This morning we got up bright and early at 6am to go to the Tuyem Yam reservoir south of the town for some early birding, but the best laid plans of mice and men...

After laying in to the steaming vats of noodles and stir-fries on the breakfast buffet, we set out for a local laundry and to pay the remainder of our booking fee to Groovy Gecko. Whilst there we got talked into booking a tour tomorrow around some local villages and a waterfall, for one million Dong. Having now used up almost the last of our cash, we both drew some money at an ATM outside a bank near our hotel. My old travelling companion, Mr Muddlehead, took charge of events from thereon. Back in our room I was putting the money in the room safe when I wondered where my bank card was. Still in the machine I realised, that's where it was! The ATMs here don't automatically spit out your card when you collect the money, you have to confirm that you have finished, and I hadn't. I sprinted down the stairs, out the lobby and down the road. Someone else was already using the machine which was in a glass kiosk. I don't know what he was doing but he was in there 5 minutes, me dancing about on the pavement in frustration, peering through the glass to try to see if he was using my own card. But he wasn't, and when he came out there was no sign of my card anywhere in the kiosk. I went in to the bank. The first cashier I spoke to directed me to the foreign exchange counter, but there was a lengthy transaction going on there, and I was hopping about in even greater agitation. Finally a friendly cashier noticed me turning purple and asked if she could help. I explained my predicament. "Do you have identification?" No of course I didn't, I'd rushed out of the hotel in such haste it was lucky I was wearing trousers. So I dashed back to the Dalat Plaza and begged my passport off the receptionist. (You have to leave your passport as security in this country.) Back at the bank, the lovely lady produced my bank card from behind the counter. What relief! Maybe I'll get the hang of this foreign travel business one day...!

And then we walked to the cable car station, which turned out to be a lot further than anticipated and up a steep hill, so it was about 11am before we got our good early start.

The cable car ride was very high up, above the pine forests, and took about 15 minutes. The trees looked lovely although there was the usual piles of dumped rubbish and they're making a new road across the forest, bulldozing all before them.

That was the story with the reservoir too... must've been lovely once but they're frantically cutting down much of the forest to build a new "resort", and the roadside litter problem is just sickening. We did see some good birds though, adding 14 new ticks to our list. There's a pagoda beside the cable car terminal with some nice parkland grounds, and we saw a whole flock of dazzling firetailed sunbirds in a blossom tree there, yellow bellied with very long bright scarlet tails. There were shrikes all over the place, and when we found a decent path off the road leading through the pinewoods we got some excellent views of a great hawk-cuckoo perched on a branch. We walked down to some fields and ponds right underneath the cable cars, where women in conical hats were tending a crop of Hypericum bushes. Saw a cute little falconet of some sort when returning to the cable car, and an even cuter black and white pigmy woodpecker.

The cable car conductor hustled us into a pod at 4.30 when we were hanging around the station birding, and as soon as we got to the other end it stopped for the day. We'd been expecting it to keep running till 5pm. There were black and yellow Vietnamese greenfinches perched along the cables coming back, birds we'd had extreme difficulty looking at in the forest all afternoon.

We jumped on a really grotty long-distance bus to get back to town. The seats were ripped and there was puke all over the floor and one of the seats, which I very nearly sat in. Vietnamese people struggle more than any nation I've encountered to keep their food down when travelling.

We ate at the Art Cafe this evening. Nice food - I had a chicken in caramel sauce, but I've been suffering from mouth ulcers for several days now and can't really enjoy good food like I should.