Sat 11 On the bus to Cat Tien

We're having a stressful couple of days. Yesterday morning in Chau Doc was relaxing enough, we just poked about the market and had lunch at the local vegetarian place - TVP imitation chicken skin in my "chicken noodle soup" ...mmm...? Phuong Trang bus service sent a shuttle bus to pick us up from the hotel at 1pm. The bus to Saigon was full this time. (We'd been 2 of only 5 passengers travelling from Can Tho to Chau Doc on Tuesday.) Travelling through the Mekong Delta feels like you're going through one massive conurbation because they build alongside the roads all the way, but really it's mostly rural.
We crossed a wide branch of the river by ferry after a couple of hours, and then we saw some countryside. There were lagoons full of some sort of water lilies with big pink flowers, evidently grown as a crop. And ginormous paddy fields.

We stopped for a half hour break at the biggest bus rest-stop I've ever seen. Like an aircraft hanger with a whole market inside it. There was a huge carpet of red chillies laid out to dry on the tarmac of the car park. An hour later the bus broke down on the hard shoulder of a motorway. It looked like they'd run out of diesel because the driver and his mate got a 20 litre fuel can out of the luggage hold and siphoned it into the tank. But the bus still wouldn't start. We sat there for half an hour. I don't know what they did but the driver then got back in, started the engine and we were off again.

We got to the Saigon bus terminal just after 8pm. No idea what part of the city we were in and as soon as we stepped off the bus into the non-air-conned heat we got mobbed by taxi men. They all had Phuong Trang badges on and we weren't sure if this was another free hotel transfer. But the one we went with charged us 160000 Dong when he dropped us off at the Hoang Phong Hotel, so evidently not. That or he pulled a fast one on us. We were both very hot, agitated and irritable by this time, but we chilled out a bit with an excellent meal at the Zen vegetarian. A group of TEFL students in there having a celebration knocking back bottle after bottle of Dalat wine and making a heck of a racket. But they were funny.

This morning the formerly faultless Hoang Phong Hotel let us down by taking half an hour to serve us breakfast when we had to catch our bus at 8am. We got hot and agitated again. But we're on the bus now which is another Phuong Trang service, not too crowded and nice and cool, so we're relaxed. We've just crossed the Saigon river.

Sunday 12th

We're in Cat Tien National Park now. It's a birder's paradise.

The bus yesterday dropped us off half way to Dalat at a nowhere town. The previous town must have been a centre for Christians, because it had at least 5 big churches, and we saw many very elegant houses which all had life-size statues of the virgin Mary looking out from their upper balconies.

At the bus drop-off there was a taxi waiting for us, exactly as arranged by the agency in Saigon. We shared it with a French bloke who spoke Vietnamese, but sadly his English was no better than my French. (That is to say, crap.) The taxi dropped us at the park entrance on the bank of a river. We bought a ticket from the Ranger's kiosk and a man took us across the river in a boat. At the other side there were a few buildings but no-one about. It was a scorching hot and humid midday. A sign pointed right saying Forest Floor Lodge 1.3km so we strapped on our heavy packs and started walking. The French guy headed off in the other direction towards the park bungalows (“barely habitable” I'd seen them described as, on Tripadvisor, so we'd gone for the luxury ecolodge instead.) Half an hour of backbreaking sweating slog along a concrete road through dense jungle in unbearable heat and we arrived. The butterflies kept me going. There's hundreds of them in every colour and they're all beautiful. “Why didn't you phone us, we'd've picked you up?” asked the teenaged receptionist. Because English mobiles don't work in Vietnam.

The place is nice, although it seems to be staffed totally by teenagers with limited English apart from a young English surf-dude type behind the bar whose uncle is one of the owners. The restaurant overlooks the river and we saw Oriental pied hornbills from there as soon as we went to investigate it.

Once we'd recovered we walked back along the road to the ferry landing and the park HQ. This time the walk took us about 2 hours because the afternoon sun was cooling off and the birds were coming out. So many, many birds along the road. My favourite was a Japanese paradise flycatcher, black body with a long, blousy tail.

At the HQ we booked a couple of tours because they're a lot cheaper from there than booking the same thing from the Lodge, which is a shocking price. We stayed at the HQ and had a quick and cheap dinner at the Yellow Bamboo restaurant, then went on the "night walk" at 7pm. This was rubbish. We raced along a forest road on the back of a smoky, rattly old truck with a dozen or so other visitors, a guide sweeping the forest with a spotlight. We saw numerous Samba deer and one Muntjac deer, and nothing else. The only information the “English speaking guide” gave us was: Samba! and Muntjac! I'm glad we'd only paid 300,000 Dong for it (about £10). The other two guests at the Forest Floor Lodge were on it too, they'd booked through the lodge and paid $25 each, and all they got that we didn't was a lift there and back on a golf buggy.

We walked home in the tarry, buzzing, peeping and beeping darkness. They shut down the generator at 11pm here, so there's no late nights. Good thing, because I was knackered!

I'll have to post today's doings tomorrow, because I'm tired again and the Wifi here is very slow.