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Published: March 27th 2017
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Yok Don National Park is in the west of Vietnam, on the border with Cambodia. There are still large mammals there apparently, things like banteng and elephants and tigers, but I was just going there for a quick look for birds. The big mammals, and also the really fancy birds like giant ibis, are right on the western side of the park in the forests which are off-limits or difficult to reach. But the dry dipterocarp forests near the HQ area are home to two birds I particularly wanted to see, the neglected nuthatch and the black-headed woodpecker, and the river right next to the HQ is home to the Mekong wagtail. I didn't actually put much effort into looking for the wagtail beyond checking out the banks and islands as I crossed the bridge into the park, so I never saw that one. I never saw the nuthatch either. But I
did see the woodpecker, and that's really the best-looking one of the three so that's okay.
The bus from Dalat to Buon Ma Thuot took six hours and cost 110,000 Dong. Most of the way was through hill country, some of it still covered in forest but mostly
just towns and cultivation. Yok Don National Park is about 25km outside Buon Ma Thuot and I knew there was a bus, coloured pink and green, which went out there. All the travel sites I had read said this bus leaves from Ly Thuong Kiet street in the middle of town. Figuring this was because most tourists are just going out there as a day trip, I hoped the bus might start its route at the main bus station where my Dalat bus was ending its ride. Sure enough, as my bus pulled into the station I saw a couple of pink and green buses sitting there. Unfortunately one left just as I arrived, but they seem to go every half an hour so I only had to wait until 4.30pm. It cost 19,000 Dong, which is just over NZ$1. The main bus station is a few kilometres from the centre, so the bus didn't get to Ly Thuong Kiet until 4.50pm, and it then took over an hour from there out to the park. At dead on 6pm I got dropped right at the gate of the park HQ.
I don't think many people actually stay at the park, but they have a lot of rooms available. The cheapest are 300,000 Dong which is a bit more than I like to pay but it's not that expensive and they are really nice rooms - hardly "basic" as one trip report called them. However meals at their restaurant are 100,000 Dong each so instead I ate at a little place right outside the gate where the meals only cost 30,000. I was a bit concerned about the cost of guiding here as well - 300,000 for two hours or 500,000 for a full day - but it turned out that a guide isn't a requirement as some bird reports had suggested, and they were quite happy for me to go in alone.
So at 6am the next morning I was heading across the bridge into the park. The entry ticket is 60,000 Dong, which you buy at the HQ reception, but there's nobody to check it and locals on motorbikes were going in and out all day long. Once you've crossed the bridge there is a concrete road running through the forest, and off the road there are numerous trails. Everything was bone-dry. It was so dry that the trails were covered in the pits of ant-lions. Normally you only see these under covered areas, where they are sheltered from rain.
I spent two hours out there, then at 8am went back for breakfast before heading back in again. The morning wasn't a huge success. I may have seen more with a guide, but I don't think being on foot changed anything. The forest is all the same, so it probably doesn't matter if you are close to the HQ or twenty kilometres away. Most of the birds seen were common species - hair-crested and greater racquet-tailed drongos, Indian rollers, lineated barbets, black-collared starlings, things like that. A couple of Asian barred owlets were cool; they are common but I don't see them every day. A pair of black bazas circling lazily overhead were even better. Lots of red-bellied squirrels as well.
The best bird was, of course, black-headed woodpecker. I saw a pair of them when I went back in after breakfast, and it is a truly spectacular woodpecker. And they were bookended by a common flameback and a pair of rufous woodpeckers. Three woodpeckers in a row is pretty cool.
A kilometre along the concrete road from the bridge is a junction with signs pointing to various tourist spots. I chose the rapids which were 4km away along a dirt road. I figured that way I could look for birds in the forest along the way and then the wagtails at the river. I never found the rapids. I walked for over two hours in total, past a ranger outpost where three dogs tested my mettle, and on and on and on. There are no signs along the roads so you really don't know where you are at. You could be a hundred metres from the place, or you could have missed a turn-off three kilometres back. Your only options are to keep walking and hope it is up ahead, or to give up and turn around.
At noon I decided that I had very obviously gone further than 4km - even allowing for the heat and looking at birds - so I stopped to eat some disgusting biscuits I had bought and then started back. Unfortunately I got hit by heat exhaustion, or something akin to it. I don't know what the temperature was out there but it was
hot and because the forest is so open there is no shade. The temperature was so high that the water in my bottle, inside my bag, was almost hot enough to make coffee with. I've only had this happen once before, in Samoa, and you really feel like you are about to die - which can happen. I got to the ranger outpost where this time there was no ranger to call the dogs off, but I carefully sat myself down and immediately the dogs stopped barking, started wagging their tails and then went to sleep. There was a water container there, and my bottle was almost empty, so I drank enough to drive the taste of death from my mouth. After resting for a while I set off, and the dogs jumped up and came after me barking angrily. Such weird animals, dogs. I didn't even stop for birds on the return walk, just concentrated on putting one foot after the other until I was back at the bridge. I don't want to walk anywhere any more.
Back at the HQ I went straight to sleep for the rest of the afternoon. At about 4.30pm a heavy rainstorm rolled through, which was a surprise given how dry everything was. Good thing I was already back by then though.
I only stayed for the two nights at Yok Don. It is probably very birdy there but I didn't see much, and I certainly didn't feel like going back in the forest again after yesterday. So the next morning I caught the pink and green bus back to the Buon Ma Thuot bus station, then another bus from there to Kon Tum, and finally one from there to Mang Den where I arrived at just before 7pm.
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