Cuc Phuong National Park, part one

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When I checked out of the Queen Mini Hotel in Ninh Binh I gave the owner a 500,000 Dong note, because that was all I had, and she pretended she didn't have change. Then she just stood there expecting me to just wave it aside and leave. But of course I didn't. She tried again to not give me change "because she didn't have any", but when I wasn't budging she went away and came back thirty seconds later with the right change. Then as I picked up my bags and left, the lady and her mother talked loudly about me (in Vietnamese, but the tone was obvious). I had heard that the further north in Vietnam you go, the more "rip-offy" the people get, and this is proving to be the case.

I was on my way to the Cuc Phuong National Park. I knew I could get a bus from Ninh Binh to the village of Nho Quan which is about half an hour from the park, and then a motorbike the rest of the way; or I could take a motorbike the whole way. At the bus station a motorbike guy offered 200,000 for the trip, which I rejected, and he came straight down to 150,000. This wasn't too bad - he wouldn't come down to 100,000 - but I figured the bus-bike combo would be cheaper, even though the guy tried to somehow convince me that it would be more expensive because a motorbike from Nho Quan would cost 300,000. I'm not sure how he thought that ruse would work!

As it happens the bus-bike combo is only marginally cheaper, but takes twice as long. The bus costs 25,000 and takes about two hours to get to Nho Quan. I knew a motorbike from there should cost about 80,000. There was only one motorbike guy where the bus dropped me off and he wanted 120,000 for starters, but we settled on 90,000.

Arriving at the national park everything is super-easy. The ladies at reception are really friendly and helpful, and they speak good English, so everything can be easily explained and questions answered. The accommodation is cheaper than almost anywhere else I've been in Vietnam, with the basic rooms (i.e. a bed and a fan) being 100,000. The good rooms are 300,000 and the deluxe rooms are 600,000, but I have no need for goodness or deluxity. Renting bicycles and scooters is more expensive than it should be though, with mountain bikes rated at 120,000 for one day, 170,000 for two days, or 250,000 for three days; and scooters at 250,000 per day (scooters or motorbikes are normally around 100,000 per day, for comparison).

In contrast to how friendly the reception ladies are, though, the people in the restaurant at the HQ speak little to no English and are very unhelpful. I thought maybe they just disliked me for some reason, but the German girls I befriended said "we thought they didn't like us". In any case, it wasn't much fun having to go there to eat and there weren't really any other options. Something I did notice was that if a group of foreign tourists came in with a Vietnamese guide then the restuarant people were very friendly to them (and also to the volunteer girls from the EPRC), but any foreign tourists alone, like me or the Germans, they treated us like we were wasting their time by coming in there.

I was actually surprised how many tourists there were staying at Cuc Phuong. I'd heard that weekends get busy with residents of Hanoi coming for a break, and so I'd deliberately arrived on a Monday to avoid this, but generally speaking foreign tourists usually make day-trips to national parks. I mean, it's not crowded or anything, just busier than I expected. Unexpectedly, most of the foreign tourists are German or French. No Russians.

Another thing that is very common here are the mosquitoes! There are great quantities of them, especially around the rooms and in the restaurant. Maybe that's why the restaurant owners are so grumpy, because they keep getting bitten.

Much nicer than the mosquitoes are the butterflies. There is a white species here which flies in streams instead of clouds. No matter how many there are, they only fly in single file in swooping lines. Along the road into the centre of the park there are hundreds of them, all heading towards the HQ. Occasionally there would be a black or an orange butterfly which had got sucked into their stream and so just flies along with them. Here and there you will see the white butterfies pouring down from the treetops like a waterfall, and then just above the ground they turn and flow along the roadside. They really are amazing to watch.

On the first afternoon I tried some birding along the road but it was so hot that there was nothing about. I only saw three species of bird but all three were noteworthy in their own ways. The first was a flock of grey-throated babblers which were the first I'd seen this year. Second was a pair of olive-backed sunbirds which in the local north Vietnamese subspecies have white bellies so look pretty different to those elsewhere; especially the female is very distinctive - if the male hadn't been there I'm not sure I would have picked what she was. The third was another very common Asian bird, the common tailorbird - except this one was at its nest. Tailorbirds are so-called because they stitch leaves together into a purse and then fill it with nest material. I've seen hundreds of tailorbirds but never a nest. This nest was in more of a roll shape, the bird having simply folded under the edges of a large leaf and sewn them up, and unfortunately the position of this nest meant that I couldn't get photos of it - it would have just looked like an ordinary leaf. Still really cool to see though.

Afterwards I went to the Endangered Primate Rescue Centre which houses Vietnamese langurs and gibbons confiscated from the illegal trade. It can only be visited as a guided tour which costs 60,000 Dong (about NZ$3.80). I went at around 3.30pm as this is when they are fed, so a visit later in the day seemed like the best option. Unfortunately the lady taking me around didn't seem that interested in being there and also didn't have enough information (and some things she said were plainly wrong). While I was taking photos of the Cat Ba langurs in the second cage we saw, she got impatient and said she'd take me right round first and then just leave me there alone so I could take photos as much as I wanted. The Germans in the room near mine said their guide was useless also.

Only a presumably-small part of the centre is able to be viewed, basically along two paths. A lot of other cages were visible in the non-show areas, in which I could see red-shanked doucs and gibbons. There are also Slow Lorises here (I think Bengal and pigmy) but these can't be seen on the tour because they are asleep. The cages are really basic - not too small but certainly not large, concrete-floored, with bamboo and pole beams for climbing. There is also a large "natural" enclosure in which animals are held "wild" before being released into the Cuc Phuong National Park (for those species which are native to the area - she said there were four species in there but the only ones I saw were some Delacour's langurs).

I particularly liked seeing the grey-shanked doucs because I have tried twice to see them in the wild and failed. Seeing them in cages isn't the same but it's better than nothing. The Cat Ba langurs were great because there's no chance I'll be seeing them in the wild. But most especially I was very happy to see the Indochinese grey langurs which are magnificent. There's a slim possibility I could still see these in the wild but I'm not holding my breath.

The other species in the public area were lots of Hatinh langurs (including newborn bright-orange babies), and buff-cheeked and white-cheeked gibbons.

There is a Botanical Gardens at the HQ and all visiting birders go there as a morning activity, so that's what I did too. The gate is kept locked for some reason so you need to ask at reception for the key. They only have one key but they gave it to me the night before so that I could go in at dawn. Although I was in there at 5.30am when the sun came up there wasn't much activity from the birds until 6.30am, and even then most species were ones I'd seen everywhere else so it was a bit of a wasted effort. Some crow-billed drongos were the first of the trip though. I'd been imagining the gardens to be, well, a garden, but in fact it is just a rough concrete path through secondary growth forest. It does look like it used to be a proper Botanic Gardens, with a few labels still visible and some obvious exotic trees, but now it is completely swamped in jungle. From the single paved path there are the remnants of older side-paths but they are mostly buried in undergrowth now.

After a late breakfast I headed up along the main road into the park. It was late morning, about 10am, but still there were not really any birds around. I did see a small Asian mongoose as my first Cuc Phuong mammal, and the 105th mammal of the trip. At noon I returned to the HQ for lunch without really having seen much at all. Later I found out that it was 36 degrees that day, which probably explains things! I went to sleep for the rest of the day.

I was going to cycle to the Bong Substation in the morning and stay there a couple of nights, but a rainstorm came through in the night. Bong is in the centre of the park, which should be the best place for finding whatever animals are left alive here, and the accommodation is the same price as at the HQ (albeit with no electricity). However it wouldn't be much fun cycling 20km in the rain so I postponed it and stayed at the HQ another night. I did go walking along the road though, under the cover of an umbrella. It was much cooler today and there were a lot more birds around, but they were all very common species, almost all of which I had seen dozens of times just in Vietnam alone. Probably the most interesting was ratchet-tailed treepie. No mammals were seen, not even a squirrel. The streams of white butterflies were also absent - they must only like sunny weather - but so were the mosquitoes which was a blessing.

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Photos

Indochinese Black Langur ('Trachypithecus ebenus')
This 'species' is almost certainly just a colour morph of the Hatinh Langur (T. hatinhensis)