At the Hotpot Bar

A massive lunch at Kichi Kichi. It's like a Jetson's hotpot bar. You snag all kinds of crazy crap from a conveyor belt and chuck it into a hole in the table with boiling soup.

Jenny had a blitz-krieg/ lego tactic of piling up towers of dishes, and then I realize that (holy crap) we have to eat everything or pay a fine.

All-in-all, lots of fun. I'm not entirely sure how they can keep all that meat and fish fresh, but hopefully the boiling water kills most of the germs. One note for us timid foreigners, careful of the eggs--there's a chickie inside.

The Other Chicken

I tentatively nibbled Frog in Singapore, but never thought of getting full on the alien meat. The second time I had to admit: frog is good. Especially when your wife gets free vouchers for the restaurant.
The decor is in extremely bad taste (if you have a conscience about eating frog, that is). We ate like cannibals under a picture from my favorite children's story, Frog and Toad.

We started with batter-fried mushrooms (those delicate ones with very long stems) that were ridiculously scrumptious. The fried frog was good as usual, but spoiled by an egg sauce like watery apple juice and stinking of sulphur--not a good choice.

Curry frog. Very palatable, down to the bread-dipping. Frogs need to be fried to truly sing, figuratively speaking, and frog that's fried and then covered in curry is much better.

That Ol' Timey Opera

Our farewell party at Nam Cat Tien. Some ol' 9 fingered drifter stopped by our table to recite some Vietnamese folk-opera.

1000 Birds!

My friend Bao who took me in on his tour in Da Lat offered me a ride to Cat Tien. How could I say no?

Jenny booked me a cheap bungalow. The accommodations were infinitely better than last time. I had my own bathroom, which didn't drain and was a little gross. At least I didn't have to share the toilet with dog-sized spiders.

The room came with its own giant gecko. Thankfully this one was pretty quiet--they often like to wait until you are asleep and then, with expert ventriloquism, scream "Gecko!" into your ear. They're so beautiful in real life--hard to imagine someone wanting to stuff them into a jar to make alcohol.

Some amazing local birds I'd been dying to see were in my own backyard. This Black and Red Broadbill looks like a muppet, with a stuck-on bill enameled in sky blue and yellow. I also had many woodpeckers, Racket-Tailed Drongos, treepies and Velvet-Fronted Nuthatches.

Bao was here to train the young staff at Cat Tien as bird guides. They showed great promise.

A little lecture on birding history and some morphology.

Taking a break by the riparian habitat outside the Forest Floor Lodge, where we had easy views of Golden-Fronted Leafbirds.

As always, the food at Cat Tien was phenomenal. The menu is pretty small, but the chicken and fish are extremely fresh and well seasoned. Here we tuck into some local banh canh.

In the middle of nowhere, we took shelter in an abandoned hut from a violent thunderstorm. Vietnamese don't share the petty fears of Westerners--while I was thinking of lightning rods and the movie 2012, everyone else calmly sat for a smoke and munched on some sour wild fruit I'd never seen before.

The hut had some neat grafitti. We obviously weren't the first to take cover here.

Well, this is the rainy season. After two days with long, drenching downpours, there were a lot of downed trees to be cleared. The roads were slow-going.

None-the-less, we got amazing views of very sought-after birds from our truck, like Green Peafowl, Junglefowl (the deadly wild chicken), and this Siamese Fireback.

A bird that's very commonly heard but often impossible to see: the Blue-Winged Pitta.

We saw 74 species that trip, not bad for the off-season. After updating my lists, I found that I'd reached exactly 1000 species of birds, which is a strange number to stumble upon.