11/06/08
This is the National Park that we speak of with despair; everyone else in the country, including the park’s own ‘management board,’ recognise that its forests are just a classy backdrop for the tourist town. As in any of Vietnam’s designated tourist spots: a range of identikit businesses all offer the same thing that everyone is acknowledged to want and what they want here is wild meat. Any of the pastel-painted high hotels will give you a laminated menu which is organized by species. You can, supposedly, get serow, sambar, monitor, silver pheasant, wild pig and Generic Small Carnivore, either with garlic or with chilli and lemongrass. In practice, most of these will be ‘off’ on any occasion and, very likely you’ll actually be served a domestic substitute; there being little control even in the sales of legal food. But that is normal when consuming stuff in Vietnam. You show you’re not another rube by knowing the place that serves the real deal, even though that place looks just like all the others. Failing that, you just go for the one that’s busiest. You will, of course, order a plate of chayote greens to go with your wild meat because the foggy weather here is supposed to be perfect for them. Frames for the vines cover the wasteground between the little hotels and, in June, they’re hung with the pale squashes which look like a shrunken, eyeless muppet heads and taste a lot like courgette. In Vietnam the greens are more popular.
Some families may manage the slog up the stone steps to the TV tower but otherwise no tourists go into the forests. In fact, there are no hiking trails in Vietnam’s national parks, only hunting trails; I’m still not really sure why. The only tourists who do go into the woods in here seem to be birders, because this is still the best known spot for some wide-ranging but difficult mid-elevation species. For birders living in Hanoi, it’s our most accessible forest, although we have to hire cars to get there early enough. Usually when we arrive, we can still see the lights of moth traps on the slopes; faced with the diminishing returns from larger prey, some hunters have just moved down the food chain, rather than moving further away. Pinned specimens go to both collectors and tourists.