen Lam on Saturday and Ta Nung on Sunday.

It was around midday when I got into Dalat, so for starters I just had a wander around the nearby lake. The big park next to the lake which I had seen on Google maps turned out to be a golf-course so I just walked round the outside of that, not being allowed inside. Over the lake I saw a white-bellied sea eagle, an osprey, and some house swifts. Along the edges I found a common kingfisher and a Chinese pond heron coming into breeding colours (all the other pond herons I'd seen so far were in non-breeding plumage when you can't tell the species apart). And in the trees by the golf-course were lots of Burmese shrikes.

At 6am the next morning I got a taxi out to Ho Tuyen Lam, which took about twenty minutes and cost 170,000. The taxis in Dalat are all metered, and are between 11,000 and 15,500 Dong per kilometre, so you don't need to do any bargaining because any price you agree on will probably be more than the meter anyway. Having said that, the taxi back from Ho Tuyen Lam only cost me 130,000. I found out a little later that each taxi company has different rates (printed on the side of the vehicle) and my original ride had been with the moist expensive company!

Ho Tuyen Lam is the name of the reservoir itself. It is a huge artificial lake caused by flooding a valley, and instead of being a nice orderly lake it is like a jagged forked-lightening bolt with spiky arms snaking off in all directions. The shores are covered in native pine forests but higher up on the hills is broadleafed forest. The point to get to for birding is the Da Tien Restaurant at the bottom southeast corner. This is right at the end of the road and appears to be a crumbling "resort" with tumbledown huts called Khu Du Lich Da Tien (Khu Du Lich means something like "tourist area"). In a strategic error I did not arrange for the taxi to either wait or to return to pick me up. This was largely because I didn't know how long I would be here for, and secondly because I wrongly assumed that because there was a restaurant there then there would surely be some sort of transport available - or at least other visitors who I could get a ride with. This was wrong on both counts, but it worked out fine in the end.

I had read a few reports on birding here, and it sounded like the smaller trails may be difficult to find with local guides but the main trails were easy enough. There should also be birds everywhere in abundance. Hmm, no, not today. This was one of the worst birding days I have had for a long time. I mean, I often write something along the lines of birding being poor on a particular day but it is all relative. Today really was poor. Also it turned out that the trail I was on wasn't the main one which I thought it was, so that may have been part of the reason too. However the bird I absolutely wanted to see here was the Vietnamese red crossbill which is a type of finch with the two parts of the beak crossed over like mangled secateurs, and I saw several of these birds so I can't complain too much! They are awesome birds, and much larger than I had been expecting. They join the "birds with weird beaks" which I have seen, alongside such characters as wrybills, skimmers, and openbill storks.

The reason I ended up on the wrong trail was just a simple memory lapse. The account I had in mind said the start-point was the parking spot for the restaurant (which is down a little foot-track from where you park). Right at the parking spot there's a trail heading up the hill through the pine forest, so I took that. What the report had actually said was that the start-point was the parking spot but that the trail itself begins after going through all the huts past the restaurant. Anyway, I went on up the hill. The trail was very clear, but birds were not swarming all around me as it seemed they should have been from all the reports I'd read. A couple of black-collared starlings flew past, there were some Burmese shrikes, sooty-headed bulbuls and lots of grey bushchats, but that was it. After a few minutes I came out onto a road. A brand new road. It was still being built in parts higher up so it had a perfect tarseal but no vehicles except the occasional motorbikes of the workers. The trail continued on the other side but because the road is winding up the hill it kept continually cutting across the trail - and being cut out of the hillside meant that more often than not there were high banks on the upper side meaning the trail became difficult and then impossible to access. I ended up just walking along the road itself. Where the broadleafed forest started above the pine zone, I couldn't find any trails at all. I think the new road has just destroyed all the old trail higher up and it has overgrown and disappeared.

I did see some nice birds despite the lack of numbers. While still in the pine zone I saw the first pair of crossbills and watched them foraging amongst the pine-cones for some time. A white-throated fantail, some ashy drongos, and pairs of green-backed tits were next. Then in a tree above one of the workers' make-shift tent-accommodation I spied a small flock of Vietnamese greenfinches accompanied by a grey-capped pigmy woodpecker and another (or the same) pair of crossbills. In the last section of pines before the broadleafed forest, I saw my first ever cutia which is a relative of laughing thrushes but looks sort of like a cross between a shrike and a cuckoo. Really the three main birds I wanted here were the crossbill as mentioned, and then the greenfinch and cutia, so it actually was a successful day on that count.

Right where the broadleafed forest began, a pair of yellow-throated martens went hurtling off one tree into the canopy of a lower tree as if they were monkeys, and disappeared. The only other mammals seen today were a giant squirrel and a slender-tailed tree shrew. I didn't really see any birds in this stretch of forest. I could hear plenty but the vegetation was too thick along the roadside and there were no trails for access. Higher up the forest reverted to pine, and then the road just ended. Perfect seal and then just grass and pines on a steep drop-off. It was like they just kept building and sealing without looking ahead, and then went "oops, can't put any more road here, we'll have to go do it somewhere else". I headed back down, and this time in the broadleafed forest patch I saw an Annam barbet, and then a little birdy area with a chestnut-vented nuthatch, Mrs Gould's sunbird, lesser racquet-tailed drongo, and verditer flycatcher.

I figured I'd go back to the restaurant area and see if I could find the other trail from there. The whole complex looked dejected and abandoned. There was an elephant standing at a platform with a seat strapped on its back for rides for the non-existent visitors. Nearby a crab-eating macaque was chained to a tree. I stopped at the restaurant, which seemed to be barely open. Their menu was a tad overpriced. Even the fried rice was 150,000 Dong, about three or four times what it should cost. I asked for the mixed vegetables which was the cheapest thing there at 70,000 Dong. They brought me out a plate of lettuce with some sliced tomato on top. I gave up on the day and they rang a taxi. I had asked if someone there could give me a ride back on one their motorbikes but apparently all the staff sitting around doing nothing were busy. I was concerned that I was going to be paying a princely sum for the taxi pick-up but, in contrast to the norm in Asia, the driver didn't start the meter running until I got in the car and it only cost 130,000 back to the hotel.

So it was a bit of a good but mostly not-so-good morning in terms of the birding. With my afternoon now free I visited the Crazy House which is a fantastic place. I totally recommend it if in Dalat. The house is a series of mutant tree-like structures with rabbit-warrens of narrow corridors and over-bridges and bolt-holes, and it really defies verbal or written description. It is like if M. C. Escher drew up the designs and then passed them over for completion to Lewis Carroll when he was high on goofballs. It is the strangest and most mind-bending example of architecture ever. The lady who created it was taught architecture in Russia which may or may not explain the result. The entry fee is only 40,000 Dong but they must be raking it in because there would have been at least a hundred people there just on my visit. There were selfie-sticks everywhere. Have people got so lazy and stupid that they can no longer even hold a camera or phone properly? Aaaaand, most of them were Russians. Three tour buses of them, plus all the individual ones. Almost every white person there seemed to be Russian. Are there even any Russians left in Russia?

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Sunday was supposed to be for going to Ta Nung. This is the name of a village about 20km from Dalat and I think also the name for the area or valley in which the village is situated. It seemed like the directions to the best bird sites there are kind of vague so I wasn't confident of finding the right place. But that didn't matter because when I came back from Ho Tuyen Lam yesterday I was googling some information about the sites and found a birder's blog from last month where he said that the Ta Nung area is closed off at the moment due to road construction. Found that out just in time! So I changed my plan for Sunday to the Datanla Falls which I only found about yesterday, on that same blog I think. I saw it on two blogs, one saying that this tourist spot 5km from Dalat was the most birdy place he encountered in Vietnam, and the other saying he had read that first blog so went there himself and saw lots of birds just by sitting in the balcony restaurant there.

Instead of a taxi I caught a local bus to Datanla for just 10,000 Dong (about a tenth of what the taxi would probably have cost). The mini-station from which the bus leaves is just up the road from my hotel, about five minutes walk. I don't know how often they go - I got there at 6.45am and the bus left at 7am. It took almost half an hour to get to there because, well, it's a local bus and not a taxi. Apart for the waterfall in the name, Datanla Falls is also a major "thrill park" with a luge and obstacle course and abseiling and white-water and dead English people. The entry fee is 30,000 Dong but you then pay extra if you want to do any of the other activities. I knew it was going to be busy, being Sunday, but when I arrived there was just one tour bus there and no people to be seen.

The entry gate is just beside the restaurant. As you head down the steps, on your left is broadleafed forest and on your right pine forest. These aren't actually "forest" because they aren't large areas, but they ultimately are connected to all the forest in the surrounding countryside so from the birds' point of view they still count. The area just past the gate was supposedly the very birdy area. Hmm, no, not today. Again! I saw a cutia here which was cool, but otherwise there was very very little about. The best animal was a maritime striped squirrel which was the one-hundredth mammal species I have seen on this trip. All the people started arriving not long after I did; afternoons must be packed. It seems like the standard thing to do is to walk all the way down to the waterfall (that is where all the people from the tour bus were when I first arrived), and then go back up and either sit in the restaurant or do the luge. I didn't bother with the waterfall - I've seen water before - so did what the birder in the second blog did and went and sat in the restaurant. There were so many birds visible I forgot to yawn. No seriously, there were none. Not a one.

I walked back to town rather than wait for a bus (one had gone by just as I was coming out). Datanla is supposed to be five or six kilometres from Dalat but that can't be right. It only took me half an hour to walk to the main bus station which is on the outskirts of the town, and then another twenty minutes to the city centre. Having the big lake in the middle of town certainly helps for orientation because as soon as you see it you know where you are in relation to where you want to go.

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Photos

Dalat's Eiffel Tower
or maybe just a telecommunication tower