At last we've found where some of the birds are hiding! We hired a car & a driver to take us to the Tra Su forest bird reserve. It took 45 minutes via the Sam Mountain, the local holy hill that rises out of the flatness of the delta. Our plan was to spend all day tomorrow climbing up the Sam, but there's a right grotty looking town grown up at the foot of it and I doubt we'll get much peace & quiet up there, so we'll just leave it till the afternoon.

The Tra Su forest was a fantastic birding place. It's an area that was devastated by the Americans in the war, but they've flooded it and reafforested it, and there's now huge great lagoons full of freshwater mangroves and water lilies. We went on the boat tour they do. Massive problems with communication because nobody there spoke English and the office had no literature, maps, nothin' in fact except a load of blokes sitting about doing b***** all. They had a small cage outside in which was cooped a massive coiled up python, and a very uncomfortable looking duck. I guess the duck was intended to be the snake's next dinner when it wakes up from digesting the last one. A boatman took us off in a power boat across the lagoons. Egrets, darters, cormorants, swamp hens all went flying off in every direction as we approached. Perhaps we should've asked the boatman to stop for a bit. Like I said, communication was a problem all day. But he deposited us in the centre of the reserve, and from there a woman took us in a paddle canoe into the heart of a heronry. Even under oar power, the birds were reluctant to allow us to come anywhere near them. All birds in this country seem to be deeply traumatised. Black crowned night herons were the ones that allowed us the best views, and Chinese pond herons were so abundant we got some good looks at them. They're brown when perched, but taking to the wing they transform into a gleaming white egret. Hard to make judgements on all the egrets in nests in the trees because they were difficult to see through the branches, and if you can't see the colour of an egret's legs you don't have much hope anyway. But I'm pretty sure that over the course of the day we got the full set of egrets: cattle, little, intermediate and great. The water was rank and smelly under the heronry, and a big bird s*** that landed next to the boat just bounced off the surface scum and splattered all over me. Nice.

The people lazing in hammocks around the paddle boat landing vaguely waved us up a track next (this wasn't the most diligently escorted bird tour I've been on...!) and a few minutes walk brought us to a big concrete watchtower. We climbed up it and spent a good hour on top. It had a roof over it or we would've fried. Not as many birds as we'd seen out on the lagoon, but patience rewarded us with a purple heron with it's sinuous tiger-striped neck, psychedelic purple swamp hens, bronze-winged jacanas with their over-sized feet, white breasted waterhen, olive-backed sunbirds in the tree tops below us and numerous drongos, black birds with long fish-shaped tails: my best guess is they were crow-billed drongos but they're a devilish group to differentiate and there might've been more than one species. There was a "snack bar" below us with apparently nothing for sale except a few very warm bottles of pop, and a building a bit further up the track that might've been a ranger station, but nobody looked like a ranger or was offering any assistance to us, the only two visitors. A group of adults and children were sitting outside making a hell of a racket, shouting and playing the radio, which kind of explained why there were not many birds around. A steady stream of scooters were moving up and down the track to it, I don't know why because there was nothing there of interest to non-birders. A noisy tour group appeared eventually - the only other visitors we saw all day - so we decided to go for a walk as no-one had made clear when or if we were expected to return to the boat. We walked along the track right to the edge of the reserve, which is all surrounded by lush green paddy fields. Despite the irritating scooters that kept buzzing past us, we did better with birds along here. We had white throated kingfisher and black capped kingfishers, which are both stunning. Twice the size of our kingfishers at home. Greater coucals were abundant if hard to see - related to cuckoos, they're big magpie shaped birds with long tails, dark irridescent blue bodies with fiery chestnut wings that burst into flame when they fly. A common tailorbird showed itself well but had us scratching our heads until late this evening - our bird book, Birds of Southeast Asia by Craig Robson, is quite annoying at times. I should've remembered seeing tailorbirds in India a few years ago.

We walked back to the other end of the track where they've got a few deer in pens. No idea what deer nor why, but I think one of them was a Chinese musk deer - big glands on the side of it's nose.

We returned to the boat at 4pm and a different man took us back to the entrance. Thankfully he cut the engine and punted us over the lagoon, so Robbie got a few good photos, but the birds were still very flighty. From the entrance we walked some way along the straight perimeter track which goes along a bund planted with eucalyptus, paddies on the left and bird lagoons on the right. Got some good views of herons and kingfishers.

The man with the car was waiting to take us back at 5pm. We've had dinner at a place across the road from here - traveller's hang-out with a large vegetarian selection but the food was pretty dull. I don't think this town has a really good restaurant, apart perhaps from the very exclusive one in the Victoria Hotel.