Not Hating Langurs

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The final Vietnamese park which I would be re-visiting from my 2015 trip is Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park. After this I'm going further north than I did before. As in 2015 my sole reason for coming to Phong Nha is primates. The main species I wanted to try and see was the Hatinh Langur which is one of the black and white "Francois' Langur group", a group of closely-related Indochinese leaf monkeys which are restricted to the remnant forests in limestone karst country. Hence they are also collectively known as "limestone langurs". All of the six or seven species in this group spend their days in the forest feeding and retire at night to sleep in crevices or small caves on sheer cliff-faces to escape predators.

Phong Nha is basically the only place left where you can hope to find Hatinh langurs in the wild. Poaching still a problem - obviously, this being Vietnam. This news article from 2015 mentions at the bottom about poachers being caught at Phong Nha-Ke Bang with thirteen Hatinh langur skins (http://vietnamnews.vn/environment/268719/poachers-caught-at-phong-nha-ke-bang-national-park.html#U0U9AWRWMQJj8d8D.97) and this one from 2016 is about four Hatinh langurs being found at a police traffic stop and mentions at the bottom another poacher being caught coming out of Phong Nha-Ke Bang with a smoked Hatinh langur (http://www.eprc.asia/frozen-endangered-hatinh-langurs/).

In theory seeing the langurs should be fairly straightforward because I knew there was a troop which slept on the cliffs just by the Dark Cave on the western side of the park. They do move around of course, sleeping on different cliffs at different times, but overall it should just be a matter of waiting there in the late afternoon or early morning until you see them. In 2015 this didn't work out so well, and it was so hot then (in August) that I only lasted two days.

From Bach Ma National Park I caught a Hanoi-bound bus which dropped me off three and a half hours later outside Dong Hoi, from which I took a local bus for about an hour and a half to the village of Phong Nha (aka Son Trach) which sits on the north-eastern edge of the park. Last time I stayed at a hotel called the Binh Minh. This time I stayed at the Thien Thanh Hotel which is a bit cheaper, the owner Bong giving me a room for 200,000 as opposed to the 250,000 most of the other hotels were asking. There are also numerous hostels in town with dorm rooms but they aren't much of a saving (they all seem to be around 150,000 for a bed) and, with me being a good fifteen to twenty years older than your average backpacker and having different aims for travelling, I'd really rather have a room to myself than share with a bunch of barely-adults.

The village consists largely of hotels, tour operators and restaurants, with most places being all three at once. Since my last visit the Why Not Cafe has changed its name to A Little Vietnam Restaurant, possibly in response to bad reviews. It is actually much better now, both in terms of food and service, although really the service is pretty rubbish in all the restaurants here. The best food I found was at the Tuan Ngoc Restaurant.

Access within the national park is via a long loop road. The village of Phong Nha sits up in the northeast. The Dark Cave - where I'd be going to look for the langurs - is almost directly on the opposite side of the loop and you can't go through the middle because it is all mountains. Whichever direction you take it is a 25km or so trip. The north route is through farmland outside the park and is all flat, while the south route is through forest but all mountains. Last time I was here I hired a guy to drive me around on a motorbike. This time I was going to just rent a motorbike myself, although I haven't ridden one in over twenty years, but the hotel also had bicycles for hire for only 50,000 Dong per day (about NZ$3) which appealed to both my pleasure at saving money and in inflicting pain on myself for no good reason.

When I arrived in town in the mid-afternoon it was raining so I didn't go anywhere, but the next few days were mostly cool and cloudy which was nice for cycling. Given the distances needing to be covered I decided to just concentrate on trying to find the Hatinh langurs and to forget about the southern white-cheeked gibbons which are also found in the park. To look for gibbons I would need to be at the far southern end of the park early in the morning and even then the chances of seeing any would be minimal. Fortunately I had already managed to see red-shanked doucs at Son Tra and Bach Ma so I didn't need to worry about looking for them as well.

The best times to be at the cliffs are around 5-6.30am when the langurs are waking up and leaving for the day, and 4-6.30pm when they are returning to sleep. I chose just to go there in the afternoons because if you don't see them coming to the cliffs to sleep then you're not likely to see them leaving those same cliffs in the morning. So I got to sleep late, do little during the day, and then at about 2pm set off on the bike to the park's Tro Mong entrance by the Dark Cave.

It took me an hour and a half each way when I went to the Dark Cave. I'm not sure exactly of the distance but it is somewhere between 20 and 25km from the village. First you cycle north for forty minutes to the junction for Khe San, and then you cycle for about fifty minutes southwards. By motorbike it's about half an hour total. Annoyingly the two roads run pretty much alongside each other for the last part but the river between them means you can't just cut across and save half an hour of cycling! On the first day while cycling I spotted a narcissus flycatcher, which for once is an appropriate Classical name for a species because if there's one bird which would be constantly admiring itself in a mirror it is the male narcissus flycatcher.

Phong Nha-Ke Bang has ten primate species within its forests, although your average visitor isn't going to see any of them unless they go to the Botanic Gardens where ex-pet macaques are rehabilitated. I counted myself lucky to spot a group of stump-tailed macaques on my first day, somewhat south of the Tro Mong entrance on the other side of the river. I hadn't been confident of seeing stump-tailed macaques anywhere in Vietnam because they seem difficult to see everywhere, but I have now seen them at two places here (the other being at Bach Ma a few days previously).

I saw my second primate species here later in the day while stationed on the roadside watching the langurs' sleeping cliffs. The cliffs I was watching were on the other side of the river. You can tell the usual sleeping spots because there are broad yellow streaks down the cliff-face from their urine staining the rocks over the years. This makes it easy to tell where to keep an eye on, but unfortunately also makes hunting them a lot easier for the poachers. Anyway, I had been sitting there for over an hour with no signs until 5.15pm when I suddenly saw some trees near the top of the cliff-face shaking. I was naturally pretty excited, thinking I was going to be seeing langurs on the first day - and then a macaque popped into view. There were a few of them up there but they weren't close enough to tell if they were rhesus macaques or Assamese macaques which look quite similar to one another. Of the langurs there were none.

One of the main annoyances when cycling at dusk is the clouds of midges which appear, bouncing off your face like needles and getting stuck in your eyes. I kept sneezing because the midges were getting up my nose, and that's not a sentence I thought I'd be writing.

Apart for the midges, there is no more relaxing night-time activity than riding on a bicycle with no lights along an unlit highway with trucks and motorbikes tearing past you at top speed, while the local dogs take the position that because it's dark they can try to bite whoever they like. And then there are all the usual Asian road obstacles, like the motorbike with no lights coming towards you on the wrong side of the road and neither of you can see each other until just metres apart, or the water buffalo standing on the road which you literally cannot see until you are just about to hit it.

For three days in a row I cycled to and from the cliffs. There was so much cycling that I considered that the species name should be changed from Hatinh Langurs to Hating Langurs. Nevertheless, it may have taken something like 150km of cycling, but I finally saw them.

On the third afternoon I was at my usual spot, facing the cliff with the most obvious staining, wondering how much longer I was going to keep this up. According to research papers I'd read the langurs tend to return to their cliffs at around 4pm and then spend time just hanging out and playing until going to bed. It was now 5.30pm. I had already cycled up and down the road several times checking all the cliffs along that stretch, not really knowing which ones they might appear on. I kept hearing what I thought sounded like monkeys grunting to one another but I couldn't see anything. Perhaps it was just frogs in the river below. I'm idly sitting there, and I think "hmm, what's that dark shape there?" On a cliff with scattered trees growing all over the face there are lots of black monkey-sized shapes. Some are just holes in the rock, some are gaps between branches - and some it seems are actually monkeys!

As it turned out, Hatinh langurs are much less obvious when on the cliffs than I had been expecting. I only saw two langurs and they weren't actively climbing open rock faces, but rather moving individually across the cliff from vegetation patch to vegetation patch. A langur would come into the open, sit there quietly looking around, and then bound quickly to the next tree. After a while it would move to the next patch. Then the next langur would come out into the open. Given their habits I may have simply missed seeing them on the first two afternoons, and possibly even on the first visit to Phong Nha.

I just checked Andie Ang's Primate Watching site and she gives only a one-in-five chance of seeing the Hatinh langurs at Phong Nha-Ke Bang, so that's interesting.

The Hatinh langur was my first "limestone langur". The next primate in my sights is another of the same group, the Delacour's langur at Van Long Nature Reserve. That one is supposed to be much more reliable, so fingers crossed!

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Photos

langur sleeping cliffs
the yellow staining shows their regular sleeping spots