After working as tour guides at Cat Tien National Park for years, several people have become experts and are called ‘The walking dictionaries’ of this jungle by local people and tourists due to their thorough knowledge about animals and plants as well as their wilderness living skills.
Dang Quang Trong (1st,left), a guide of the Cat Tien National Park, is guiding an expert of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in a tour in the Bau Sau (Crocodile Lake) Wetlands and Seasonal Floodplains in the national park in Dong Nai Province. Photo: Tuoi Tre
Cat Tien National Park is an important national park spread over three provinces, Dong Nai, Lam Dong and Binh Phuoc, approximately 150 km north of Ho Chi Minh City. It has an area of about 45,000 hectares and protects one of the largest areas of lowland tropical rainforests left in Vietnam, according to Nguyen Van Dien, the director of this park.
As home to numerous kinds of flora and fauna, many of which are rare and valuable, Cat Tien National Park has inspired those who love jungles in Vietnam, just like our tour guides. Some of them are always enthusiastic about birds, while others prefer developing their wilderness living skills. All are helping both Vietnamese and foreign tourists and scientists study jungle lives.
‘The walking dictionary’ of birds
Vu Trong Duyen, 63, who has been a tour guide in Cat Tien National Park for 20 years, is the best bird specialist in this area. He can easily recognize types of birds via their whistles, colors and flying shapes.
Over this time period, he has acquired wide knowledge about all kinds of birds within the area.
“The Orange-necked Partridge, also called Arborophila davidi, for example, is a rare kind of bird and one of the special ones living in Cat Tien Park”, Duyen shared. “There is only one couple of this tiny bird living on each hill. Therefore, if you want to see them, you should know exactly where their living area is or you will be lost in this jungle”, he smiled.
Duyen also guids tourists through the forest to look at many other kinds of birds such as Green Pigeons, Great Hornbills, Water Kingfishers as well as Coppersmith Barbets. All were rare and hard to find, yet he spots them successfully almost every time and is the only one who can do so in Cat Tien.
Therefore, Duyen is always trusted by many tourists and scientists, such as the American professor who takes his students to the park to study tropical rainforests twice a year.
When asked about the key to obtaining thorough knowledge of birds, Duyen said without thinking, “It is my love for this forest”.
He shared, “My camera has an eight-gigabyte memory card, which contains all kinds of bird pictures that I took during my trips as well as from some tourists’ and scientists’ books. I usually review these photographs in my leisure time, so I can remember the particular features of each bird.”
“My working hours are whenever my customers need me. Sometimes they are from 4am to 9pm because animals like gibbons and deer only appear in the early morning and late at night. However, sometimes we can’t find anything after walking about 30 kilometers, so I always feel worried during every trip”, he added.
“Tarzan” of Cat Tien Park
Chung Giao Duc, another outstanding tour guide in Cat Tien National Park, is a wilderness living skill trainer. He guides those who love to live like “Tarzan” in the jungle. During the trips, Duc has to take care of his customers and show them how to find food and water as well as to avoid noxious mushrooms. “You must know how to distinguish between edible and inedible mushrooms, fruits and plants to survive in the jungle”, Duc said.
While sharing skills to find the way in rainforests, he said, “When entering the forest, if you are not a local, you should bend grass and small branches along your way. Therefore, when you return, you will have an exact direction to follow”.
“However, in case you struggle to see the way in the evening, you should follow the sign of trees. Every tree in the forest has two different surfaces, which we usually call ‘East face’ and ‘West face’. The ‘East face’ is smooth and clean because it is lighted by the sun all day, while the other is covered by moss and moisture,” he added.
Furthermore, Duc also shows customers how to avoid pythons, snakes, and mosquitoes, and how to hide from dangerous animals.
Tourists and scientists visiting Cat Tien Park are surprised by these tour guides’ skills, knowledge and especially their English. They can exchange experiences with foreigners about Latin names and outstanding features of most of birds and animals.
Duyen said, “I got in big trouble when I spoke English with foreigners in the beginning because I did not have a chance to study a lot when I was young. Therefore I used to carry a notebook along every time I guided them and wrote down everything they said so that I could study and gain forest knowledge from them.”
Duyen, Duc and Nguyen Van Tam, another junior colleague who ignored the money he could have earned when working in Ho Chi Minh City four years ago, are living their desired lives in a wild forest and helping many scientists study rare and valuable animals and plants.
Cat Tien National Park, protected initially in 1978 in two sectors, consists of two adjacent segments, separated by agricultural land. They are Cat Loc, in the north, and Nam Cat Tien, which is visited most often.
The park suffered badly during the Vietnam War when it was extensively sprayed with herbicides like the defoliant Agent Orange; however, further damage was done by logging up until the 1980s.
To this day, although trees have not yet grown back, these areas have been covered by extensive bamboo and seasonally flooding grassland. The wetland is bounded to the east, south and west by dense, humid evergreen forests with semi-evergreen and deciduous forests in the park itself. To date, more than 1,610 plant species have been recorded, from 162 botanical families.
The fauna of Cat Tien National Park includes: 105 listed mammal species, 351 species of birds, 120 reptilian and amphibian species and 130 species of freshwater fish. The park also supports nearly 460 species of butterflies and numerous other fascinating insects.