night herons at Ba Be

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Almost a day's travel north of Hanoi is the Ba Be National Park, protecting a large but skinny lake surrounded by limestone mountains with remnant forests. Birders go here for just one reason, to try and see white-eared night herons. This is one of the rarest species of herons and is largely restricted to southern China. Until 2008 there were only two records from Vietnam, a specimen from 1975 and a sighting in 2001. In 2008-9 they were discovered at Ba Be - where they are breeding - and the rangers keep track of them, meaning that finding them is often straight-forward for visiting birders. All the trip reports are the same: you go to Ba Be, find Mr. Chat, and he will take you in a boat before dawn (or maybe in the late afternoon) to see the herons at their roost-site.

I also had a secondary reason for visiting. Francois' langurs, another of the "limestone langurs" like the Delacour's and Hatinh langurs, are still found here. Francois' langurs probably number a few hundred in Vietnam, but they are scattered about in isolated populations, often consisting of just a few individuals, so their future is bleak. Not surprisingly, given that they are very heavily hunted, most of the remaining groups in the country are in remote areas difficult of access. I had found a 2009 survey of the langurs at Ba Be which showed there were (then) several groups still in the park, although all of them were very small. This was my best bet for seeing them in the wild, although being almost a decade after the survey I wasn't overly optimistic they would still exist.

I had found some instructions on the internet for getting to Ba Be National Park by public transport, with the start-point being the Gia Lam bus station in Hanoi. I already knew which city-bus to catch for Gia Lam because the #34 I had caught the day before runs between the My Dinh station and the Gia Lam station, and as it turned out the latter is only fifteen minutes ride from the Old Quarter where my hotel was.

From Gia Lam there was supposed to be a red mini-bus leaving for Thai Nguyen at 9.30am, and then at that town's bus station I had to find a white mini-bus with the licence plate "TRUONG GIANG 97B-000.75" which would be leaving at midday. Apparently this bus, and only this bus, goes all the way to Ba Be. All the other buses claiming to go to Ba Be only go as far as the town of Chon Ra which is 20km short and you then need to take a motorbike-taxi the rest of the way.

I had found all that out before leaving New Zealand, but while re-checking it on the evening before I went to Ba Be I came across an additional bit of information which said that there was a direct bus to the park from the Old Quarter, leaving from Mr. Linh's tourist shop at 83 Ma May Street. This made sense because Ba Be is, it seems, a popular tourist spot and Mr. Linh runs not only this shop but also a homestay and a little information centre at Ba Be. I had also read (on Tripadvisor) that he was the manager of the national park but I don't know if that's true or not. It was too late to find out about this direct bus right away, but its departure time was 7.30am so in the morning I just walked around the corner to the spot. The shop wasn't open yet, so I ducked into the shop next door and asked them how much the bus would cost. I had a rough idea of how much the multi-bus option would cost - and it was a lot cheaper than the 660,000 Dong which was being asked for the single-bus option. In fact my total travel costs from the hotel in Hanoi to Ba Be (four buses in all) was 172,000 Dong, although it did take about nine hours whereas the direct bus apparently takes about five hours.

The #34 city-bus cost 7000 Dong and took fifteen minutes to get to Gia Lam. I arrived at 8.30am, way too early because I hadn't know how far it would be, but there was a mini-bus leaving at 9.10am so no problem. It cost 45,000 and I was told it would get to Thai Nguyen at 11.30am, which would give me a good half an hour to locate the next bus. The bus did indeed leave at 9.10, but it then spent the next 35 minutes literally crawling through the city. Well, not literally crawling, because buses don't have knees, but it did drive very slowly for no apparent reason. Even bicycles were passing us. Then at 9.45 it suddenly picked up speed and started driving normally. Ten minutes later we left the city, and dead on 11.30am arrived at the Thai Nguyen bus station. The driver said he would take me to Ba Be for 200,000 but I declined this offer. I knew the next bus would be cheaper than that, and I wasn't sure whether he was actually saying he would take me all the way to Ba Be or if he was planning on only taking me to Chon Ra.

The "white" mini-bus (actually beige) with the licence plate "TRUONG GIANG 97B-000.75" was sitting by the restaurant area of the station. The destination label said Cho Don. The driver let me know that it was 75,000 to Cho Don and then 50,000 to Ba Be. This was fine, although because he spoke no English I wasn't sure if this bus was going the whole way (as the internet said it did) or if I was transferring to another bus in Cho Don. It turned out to be the latter. We got into town just after 3pm and the driver put me onto a red mini-bus - also labelled "Thai Nguyen - Cho Don" - which was heading to Ba Be. All the buses at Cho Don seem to have this destination, no matter where they go! There were two separate locals who got on this red bus thinking it was going to Thai Nguyen and then had to jump off as the bus started leaving town in the wrong direction, so it wasn't just me having the standard tourist-confusion.

I discovered on the return trip that this red mini-bus is, in fact, the real direct bus to Ba Be. I think there's only one a day - leaving Thai Nguyen at 12.30pm and going back in the other direction from Ba Be the next morning between 5.30 and 6am. It runs a different route to Cho Don, most of the way being along a single-lane winding road through the rural villages. And it only costs 100,000 so is cheaper than the two-bus combination I took.

It is something like 40km from Cho Don to Ba Be, along a narrow and sometimes unpaved road, so I didn't get there until 5.30pm. There are a load of homestays at Bo Lu (the area by the south end of the lake, where the bus stops) - pretty much every building is a homestay. I had nowhere booked so the driver just stopped at one called Hong Gam which, super conveniently, was the guesthouse of Mr. Chat! I really liked staying here. I think it is perhaps my favourite accommodation I've had in Vietnam, and the room was only 100,000 Dong. There isn't really anywhere to eat except the homestay - there's a sort of village/market area with some shops and little restaurants, but it's about 3km back up the road - however this isn't such a problem because the food at the homestay is excellent and in great quantity.

By the time I left Ba Be I had decided that being deposited at Mr. Chat's guesthouse wasn't actually a huge coincidence after all. The driver had asked me "Ba Be Lake?" and I said "yes, Bo Lu" and showed him it written down in case he didn't understand my pronunciation. While out on the lake I saw several other boats with foreign tourists in them, and also saw a number of foreigners on motorbikes going up and down the road. This didn't make sense to me, because there were no foreigners except me staying in Bo Lu, and Ba Be is too far from Hanoi to be a day-trip. Where were they all? It wasn't until I had a wander along the road which goes up the eastern lake shore that I realised there was another village a couple of kilometres further on, in which even from a distance I could see lots of white people wandering about. So I'm guessing that village is the tourist village, probably one in Lonely Planet or something, and so when I told the bus driver I wanted Bo Lu he would have naturally thought "okay, he wants Mr. Chat's place then."

The first thing I did upon arriving was sort out an arrangement for seeing the white-eared night heron the next morning. The boat, Mr. Chat said, would be 400,000 Dong. I don't like spending money but there's no other way to see the heron than with one of the rangers. There is simply no way you would be able to find the few birds on your own. He rang the ranger (named Mr. Tu) who would be taking me out, and then told me I wouldn't need the boat because the birds weren't roosting at the lake but rather in the farmland to the south. Mr. Tu could take me there by motorbike for 200,000 the next morning.

I also wanted to try and see Francois' langur. I asked Mr. Chat if he knew these - being clear it was the black monkey with white on the face - and he said that after seeing the herons Mr. Tu could take me on the boat to the other side of the lake to look for monkeys. Excellent.

At 4.30 the next morning I was on the back of a motorbike. We went about 8km back along the road towards Cho Don, and then had to wade across a crocodile-infested river. Well, maybe "crocodile-infested" is a bit of an exaggeration, but some of the stones were quite sharp. Then we walked up a stream and turned off onto a dirt track through the rice-fields. After a few minutes we stopped, and Mr. Tu pointed to a tree-covered hill opposite, which was basically a little island of forest surrounded everywhere by fields. This was where the herons were roosting. Both of them. As far as I could make out - his English was fairly limited - there were only two herons using this area, but I may have misunderstood. There were, at any rate, only two birds calling before it got light.

Once it was light we made our way around the paddies and started climbing up the hill to the forest. I think the reason we had been standing looking at the hill in the dark was so that Mr. Tu could get a rough bearing on where the birds were calling from. There were very indistinct tracks running through the forest, perhaps partly made by birders, but also clearly by locals cutting out the trees. The undergrowth was thick and tangled, and sodden from the morning fog, so I got thoroughly soaked. Not helped by me being somewhat larger than Mr. Tu! While he could slip between vines and saplings and under spiny creepers, I had to be a bit more cassowary-like and just bludgeon my way through - while trying to also be as silent as a Mohican tracker.

At the top of the hill we came out on a clear dirt track - that would have been nice going up the hill! There was also a white-eared night heron up there. I didn't see it. Mr. Tu was a couple of feet in front of me, being all sneaky as we were, and he saw the heron flush up from the ground inside the forest and fly onto a branch. He quickly motioned for me but it was already gone. A few minutes later, I did see it. Just. It flapped through the trees to my left, landed for half a second in one of them and then kept going and disappeared. So... I saw it, but I wasn't exactly happy with how poorly. I didn't even know if I should "count" it as having been seen. We kept looking but didn't see that one again. We also tried a different spot on the hill where we found a dropping and a broken egg-shell under a tree, but there was no nest in evidence.

We returned to the homestay where I had breakfast, and then we set off on the boat ride to look for monkeys. The lake is surrounded by cliffs covered in forest, but I don't think there is much beyond that. I know at one point we got off the boat and walked up a steep track, and at the top after just a few minutes the forest was cleared for crops. I think probably all around the lake, if you could get ashore, it wouldn't be far in before you hit clearings.

We motored quite slowly along the edge of the lake checking out the forest for langurs, and soon enough Mr. Tu pointed excitedly up ahead, exclaiming "monkey!". I couldn't see them. I thought I was going to miss seeing Francois' langurs, because I couldn't imagine they would hang around once spotted. Mr. Tu was trying to point them out, high up on the cliff ahead, and then I saw them. Rhesus macaques. Not Francois' langurs. It's still good seeing rhesus macaques - in Vietnam seeing any mammal is a job well done (!) - but they weren't what I was after. I didn't want to seem ungrateful, even if I was paying 400,000 Dong to only see macaques, so we sat and watched them for a while. Then I drew a picture of a Francois' langur and a rhesus macaque for comparison, and asked if he knew the langurs. Yes, he did, but they were only found far back in the mountains - he pointed into the distance where the mountains were barely visible through the clouds. The only monkeys left around the lake were the macaques.

Back on shore I went off for a walk up the road, which is edged with forest. There were a few common birds around, including a green-billed malkoha, and also an inornate squirrel. I did the same walk the next afternoon and saw what was probably the same inornate squirrel and also a maritime squirrel.

Mr. Tu was coming back at 8pm to take me to a place where the night herons feed. I looked up the 2009 Francois' langur survey and wrote down the names of the places they had been recorded. There is even a map on the survey so I could see that one of the main sites, Pac Ngoi, was quite close to Bo Lu. When Mr. Tu arrived in the evening I asked him if the langurs were still found there. They were not. It seems that in the last eight years the family groups in those accessible areas had all been shot or trapped.

There was no joy with spotlighting for herons either, but the next morning we returned to the roost-site. It went pretty much the same as the first morning, except this time the heron we flushed had been in the open and not in the forest so I actually saw it properly. It wasn't the ideal "perched stationary on a branch so I could sit and look at it" kind of sighting, but it was good enough.

Two things surprised me about the night heron(s) we saw.The first was how flighty they were. This really shouldn't have surprised me, this being Vietnam where anything that breathes is considered food (and, apparently, unlike most herons the white-eared night heron is good to eat). The second thing was that on both mornings the bird we saw was on the ground when we disturbed it. The impression I'd had from reports and photos was that they were usually seen perched. If they habitually roost on the ground then that leaves them much more vulnerable to trapping.

So I didn't see Francois' langurs. Although it sounds counter-intuitive to say this, I think China would be the best place to see them. The ones left in Vietnam are too scattered and are disappearing fast. However I did see the white-eared night heron, so the visit to Ba Be was a success in that regard.

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