Cat Tien National Park

To get in the mood for this first section, I recommend listening to this sound clip that I recorded on the evening when we begin. 

The rain finally came Sunday night at around 3am. It was late, though, and made for a tense evening. The previous four days it had rained all afternoon, washing the accumulated heat and dirt off of the day and cooling the evenings. But Sunday night, I lost my patience waiting around for the rain and went to bed feeling like the day wasn’t quite complete. I had been waiting lazily enough, reading and swinging myself in a hammock out on a deck overlooking the Dong Nai River. The waiting was getting uncomfortable, though. The mosquitoes had already managed to score a few bites on my butt, which I have to point out was covered in two layers of clothing. I retreated back to my bungalow and behind the protection of my mosquito net. By then, even the crickets, cicadas and frogs had gone to bed and it was dead still outside as everyone just kept waiting for that inevitable rain to finally come. I turned on the fan in my room to blow away the tension in the air. It’s amazing how heavy the air feels right before a storm.

Typical afternoon rainstorm on the banks of the Dong Nai River. Cat Tien forest is on the opposite bank.

I felt like I had barely closed my eyes when I woke up to thunder in the distance. It was a welcome sound and I lay in bed listening to it gradually get closer. Within a few minutes, the thunder was peeling directly over me, starting just behind my head and continuing down past my toes.  I waited for the drops to start falling, but they didn’t. Despite the lingering anticipation, I fell back asleep. The next time I woke up, I heard footsteps approaching my bamboo bungalow. I held my breath and strained to listen where they were headed. They approached my bungalow, then started heading away from it, then sideways, parallel to my room then… on my roof? Eventually, my senses sharpened and I realized that the footsteps were in fact the rain beginning to fall around me. The slow, heavy start transitioned to a steady rhythm that played nicely on the thatch roof above me. With the tension finally cut, I fell back into a deeper sleep.

I dreamed of dinosaurs that night: specifically, a T-Rex wreaking havoc on a ship. It was like “Jurassic Park: The Lost World” except that my brain was playing all the scenes that took place on the boat that the movie didn’t show. My dream ended differently, too, with the boat finally pulling up to a curb along a Mexican sea-front plaza. The shallow water caused the ship to tip over, releasing its deadly cargo into the party town. I can only imagine that my dream was (at least partially) inspired by Cat Tien National Park. The forest I spent the last 5 days in is a prehistoric kind of place that seems to be fit more for giant lizards than soft skinned humans. The giant “Tung” trees, for example, must have been around for the dinosaurs - they kind of look like dinosaurs. Their long, ascending roots are like dragons, with smaller, secondary roots coming off the main roots that make for believable looking legs. Maybe my dream influenced that simile, though. A few days before my dream, I had walked around a Tung tree comparing its giant roots to flying buttresses of some medieval church or castle. I like the dragon simile better though – it’s more likely you’ll see a dragon in that dense, ancient forest than a gothic cathedral.

A massive root coming off a massive Tung tree.

I celebrated my last day in the Cat Tien forest by crossing the length of the park to Crocodile Lake. I didn’t actually see any crocodiles there, but that didn’t take away from the experience. I rode my bike and walked through dense jungle for about 3 hours to get there and the grand expanse of the lake was a dramatic contrast. I don’t tend to get claustrophobic, but walking through Cat Tien tested the limits of my senses. My eyes couldn’t do much more than watch the path directly in front of me. As soon as I looked up to either side of me, I was blinded by green. In the beginning, I’d try to use my eyes to follow up on clues my ears were receiving – a rustling tree here, a flutter of wings there – but my eyes usually couldn’t provide much help.  Once, while watching a tree top shake violently, I saw a monkey fly through the air on its way to another tree, but other than that my eyes were pretty much useless. By the end of my trek, I was relying on my ears. Instead of trying to spot birds through the dense leaf cover, I stopped periodically to listen to the symphony of calls all around me. At Crocodile Lake, though, the jungle opens up to an expansive wetland where the eyes finally got to join in again: cranes circling over the water looking for a place to land, brightly colored birds darting over the tops of the reeds and red-headed ducks waddling through the shallow wetlands.

Lava stone footpath to Crocodile Lake - chiseled and placed by hand.

I returned to the lodge sweaty, muddy and beat. It was 3pm and hot and I had just covered 20 miles over bumpy, muddy roads and narrow jungle paths. I was hungry and thirsty, as all I had during my trek was a Cliff Bar and two bottles of water. Luckily, the lodge I was staying at served an awesome river fish steamed in pineapples, tomatoes and peppers. After I devoured that and finished off a liter of water, I crashed into bed to sleep off the heat of the afternoon. The bamboo bungalows make air conditioning futile, but the gaps in the wall allow natural ventilation to keep the rooms cool. I actually visited another lodge down the road that had brick built rooms and a/c, but they were still hotter than my little bamboo bungalow. The technology may be a thousand years old, but it works.

My humble bungalow. The stockings hanging behind the chair are my leech socks. 

Steamed fish from the river right below this table. 

Later that evening, the owner of the lodge I was staying in showed me around his garden. He had planted about 40 hardwood trees that would grow there for over a thousand years. Even though the lodge had only been open for two years, the owner was obviously planning for a long future. The trees he was planting would barely be adolescents (in tree years) by the end of his life. But that’s the cool part about forests, I guess. The giant trees that are already over a thousand years old transport you back in time – even if not quite back to the dinosaur era, at least back to the gothic age. The little saplings that reach up to your chest and are as big around as your thumb transport you a thousand years into the future. Who knows what the banks of the Dong Nai River and Cat Tien national park will look like a thousand years from now. I hope it still looks similar. It was nice to have my weekend there in the middle of both.

The full span of a Tung tree.