Tuesday 14th

Oh dear, I'm going to be one day behind with this blog for the rest of the trip, I can tell. Yesterday we got up early for a 6am breakfast. The gibbons in the primate sanctuary across the river set off singing as we sat gazing into the dawn-lit forest from our restaurant balcony. I was sure I could hear one gibbon answering them from our side of the river, and this was confirmed by a Brit know-all birder we met later in the day who said he'd seen a wild one along the road between here and the Park HQ. We should've gone out earlier instead of stuffing ourselves with toast.

We walked down to the HQ and got in a boat for our river trip at 7.30am. Our guide was a fairly old chap called Xin, and he was excellent. He knew all the birds and gave us an interesting tour around the Ma indigenous village downriver. The lad at the hotel tells us that he is the best guide the Park service has, and he is ex-Viet Cong.

We saw lots of birds along the river bank from the boat. The river is the Park boundary, and you can see everything going on at all levels of the forest from the water. Dollarbirds, rollers and bee-eaters were abundant, and pied kingfishers were absolutely everywhere. I saw silver backed needletails, the first time I've seen these fascinating swift-like birds. They look like they've got no tail at all, just a rear end tapering to a point. An osprey was hovering about looking out for fish.

We landed at the village and Xin showed us around the "Ethnic Cultural Centre" (big building with a lot of old photographs on display.) The Ma used to be a nomadic tribe of slash-and-burn forest dwellers, until the Americans made them settle here during the war so they could do their best to destroy the forest and anyone still left in it. We had a look at birds on their paddy fields, which were small, mixed in with reedy areas and diverse crops, and brimming with bird life. Such a contrast to the Mekong Delta. We looked in a bamboo church (the Ma seem to be mainly Christian) and watched a woman doing some hand-weaving in her house, stretching the loom out with her feet. We bought a scarf off her. A little dog followed us all around the village and then returned to his house on the river bank where the boat man was waiting for us. We saw a good amount of new birds just walking in the village: wood swallow, wood shrike, black collared starlings with gleaming white heads, rufescent prinia flitting amongst the reeds. Then we were back in the boat and speeding back to the HQ.

We had an early lunch at the rather unenticing Yellow Bamboo Restaurant, service with a scowl, but I did see a couple of monkeys creeping along branches between us and the river. We walked back to the Forest Floor Lodge along the "Tree Walk", a lovely trail through dense jungle passing numerous ancient forest giants. After a brief rest and freshen up, we plunged back into the jungle opposite and continued northwards past many more ancient buttress-rooted behemoths, reaching the road near a particularly massive 700 year-old Reddish Wood Tree, Christianed "The Uncle Dong Tree". I laid myself down and took a nap in the crook of Uncle Dong's Brobdingnagian roots. Walked back to the Lodge again along the road. Saw an Asian Paradise flycatcher, lovely chestnutty brown colour, picking flies off the surface of a pool in one of the dried up creeks. Then we did a circuit through the "Botanical Garden" area of the park. Just before returning to the main Park road the most magnificent male jungle fowl strutted out onto the track ahead of us. The jungle fowl is the wild ancestor of all domestic chickens. "What's so magnificent about a wild cockerel?" you could justifiably ask. Well...you should've seen it...stunning!...the great-granddaddy of all chickens!

Dinner at the lodge, then we did our own free, DIY night walk along the road outside using the flash lamp from our room. We thought we saw a Binturong civet up in the trees, but it was mainly a pair of glowing eyes. The frogs in the Lodge's frog pond were making a huge racket. The nights are so noisy here!