Tam Dao, where all the mammals have been eaten...

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To get from Cuc Phuong National Park to Hanoi, there is a very handy bus direct from the park HQ at 9am. It even goes right past the entrance road for the Van Long Nature Reserve on the way. The "real" fare - if going from the nearby town of Nho Quan to Hanoi - is 80,000 Dong, but if you buy the ticket at the HQ it costs almost twice as much, at 150,000 Dong. However I think the bus only comes to the park if there is someone to pick up - otherwise you would have to make your own way to the bus station in Nho Quan by motorbike or taxi, so 150,000 is actually cheaper than it would otherwise be.

The bus gets to the Nho Quan bus station at about 9.45am, leaves there at about 10am, and gets to Hanoi's Giap Bat bus station at around 12.30pm. I had found out the night before from the internet that there is a city bus (#08) from the Giap Bat station to the Old Quarter of the city by Hoan Kiem Lake, where the cheaper accommodations are situated. It costs 7000 Dong, so considerably cheaper than a motorbike or taxi. From the lake I just walked around - for quite a long time - until I found a place that wasn't over US$20!

I ended up at the Lemon Hostel where I got a room for 200,000 (about US$9). It is actually a hotel rather than a hostel (to me, at least, hostel implies backpacker dorms), but I think this is because they used to be called the Lemon Hotel - I had a look on Tripadvisor and there are a ton of really bad reviews from a few years ago. It seems to have either changed hands or picked up its game since then, and the (slight) name-change may be an attempt to distance themselves from the past. Their neon sign and their business card reads "Lemon Hostel: hostel and department". I'm not entirely sure what that means. Their usual rooms are, apparently 300-400,000. Mine was half-price because it was in a state of reconstruction with wires coming out of the walls and a lovely die-in-your-sleep fresh paint smell. Fine by me, though.

From Hanoi my destination was a hill-town called Tam Dao. I was just going there for birds because there aren't really any mammals left there any more. To get there I had the information that I should take a bus from the My Dinh station to the town of Vinh Yen and then I'd have to take a motorbike costing at least 250,000 for the last 27km. However, luckily, when I mentioned Tam Dao to the staff at the hotel they said that bus #58 goes past nearby and that's the one I take to get to Tam Dao. I checked this new info out online and found a number of sites saying (albeit all simply repeating one another) that you can take city-bus #58 to Me Linh Plaza, then bus VP01 to a town called Vinh Phuc, and then bus VP07 to Tam Dao. It sounded much more lengthy (it took about three hours in the end) but also considerably cheaper.

The #58 runs from Yen Phu, which is a sort of small highway through the city. This was less than ten minutes walk from the hotel, so I was already saving money from taking a motorbike to an actual bus station. The series of buses to take turned out to be accurate information (although the VP01 dropped me at the Vinh Yen bus station rather than in Vinh Phuc, but that was a better place to be anyway). The only real omission from the internet sites was that you still need to take a motorbike after the last bus in order to get all the way to Tam Dao. The VP07 bus is labelled as going to Tam Dao but while it does go to a place called Tam Dao it is not the actual town of Tam Dao which is still another 14km further on. So I had to pay 100,000 Dong for the last stretch (all uphill, hence why it seems so expensive) - but it was all still much cheaper than my original option.

When it was time to return to Hanoi I unexpectedly found an even cheaper way to do it. I have never seen this on the internet so I think it may be something that the locals know about but not the tourists. There is a mini-bus which runs twice a day between the Vinh Yen bus station and Tam Dao, and it costs 50,000 Dong. From Vinh Yen it leaves at 11.30am and 5pm, and from Tam Dao it leaves at 8.30am and 2pm. It is easy to arrange from Tam Dao (your hotel can just call them for a pick-up) but from Vinh Yen you may need to let them know. The driver gave me the phone number 0914 714 999 - of course they only speak Vietnamese, so you'd probably need to find someone else to make the call for you.

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Tam Dao is just a small village really, but being on hillsides it is sort of divided into separate sections. The central part of the town is obviously the tourist-zone, chock-full of fancy hotels and restaurants and nothing else. There are dozens of hotels crammed in everywhere, and more are under construction, but there doesn't seem to be any proper budget accommodation. The cheapest rooms I could find at any of the hotels were 300,000 Dong minimum. Interestingly, the ones which had rooms for 400,000 or 600,000 seemed quite willing to drop to 300,000 at a moment's notice, but the ones already at 300,000 wouldn't budge. The only one I found which came lower was the Suoi Ngoc Guesthouse (apparently aka Tam Son Hotel) which let me have a room for 250,000. Naturally, that is where I stayed.

When I said "the tourist-zone" above, I mean Vietnamese tourists. I feel like the only foreigners who come to Tam Dao are birders. I didn't meet any residents who spoke more than two words of English, although a few of the young Vietnamese visitors could speak it. Everyone is very friendly though, and it's a nice little place. I had expected it to be cool and drizzly, or at least foggy, especially given that it was raining when I left Hanoi, but instead it was hot and sunny and it remained that way for my entire stay (except the last night when a foggy gale came rolling through).

Because the town caters pretty much solely to Vietnamese, the restaurants are somewhat ... zoological in nature. The first one I visited, to review their prices, had squirrels on the menu. Perhaps connected to this, the forest in the national park was notably squirrel-less. I briefly saw one red-cheeked ground squirrel and one Callosciurus (probably red-bellied, but it ran away too fast to ID it). I didn't even hear any squirrels calling, and normally that is a common sound in the forest even if you can't see them. Another restaurant had convenient animal photos next to the dishes' names - sambar, porcupine, bamboo rat, civet, ferret-badger, mouse deer, monitor lizard.

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There are only two bird sites at Tam Dao, and both are within easy walking distance. In fact one of them (the TV Tower Trail) is right beside the hotel area, and the other (Tam Dao National Park) is just up the road.

Because it was midday when I arrived in town I decided to go to the TV Tower Trail first and then I'd use the following two days for the national park. This trail isn't really a trail at all, just hundreds of stone steps leading to the top of a hill where there is a tv tower. Funny that. It is easy to find because the tower can be seen from every part of town.

From the hotel I went to the old church (a good reference point - for the TV Tower Trail you head right along the road and for the national park you head left). Just follow the road around for a few minutes until the Cafe Legend where you go up the side-street to the Huong Rung Hotel. Next to this is a set of stone steps creating a short-cut up the hillside, and when you hit the road again you just follow the road signs going right for the chua (pagoda). A couple of bends further along there is a cluster of stalls by the road and this is the entrance to the "trail". About thirty metres up the steps is another set of steps on your left - this leads to the pagoda, while the main set of steps continues on up to the tower.

Although the sun was quite hot, once on the staircase the temperature dropped to comfortable levels under the cover of the forest. However it was still the middle of the day, so birds were not exactly in evidence. The entire walk up the stairs the only birds I saw were a couple of mountain bulbuls. I could hear other birds but the forest is a mix of bamboo and broadleaf trees, so the undergrowth along the sides of the steps is quite thick and trying to see whatever birds were calling proved frustrating. On the way back down a surprise chestnut-winged cuckoo shot across the steps. This was only the second time I'd seen one of these, although the first time (at Kaeng Krachan in 2014) was a much better sighting. Further down a bunch of little birds scattering through the treetops contained black-chinned yuhinas, of which I got poor views. These were a lifer, so fortunately the next day at the national park I got proper views of them because the ones I got today were rubbish. And... well, that's it. Three species of bird in about three or four hours. Not the greatest start!

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In the morning I discovered that Tam Dao is not an early-morning sort of town. In Hanoi the places to eat are opening as soon as it gets light because of all the people going to work or school, but here it takes a little longer. I needed breakfast and also food for lunch, so I didn't get started until after 6.30am. Fortunately it isn't far to the national park. From the church you walk a hundred metres to the Rex Diamond Hotel and take the right-hand fork. This leads to the park checkpoint after about a kilometre. There were lots of birds along the road, although the frustration from yesterday sort of carried over because the birds liked to congregate in bushes just behind the roadside bushes, meaning I was trying to see what they were through an additional layer of foliage. There were lots of Phylloscopus warblers - I could plainly see that, although the only ones I could ID to my satisfaction were Radde's and yellow-browed - as well as chestnut-crowned warblers, golden babblers, and a too-fast Zosterops. Oriental honey-buzzards were circling in the sky, black bulbuls and Stejneger's stonechats were about, and a greater coucal wandered across the road.

It was too early for there to be anybody at the checkpoint building, the only greeting being from two barky dogs, so I continued on. The road turned from paved to gravel, and wound around the hills for a while before terminating at a parking area where there was a possibly-abandoned restaurant and a whole lot of rubbish. I spent some time watching for birds in the trees around this area, seeing my first chestnut bulbul, an elegant species which in Vietnam is restricted to East Tonkin. This part of Vietnam borders China, of course, so a lot of the birds found here were either completely new for me or were ones I had previously seen only on my Chinese trip a couple of years ago. There were also black-chinned yuhinas here, and a lot of hair-crested drongos.

At the far end of the parking area there are three trails, although you almost need to be right on top of them before you can see that. The one on the left is an overgrown loop trail. The one on the right leads up to the top of the mountain named Tam Dao 2. The trail in the centre is the so-called Contour Trail (because it follows the contours of the hills) or formerly as the Water Tank Trail (because eventually it leads, I guess, to a water tank?). The Contour Trail is the one birders follow. Again, birding along here was a frustrating exercise. The understorey was very open, being mainly the stems of giant bamboo and the trunks of trees, but that meant that any birds you could see were usually flitting between bamboo way back in the forest. Most of them were just too far in for me to see what they were, even if they hadn't kept disappearing as they moved. The opposite problem was with the birds in the canopy of the trees, because I couldn't see them at all - between me and the tree branches there was a thick sub-canopy of bamboo leaves. I would get glimpses of birds flying between trees, but that was all, just glimpses. From reading trip reports, this difficulty in actually seeing the birds in the Tam Dao forest is common.

I really didn't see much for the first hour or so, but later the trail left the thick forest and crawled around a much steeper hillside where the birds were easier to see. The slope was so steep that there were at least ten places where there was no longer any track, just gaping holes spanned by makeshift bamboo bridges. Annoyingly the better part of the morning had already passed by now, so the birds were less active. Still, the best birds in a long time were seen along here, firstly with a short-tailed parrotbill. I was trying to see what the bird in the undergrowth was, expecting it to be some boring warbler or common old babbler - but when this bird popped out into the open I literally gasped and said "that's a teeny tiny little parrotbill!" That's the good thing about birding alone - you can say anything stupid out loud and there's nobody around to hear it. The first time I was in Vietnam I saw grey-headed parrotbills at Mang Den and was amazed at their size, so much bigger than any of the parrotbills I had seen in China. The short-tailed parrotbill was the complete opposite, the smallest parrotbill I have ever seen. You should Google Image short-tailed parrotbill, it is a great little bird.

Next on the "you have to Google Image this bird" list was the slaty-bellied tesia. Tesias are like feathered mice. They just scuttle around on the ground in the plants. I could hear this pair of birds rattling away with their annoying calls from amongst the plants covering the ground on a relatively open slope, and I could see the plants moving. I am useless at bird calls so I didn't know what was making all the noise, I was just waiting for them to show themselves. And when one did I was gobsmacked. Deep blue with a golden head glowing in the sun, it looked like some sort of South American manakin and I had no clue what it was. Then it changed position and I realised it was a tesia. In real life it does not look like its picture in the field guide! Absolutely amazing bird.

The other birds seen on the trail paled in comparison, but included streaked wren-babblers, David's fulvettas, silver-eared mesias, a red-headed trogon, and a Siberian thrush. Walking back along the road in the late afternoon there were more birds, including lifers grey-backed thrush and brown-backed needletails. The golden-throated barbets here are unusual too, having white and yellow throats instead of pure gold.

That trail was one of the best places for birds I've been in Vietnam, and I couldn't wait for tomorrow when I was hoping to see even more new species. Early in the morning I was on my way back. Oh what a day, I thought. What a lovely day. Then I got to the checkpoint where I was stopped. The guards there didn't speak any English, but "no" is pretty clear in any language. Were they saying it was too early to go in? That would have been nonsense because all visiting birders go in early. And clearly the park was open for visitors because I was passed several times yesterday by rangers who said nothing, and there had been Vietnamese tourists as well. The ranger at the checkpoint took out his phone which had a translator thing on it and showed me "Can not enter". I naturally wanted to know why. He showed me "It is illegal. Go to your home." What? "Forbidden by Vietnamese law." Huh? "Not allowed. Go to home." Buh?

No amount of pointing at the National Park signs would convince him that I was allowed in, and after a few minutes they got annoyed at my persistance and so just ignored me. There's not much you can do when the other people are just talking to each other as if you don't exist, so I stormed back off down the road. There was only one way into the park so I couldn't even just side-step the guards. Halfway back to the town is a hotel in which four coach-loads of students were staying, and they were going to the restaurant on the other side of the road as I came past. I found a couple who spoke English and asked for their help in understanding what was going on. They quickly said I could just go up the road and go in the park. I said that the guards wouldn't let me in. They seemed confused and one asked the restaurant owner about it. She said something in Vietnamese and he said "oh..." - pause - then to me "you cannot go in because it is too dangerous."

I have no idea what was going on but it reminded me irresistably of what I encountered in China, where foreigners would simply be refused entry because "it is too dangerous". I was really glad I had managed to get in there the day before, though, because without entry to the park then being in Tam Dao is utterly pointless for me. Making the best of a bad situation, I went instead to the TV Tower Trail where I saw, erm, not much of anything. Over two hours, there was one mountain bulbul, one silver-eared mesia, one Blyth's shrike-babbler, one puff-throated babbler, a couple of golden babblers, and a couple of chestnut bulbuls. Oh, and Finnish birder. He had arrived in town the previous evening and just like me had been refused entry to the park this morning. Now he had no clue what he was supposed to do here. He'd had his Vietnamese girlfriend with him, and yet still the only explanation they were given was "it is forbidden". I think it really is a foreigner thing, but I can't explain why because lots of birders go there.

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