by Gene Walz
Another bus ride took us to Lo Xo Pass where a long walk in the woods produced our target bird for the day, the recently discovered but otherwise unremarkable Black-crowned Barwing. On to the newly developed town of Mang Den, where we trudged the nearby logging roads to catch a glimpse of the Chestnut-eared Laughingthrush, only discovered in 1999. We also found its cousin the Black-hooded Laughingthrush; these elusive birds do sound as if they’re laughing at you as they flit almost undetected through the thick foliage.
Too far from our home base, we had lunch at a roadside shack with corrugated tin walls and roof supported by tree branches. We had to squat down onto those plastic kiddie chairs again; they were uncomfortable but out of the intense heat of the sun, providing some much needed shade. For lunch we had the typical Pho, various greens (perhaps morning glory) and small, indecipherable pieces of meat in a clear broth. Untypical was the source of the broth: a large 500 gallon drum of rainwater, boiled of course. None of us got sick, but I think we all imagined a headline: Ten birders and two guides die of food poisoning.
Our reward: some great birds after lunch, including self-explanatory Pale Blue Flycatchers, Maroon Orioles, Stripe-breasted Woodpeckers, Grey-crowned Tits, and Yellow-billed Nuthatches, as well as Blue-winged Minla (or Siva, names often change here), a cute, slim, white-bellied bird with a brown back and, surprise, blue wing fringes.
A plane ride, a pokey bus trip through traffic-clogged Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), and a short ferry ride brought us to Cat Tien National Park for three hot, hot days in a lowland tropical forest. Craig Robson, the writer of A Field Guide to the Birds of South-East Asia which we all were using, was already at the park. We were happy to see him until we learned that he had commandeered all of the good safari vehicles. We were stuck with the banged up pick-up trucks with plank seating in the beds to get us to and from our birding sites. I pulled a muscle on one of the bumpier rides and hobbled around painfully for the rest of the trip. If you were lucky enough to get in the lead vehicle, you were bumped around but otherwise okay; if you got the following vehicle, you ate dust. We all took turns eating dust. Headline: Birders die of dust poisoning.
We spent three and a half days at Cat Tien, serenaded early every morning by the mournful whistles of a family of buff-cheeked gibbons high in the trees just opposite our cabins. A routine was established the first day: up at 4:45 am or so, a quick breakfast, a bumpy ride, long walks ’til noon or so, lunch, a brief respite (for a change of sweat-soaked clothes), a second ride, more long walks ’til 7:00 pm, a quick shower, the compilation of the day’s birds, dinner, and socializing, emailing, or reading—usually a preparatory scan of the bird guide for the next day’s outing. Not too much different from previous stops, but by this point, most of us were knackered by mid-morning.
Our main target bird for Cat Tien was the endemic Germaine’s Peacock Pheasant. We spent hours and hours searching for it to no avail. That’s how birding goes sometimes.
As compensation, we did have clear views of Great Hornbills and lots of galliformes: both Scaly-breasted and Orange-necked Partridges, some Red Junglefowl (like spectacular farm roosters), stunning Green Peafowl (like our zoo’s peacocks but emerald green), and, in our guide’s words, “the superlative-defying Siamese Fireback,” a peacock-sized groundbird with a grey body fading to purplish-black underneath, a large, green-black tail with a fiery patch on the rump, a red face, and a dainty top-knot.
We also notched ten different kinds of woodpeckers, including the scarce Pale-headed, plus a Blue-rumped Pitta, a Siberian Blue Robin, and a Tickell’s Blue Flycatcher when we thought we’d seen everything. Red-breasted Parakeets entertained us with fly-overs during the day, followed by Great-eared Nightjars just after dusk.
Our final destination was Da Lat, another temperate resort city situated on top of a plateau. Home to over 200,000 people and probably as many motorbikes, Da Lat, remarkably, has no traffic lights or stop signs. Our hotel, modern and comfortable in almost every way, was called Dreams but produced nightmares; it had no elevator. We had to clamber up three or four flights of stairs after every exhausting bird search. Hard on hearts, death on arthritic knees, especially at the end of a tour!
To make matters worse, half of our number started to get sick with a vicious bug that emptied us out, top and bottom. I was the only one of the stricken five who didn’t spend at least a day in bed, missing the great birding opportunities that this Important Endemic Birding Area provided.
The lack of elevators was especially painful after a day at Lang Bian Mountain. Jeeps took us to a lofty drop-off point. As we exited, our guide heard a scarce Vietnamese Cutia singing about one hundred metres farther up. We had to scramble up a rocky, fiftty degree slope covered with pine needles to see it then risk warbler-neck or toppling over backwards to find it at the very top of the pine trees. A decorator’s combination of a slate-blue crown with a thick black face, chestnut back and rump, and white underparts with black barring, the bird was worth the effort. But what an effort to start the day!
Then we trudged higher, on broken, rocky terrain through briars and thick tangles in search of the almost-impossible-to-find Collared Laughingthrushes. It probably took an hour to get a good look at them after we first heard them and caught fleeting glimpses. But what a sight! With black hoods, silvery ear patches, muted gray-gold backs, and bright orange bellies and collars, they were worth the effort. We spent almost as much time trying to catch sight of a Grey-bellied Tesia, a small, mousy forest-floor denizen with a loud, almost ventriloquist’s call. It’s there. No, it’s there. Its call is coming from right over there. No, it isn’t. Our silent, crouching patience finally paid off. We caught a long glimpse of the Tesia as skittered across an opening, enough of a glimpse to include it as one of the “birds of the day.”
Ta Nung Valley was hardly any easier, though for this spot, we descended down a long, steep hill in the morning and struggled up at noon, and then repeated it. Our highlight birds here were some Orange-breasted Laughingthrushes who weren’t where they were supposed to be and some Grey-crowned Crocias, oriole-sized birds that almost duplicate the markings of the Cutias.
My last night in Da Lat was agony. I caught the virus that the four others had suffered through earlier. Severe cramps and the attendant GI track evacuations. Thus, I surmised, were the pre-trip premonitions finally realized. I felt like death barely warmed over. No headlines, just a quiet burial in a good birding spot, please.
On our way from Da Lat back to HCMC on our final day, we made a brief stop at Datanla Waterfall. I raced to the park’s washroom four times in an hour but still managed to see some of the best birds of the trip: Orange-headed Thrushes, a spectacular Red-headed Trogon, a White-throated Rock Thrush, a Eurasian Jay, and, to cap it all off, another Cutia.
I was starved and wasted by the time we got to our posh hotel in HCMC. Birding now done, I turned my full attention to a more urgent problem—re-entering into Canada. I had two days to get an emergency Permanent Resident Card. Get one, and I could stop worrying. Get denied, and, as I was warned, I could be detained at the airport, or at the Seoul airport for my connecting flight, or denied entry in Vancouver. The irony was clear. All my pre-trip anxieties about going to Vietnam were now focussed on getting out of Vietnam.
After a hasty breakfast and heart-felt farewells to the non-Winnipeg birders, I headed to the Canadian visa application office. At the door, I was given a number; inside, I took a seat with twenty-four Vietnamese applicants. The wait was excruciating. I considered alternate strategies. Since my visa expired the day after I was supposed to leave, I was going to have to get out of HCMC quickly. My plan: buy a new ticket, fly anywhere, get a connection to some US border city, and figure things out there. Sneaking across the border like a drug dealer was, I confess, one idea.
When my turn finally came, a Vietnamese lad with perfect British English heard my pleas. I’d already had passport photos taken and filled out the f
orms. He told me there was little hope; applications took a month to six weeks in his experience. He copied and faxed my application anyway, along with my passport and Vietnamese visa. I was now paperless in HCMC where even a hotel demanded passports and visas to register and I hadn’t yet registered in our new, cheaper hotel.
The hotel clerk reluctantly let me register without the proper credentials. In my room, I called the Canadian Consulate. The automatic answering service required me to press one. Every time I did, I got the hotel clerk. It took me four frustrating calls to realize my mistake. I went down and called from her phone. A woman at the consulate told me that they could surely help. I didn’t take her name. When I got to the consulate, the people there told me that they could not help at all.
I left the consulate angry and bewildered. Wandering down the street, I was offered a ride by a motorbike cabbie. The cost was reasonable: thirty Dong, about a buck and a half Canadian. With a backpack slung over my right shoulder and a sheaf of documents in my left hand, I hopped on. Our guide had told us there were six million motorbikes and scooters in HCMC. They all seemed to converge on us in a Darwinian nightmare, me with no helmet, holding onto the seat with one hand, and trying not to scrape my knees on adjoining bikes, trucks, buses, and cars, yet not squeezing them into the driver.
Unscathed and back in my hotel room, I spent the rest of the day waiting for a phone call and planning for the worst. Very little sleep that night, if any.
The next morning, I went back to the visa application office. More waiting. When I got to my agent, I re-emphasized that I needed things resolved by closing time that afternoon, 3:30 pm. My plane left before they opened the next morning. He sent a fax somewhere saying I needed my passport and visa back that day. I walked home, not willing to risk suicide-by-motorbike again. I sat nervously in my hotel room for the rest of the day. My two friends went birding and touring.
At 2:50 pm I got a call from the consulate: come and get your papers. Which ones? They didn’t say. John Hays and I rushed to the consulate. A young guy was there waiting to replace a lost Canadian passport. We commiserated. I waited behind him. The people who were rude and unhelpful the day before now smiled at me. I was given an envelope. Inside were my passport and visa. I opened the passport. Pasted on page 12 was a temporary Permanent Resident Card. Whew! At 3:10 I was free to go—with only twenty minutes to spare.
I stashed my papers at the hotel and decided to head to the zoo where my friends had earlier seen some interesting birds—not in cages but on the well-forested grounds. At the zoo and on the way, I added seven new birds for the trip, including Little Cormorant, Black-headed Ibis, twelve Painted Storks, and nine Lesser Adjutants—huge, stork-like birds with black backs and white bellies. Adjutants = aides. Great symbolism there for my final birds of the trip.
I took another motorbike cab back to the hotel. It was rush hour and even scarier. Risky, I know, but I felt exhilarated and invulnerable. As we raced to a corner, my right knee scraped a strip of dirt off the bus next to me. The last close call of many.
That night, I contemplated all the ups and downs of the trip. I felt like a warbler must feel after a very tough migration. Completely spent.
Was it worth the aggravation? Absolutely! The birding was difficult, but the rewards were many. We tallied over 300 species of birds, many of them endemics that I’d never get a chance to see again. 280 of them or so were lifers for me, birds I’d never seen before. The animals—langurs and gibbons, the deer, and even the many squirrels—were a gratifying bonus.
More broadly, Vietnam was, of all the countries I’ve visited, the most unique. You know you’re in a special place when you see a man safely leading a water buffalo across an eight lane divided highway with no traffic lights at rush hour. Or people in a supposedly Catholic country burning fake money on curbsides to appeal to the gods for the real thing.
Vietnam’s combination of old and new, modern and ancient, urban and rural, rich and poor is striking. The people are friendly and helpful, seeming to bear no grudge at all for past Western aggression and its destructiveness. It was amusing to sample their food, from Vietnamese caphe (coffee with an egg yolk, condensed milk, and sugar) to Ba Ba Ba (333, their beer), to porcupine meat (terrible!), and to their fresh, un-modified vegetables and fruit (especially their watermelon, the sweetest, tastiest treat I’ve had since I was young). I only wish they’d pick up their garbage.
Add new last paragraph. As for the weird premonitions I had before I left, I guess I now have to worry—now that I’m older—that I may have discovered my inner “worry wart.” I’ll have to stifle this latent creature. Despite all the troubles I endured in Vietnam, I lived through it. No permanent bruises. No poisonous snake bites. No stints in jail or in customs detention. And some great birds and amusing stories. “Don’t worry, be happy.” It’s now one of my favourite songs.
My Birding Bruises
About fifteen years ago at a Christmas Bird Count, I was bitten by a Doberman pinscher. The temperature was well below zero Fahrenheit and my friend Jerry was leading a silent group of birders across his deck, each of us intently searching for an over-wintering and thus aptly named Mourning Dove. Suddenly, Jerry’s Doberman sneaked up behind us and, without warning, bit me on the butt.
Twelve cheeks to select from and the dog chose my right one. (If he’d chosen the left, he’d have pinsched my wallet.) He broke the skin, right through my ski pants, jeans, and insulated underwear. Startled, I let out a yelp that scared every bird clean out of the count area. We never did find the Mourning Dove, I remained in mourning, and Jerry became my ex-friend until he got rid of the dog.
Of course, the story made the rounds, and I became perhaps the second-most notorious person to be bitten on the butt. David Howells Fleay (after whom the Fleay’s barred frog is named) was nipped on the buttocks by a Tasmanian tiger. It just happened to be the last remaining one in the world, and Fleay was photographing it in the Hobart Zoo. He bragged about his scar for the rest of his life. I don’t.
It wasn’t the first or the last time I limped home, bruised and/or battered, after a day of birding. When I was a kid, I fell out of a tree while trying to retrieve an abandoned vireo’s nest. I broke the branch the nest was on and then a couple of pretty useful (when unbroken) bones. Some refer to this early episode of my birding life as “One Cuckoo Fell Out of the Vireo’s Nest.”
I’ve also had several sprains and strains, plus welts and bruises of every colour and description. Maybe I should have kept a life list of injuries as well as one for the birds.
The list would include other kinds of bites besides the Doberman’s. Nasty bites from Kamikaze bees. From cartoon-sized black flies. From hornets with lasers instead of stingers. From dark, noisy battalions of mosquitoes in Churchill, Manitoba—mosquitoes that ate bug repellant for breakfast and used what seemed to be computer-assisted guidance systems, as eerily effective as smart bombs, to find exposed flesh.
In Brazil, nobody told me that the ticks there are as small as freckles until the first of over seventy festering, itchy welts sprang up on my body in private, sweaty places. It took almost a month for the last one to disappear. And the chiggers! Who knew they could penetrate your wool socks and cover your feet with bites—including between your toes?! Almost drove me crazy.
I’ve somehow managed to incur almost as many injuries from birding as I did from more than fifty years of full contact sports such as football, hockey, and basketball. It all makes me wonder sometimes whether I’ve settled into the wrong pastime.
My worst encounter almost proved deadly. It was a simple outing to an eastern Manitoba wilderness area. My friend Andy and I took the morning off to look for Golden-winged Warblers and Yellow-bellied Flycatchers. (If I were superstitious, I’d say that you should never chase after two hyphenated birds at once.) We found our warbler easily enough, sitting near the top of an ash tree. Buzzy song, black cheeks, yellow wing bars.
Check. Then we saw a Northern Parula and a Nashville Warbler. Good bonus birds.
But there were no Yellow-bellied Flycatchers to be found. We searched all the black spruce bogs to no avail. Whenever we saw even a single black spruce, we stopped, got out of Andy’s toy pickup truck, and looked around. We played a tape and listened for a response. No luck. Then we got back into the truck and moved on.
After a while, our search became a comic routine. Stop the truck. Clamber out. Play the tape. Listen. Look around. Get back in. Bang your elbow. Bump your head. Scrape your shin. Wrestle with the dad-blasted seat belts. No, forget about the dad-blasted seat belts! Move on. Let the car’s bleeping mother-in-law warning system beep away!
Bad idea.
As we rounded a banked turn on a narrow gravel road, I thought I caught something out of the corner of my eye. Andy did too. We both looked up. In a flash, the pickup strayed six inches from the beaten track and hit the soft gravel at the side of the road, and then a slight washout.
Before we could do anything, we careened off the road, hurtling down a twenty-foot embankment. We were bounced around the cab of the pickup like dice in a tumbler, our binoculars, bird guides, scopes, and tripods menacing us about the head and shoulders. Tree branches lashed us through the open windows.
Despite the steep incline, the rocks, and the tree trunks, somehow the pickup didn’t flip over. It should have, but Andy’s coolness and the great god of birding kept the truck upright. If it had flipped, we’d have ended up in two feet of cold snowmelt, upside down, hidden from the rarely used road, and probably seriously injured, or worse. As it was, we were badly shaken and pretty banged up. But we would live to bird another day.
I wish I could tell you that we heard a Yellow-bellied Flycatcher as we waited (for four hours) for a tow truck to arrive and winch the truck out of the deep ditch. About all I heard was Andy’s repeated refrain: “Sam’s gonna kill me!”