My Great vietnam Adventure
My much loved father in law, Jimmy Jackson was known to sing this when faced with a car load of kids to transport here and there: Bingo bango bongo and we going to the congo..! I just could not get this song out of my head as we headed from Dalat on a very comfortable ac bus to Cat Tien National Park, which is en route to Saigon/HCMC. On the subject of bus rides. Dad’s worse nightmare would be to ride a bus here.
Our luxurious coach gave the passengers complimentary bottles of water-wonderful in the heat- but what goes in must come out, and inevitably after an hour or two people began to twitch in their seats. The bus stopped briefly at a bus stop with a seductive WC sign, and everyone got up to nip out for a quick pee; but no the driver blocked the way, a pee was not to be..so we all sat cross legged for another hour until the official pitstop when the whole bus evacuated at top speed and headed in a desperate pack to the loo.
Travelling by bus is a great experience once you are actually in the right bus going to the right palace. In between this there seems to be a pattern of stress points when you have no idea where you are, how to buy a ticket, and what constitutes a proper bus rather than some cowboy with an old boneshaker. The touts and taxi drivers seem to get worse as you go further South in terms of ratcheting up the price and pouncing on you as easy prey when you get dumped in the middle of nowhere.
This happened to us twice, once on the way to Cat TIen and once in the Mekong delta. Here the driver forgot to drop us off and suddenly screeched to a halt in the middle of a hot highway and, grabbing our rucksacks, ran across the very busy dual carriage way beckoning us to follow him. So we did, and I live to tell the tale!
Our arrival at Cat Tien was very eerie. We arrived in the dark and out of the gloom a boatman ushered us onto a tiny ferry that slid silently across the swampy water to the dark jungle on the other side. Images of the film Apocalypse now and the heart of darkness floated in front of me. Perhaps this was some sort of elaborate management game devised by the NHS to help us survive the next round of spending cuts. We were left on the other side in the pitch dark but managed to find a reception and got allocated a ‘shack’ which turned out to be a largish garden shed with beds and an ensuite in it. The main drawback was THE JUNGLE SPIDER.
Now both Sean and I are spider phobics, and on day 2 I trotted into the bathroom to discover a very large hairy Hector (as our family call the spider) winking at me curiously. In his surprise he scuttled at the speed of an express train across the room and settled in the toilet roll holder. This posed a big problem for me and sean re how to go to the loo without having a panic attack. We then spent the next 2 hours peering round the bathroom door to see where he had gone next. Worse was to come when we fortified the bathroom door with towels to prevent his escape into our bedroom, only to find that his hairy cousin was stationed above the dressing table. Fortunately we had mosquito nets round the beds so we besieged ourselves in them for the night.
Creepy crawlies is definitely the name of the game here. Despite the hairy hectors we had a great time . I survived-just- one jungle trek to crocodile lake although the crocs were nowhere to be seen. Our guide told us all about the flora and fauna of the forest and how it is used in medicine and survival. He threw in a few gruesome details about how a prickly plant was spiked with poison by the viet cong in the war to catch out the poor americans. Whilst I nearly expired in the 10 km jungle trek, I thought how absolutely hellish it mush have been for those American boys who didn’t want to be there and had to endure the horrors of jungle warfare. We also hired some ancient bikes which bounced over the potholes very sturdily and got a sense of the different types of terrain. Apparently there is primary (ancient ) forest with trees etc of great age-even 500 years.
The trees are redwood, very old, twisted and sinewy and look like something out of the Lord of the Rings. There is secondary jungle. This is where there has been clearance or, depressingly, destruction by Agent Orange in the war. The extent of damage with this to people, future generations with birth defects, and the environment has been horrendous. We also had a wonderful morning on the primates sanctuary hosted by a very enthusiastic English woman who said this was an offshoot of Dorset’s Monkey world. Their job was to rehabilitate pet gibbons into the wild. The Vietnamese love Gibbons as pets, but do not know how to look after them so this sanctuary offers an active rehab programme. We watched 2 gibbons Da and Lat (after Dalat) who had become inseparable when they were in a cage at a bus station.Funnily, the female, Da already had a mate but chucked him for Lat!
They had an infant and were in stage 2 of their programe which involved surviving in a mini jungle enclosure to help them forage and get fit enough for swinging through the jungle. (perhaps some of us should do this programe too) The biggest problem is how they find a place in the pecking order of territory where there are already wild gibbons. I could go on and on about all the behavioural stuff they have to do to retrain these monkeys. We felt very honoured to have been given so much insight into these particular ones.
Hot and sticky in Saigon, meandering the Mekong Delta and cooling off in Paradise Lost…….more to come-the final chapter!
