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.