Field trip diary 4

Reminiscences, Treeferns, Saola which are there because you believe in them.

22nd March - late afternoon.

Now we are heading south, into the next province. It’s a long car ride and I’m worrying because D- has dropped a bit of a bombshell by saying he has to be back in Vinh on Friday, giving us one day less than we thought. Rather than doing things properly in this province, by spending another half-day in the capital visiting offices, we have decided to stay in the district town and head in and out of villages as we need to, without staying the night. It looks like we might only have one day anyway.

Clusters of tombs appear on the slopes, bed-sized with sloping tin rooves. The first that I see have carved faces. It’s odd because, if we were taking the low road, we’d be noting an increase in tombs in the lowlands too as we crossed the provincial boundary. There’s supposed to be more affinity between the highland peoples across the boundaries than there is between highland and lowland - at least for ancient things like how tombs are made. Still perhaps it’s to do with the provincial government’s provision of graveyard land or somesuch.

These will be the tombs of honoured ancestors who died a good death. Not the hidden urn burials on the slopes of those killed in war or accident and whose ghosts are dangerous.

We pass clusters of the shabby-barked tree that I remember learning, to my delight, is actually a birch. You can see it when you know, though the colour of the bark is plum-dark all over. Asia is funny like that if, like me, you learned jungle in the neotropics and got used to telling German tourists that, yes, oropendolas and caecilians might look like things you have back home but they’re really unrelated. Here, amid Philodendron and Amorphophallus you’ll find something that turns out to be a birch or oak or maple. Pied wagtails in the lotus ponds and cuckoos calling on the old blue slopes.

One time I remember, taking a break on a camera trapping circuit in Nam Đông. Jeremy Holden and I heard that call through the forest and began reminiscing about English meadows, yellow water lilies, banks of cow parsley and the arcs of light that swing so wide through our years back home. In doing so, we imitated the call and the two Katu guys with us laugh. “We call that the dick bird,” one of them said. They couldn’t tell me why or I couldn’t understand the answer. In that place, surely, the cuckoo’s call doesn’t mean may blossom and maypoles and the chance at last to cast a clout or two, to find a place in the long grass and to tell your too-curious little brother you’d been off to find a cuckoo’s nest. Yet still, somehow, the association of the bird with sex. Maybe it’s because of the way the tail jerks up when it calls, Jeremy suggested years later.

…I’m reminiscing, getting off topic. This was the landscape where I did most of my work during what I suppose were my formative years - though I’d have been shocked to hear it suggested at the time. As it turns out the motel-style guesthouse we roll into is a place I’ve been before. I have that odd feeling of suddenly being again in a tiny corner of the world that meant nothing to me but which I happened to have occupied one day years before. My rooms has black Versace logo sheets and an inquisitive cockroach

23rd March

The old proprietor will speak English to me and will not speak Vietnamese because that is what you do with people who look like I do. So I get shouted words and pointing fingers when I ask for a cafe to work in. In the end I come back and work on the motel verandah and have tea. For all that the rooms are typically shabby, the verandah is really rather beautiful. People in this province can make things beautiful and intricate; even though everyone says they can be rather stuffy. There is a myna in a cage which says something I can’t catch, and a big lush tank with some fine swordtails in it. Swordtails can change sex, I think. I read that when I was a kid.

Well, we get breakfast and we get on the road.

This road runs very straight beside very flat paddyfields with the forested hills rising clear behind it. “Was the forest better in your day?” D- asks and I cast an eye upward. “Not really.” I say, and it does look the same. I remember hearing that a postal worker met a tiger on that hill, back when that was believable. Or rather when it was acceptable to believe it - there was never a moment where tiger survival suddenly became incredible, probability has just slowly seeped away. Authorities set their boundaries though, and the boundaries do cut strong. The forest really does look like it did back then, for all that there’s less under the hood, that’s a triumph.

I’m still thinking of that kid - OK calf - on the other mountain. How can I abandon its mother, any sibling it might have? Getting lost in my own dreams, tugging my conscience into interesting shapes, writing, doing up my study, spending time with my family. Just when it needs me? Seems incredibly selfish now. Make it happen! All the bureaucracy? Push through it! What are you made of really to let stuff like that stop you? Anyway, my Hanoi equanimity is no longer a thing; I’m a bad Vulcan.

There are banks of coralfern where the hills are broken. As we round the corner, the plantation that once was pine, where the ‘majestic tree’ once stood, is now keo. Whatever. That’s fine. Plantations are plantations. The “majestic tree” was a young pine remaining from the clearcut, leaning over a flooded field in front of a slope of burnt bamboo. It was in a photo in an earlier version of the Hanoi stairwell where the baby saola picture hung, along with a barbet photoshopped out of someone’s hand and into an elkhorn fern someone thought was a bird’s nest. If you knew how big the fern was, the barbet came out the size of a sheep. I told colleagues this and they thought I was being nerdy and pedantic. I argued that everyone who came up those stairs and knew about the biodiversity of the region would get to the top with the thought “these people do not know what they are doing.” Presenting my case as negative consequences of unfavourable optics. Anyway… I’m wandering again.

The place we stop to talk is next to a hairdresser’s. We sit at one of those long trestle tables sliced from a single massive tree. Something like that would set you back several grand in the UK. Here you can have one if you own a shop out in the sticks and have a decent local council job. We wait. Lot of waiting. It emerges that we had better wait inside. The paperwork we’ve got without descending to the provincial capital is probably OK for a day visit but not everyone will necessarily think so. It’s frustrating because this actually happened the first time I came here - trouble with staying overnight, interviews restricted. I was looking forward, after so many years, to actually spending time in this place. But there we are, I shouldn’t have spent so long climbing up to that village at the beginning of the trip. Racing through three provinces like this is not really how things are done here.

I watch the geckos on the mint green walls. One of them is following a spider that abseils through the corner-space. There’s no way the gecko can reach the spider, which maintains a respectable 10cm distance above its head the whole way. Or so I assume until the lizard does a backflip off one wall, catches the spider in its mouth mid somersault and lands perfectly on the opposite wall. Never seen a stunt like that. I’m delighted.

I send some irritated emails. Ask people to share some perfectly dull information in this country and they act like you’ve asked for their medical history.

Well the people file in. Same people the team met before around (solar) new year’s. I’m disturbed by how young they are. They gave a record of saola sign. No way they’ve seen very much of it before. This place is really the opposite of the last one. Huge sprawling commune, loads of people, meeting those who really know the forest would take weeks here. Probably a mistake to come here in the first place. Sure ‘people from this commune know the forest’ but which people? They’re really nice people though. People are friendly up in these hills.

H- and I go to the house next door where she met a man who’d reported a sighting, across the border. The style of the house is familiar from the first - and maybe last? - time I came here sixteen years ago. It’s a house on the ground with a tiled floor so it won’t be moved but the altar’s opposite the entrance and two dragons are carved over it. On the altar the old jars have painted dragons also and Uncle Ho’s gentle face hangs framed in the middle. When I first saw this it was disturbingly modern compared to the smoked skulls, carved lizards and hanging drums of the Katu guorrl in Quang Nam. Now it seems quaint.

The man of the house comes in with a leech bite streaming from his foot and his wife also. The framed certificates in this house are all hers and H- thinks it’s her who tells him to clam up. He doesn’t deny the sighting exactly but he won’t tell us anything more about it either except that his son was with him and took a photo. Of course we respond to this: can we see the photo? Or H- says ‘a photo of any animal maybe.’ No we can’t but they end up phoning their son who is off doing contract labour on a pig farm in the south. H- met him when they were here before and greets him with a whole ‘remember me’ spiel.

“Do you have a photo of that saola you saw when you were in the forest in Lao with your dad?”

Noncomittal noises

“Or a photo of any animal would do.”

“I have a photo of a chicken.”

We all here it down the line and we all laugh. They’re nice people but they’re not giving us anything. Is it because he’s scared by a foreigner showing up and worried he’ll get in trouble for whatever he was doing when he saw (or maybe killed) this saola? Or is it rather that he was drunk and boastful when he mentioned it before and there isn’t really a saola at all or perhaps it was a serow. We do get that he knows saola have white face markings so - from the earlier description which specified they got a good look at the animal - it seems less likely it was a misidentified sambar but more likely it was Scotch Mist.

Basically, since we got out of the car here, my saola probability meter has been steadily falling as I reinterpret the context of the interviews I’ve only read about before.

Well it seems that we can go south, meet a certain ranger that I know from the old days, and get back to the guesthouse within the day. So we’re in the car again and through the tunnel which has forest on the other side. H- asked if there would be an echo in the tunnel. Sometimes she makes me feel really old but I guess that toddlers in Vietnam mostly don’t have a local woods or park with a tunnel in it somewhere to practice echoes. Is it possible she hasn’t properly heard one?

On the other side, she appraises the forest: “wow, it looks like the movies.” I understand what she means. It’s the tree ferns which do it. I hadn't realised they were missing. These are disturbance tolerant species so they have sprung up like dandelions where the hills have fallen away from the highway. They have been growing while I’m away I’m sure and now the place does look rather like Isla Nublar. H- says Avatar. Bloody Avatar; I suppose it’s alright but people do bang on about it.

Once in Cat Tien National Park in the south, I was happy to meet a man from Saigon who loved coming to the forest. Western colleagues at the time were likely to claim that all Vietnamese had received a complete biophilia bypass and, to be honest, my available counter-evidence was sparse. This guy said “Oh I love being out in the forest, it really puts me in touch with…” (deep breath) “…with the Avatar movie.”

Wandering off again. Keep to the road. I’m assessing this road through the forest differently from H-. I’m noting how sheer the slopes still are either side of it; I’d forgotten. As we’d had sighting reports from just across the border, I’d thought cameras could be placed on passes along the ridge here to snap animals passing over. Now, aside from the fact that those reports are looking more dodgy in the first place, I wonder why any animals would want to do that when they’d run straight into the cliffs cut by the highway as soon as they were in Vietnam. As we go south, into the area of a group of villages moved out in the 80s, I see that everything’s still a thick carpet of vines in the basin, not much recovery. I’d been thinking of an area of fresh new growth that might attract browsers but this didn’t look like a prize worth scaling the cliffs for. Not that I really know what a saola considers a prize. Still. I’ll be reworking my maps a bit.

Well we meet my old friend the ranger in a shady cafe opposite the office. The kind of cafe that’s hung with orchids and does karaoke in the evening. He greets me with a big smile and a big laugh. He has the deepest voice, I think, of anyone I’ve met in Vietnam and he laughs well. He’s keeping well too, just a little greyer. I’m pleased to see him.

Pretty much as soon as we sit down he brings up the urn burial. Oh God. It’s funny now but he points out how everything had gone fine on that field trip until I did what I did and then he couldn’t get the Katu guides to leave the camp. I was probably being awful too; freaking out at the money that had been invested in me being wasted because we turned back. I say I’ll let him tell the story but then I butt in and insist on telling it in my broken way myself. Basically, on the way back down the mountain, I was lagging behind the others when I found a sherd of pottery on the ground. Being all curious naturalist, and usually seeing no other man-made thing in those hills but the occasional war debris, I picked it up and trotted down to the others all “what do you suppose this is?” And the two kids look at the thing in my stupid innocent hand and one of them says “well, sometimes, when someone’s died…” and trails off as he edges off the tree he’s been leaning on and commences to peg it down the slope.

“Ah,” says D- listening to the story as relay-told by me and the ranger, “foreigners they don’t know these things.”

Fact is, I knew perfectly well, because I’d read all ethnographic stuff, that people who’d died a bad death would be interred far out in the forest with their ashes (was it their ashes? I can’t remember) in pottery vessels. The areas ought to be avoided thereafter and of course, of course, no-one would be such an idiot as to actually pick up a bit of the grave urn. I knew all this but I still didn’t know it properly - not as my body knew to jump away from a snake.

Anyway, what I’m here to learn is about feeding sign. This man, I had been told, had confirmed an important recent record of feeding sign and confirmed, furthermore, that it looked just like the feeding sign found at the location of a camera trap detection of saola. None of this, I find out, is true. He has seen no sign recently. And, while there was feeding sign around the historic camera trap location, it was just the ordinary ungulate feeding sign you get everywhere and is mostly probably serow. He’s seen the ‘classic’ saola feeding sign, as described by local people here, exactly once. It wasn’t there and the cameras set around it got nothing.

In his assessment, which I rate higher than that of anyone else I’ve met this time in these parts, there are no saola left. He tells me that’s also the belief of the people in the villages which still know the forest yet. Admittedly these people did say that back in 2009, after which the presence of one was confirmed - but after that there have been rumours of a capture, apparently, though they are only rumours. Anyway the animal could have died of old age by now.

So the only evidence we’re left with for this area is one report of feeding sign, not confirmed by this man. It is not looking anything like as good as it did. Not that it was looking great. I can’t say we’ve covered this area, where I once worked, very well but what I’ve seen is not encouraging at all.

Across the way, outside the office, is a concrete statue of three saola: mother, father and child. The father is placed on a block of stone to keep a noble eye out for predators. Do saola really have nuclear families? Hey maybe, who knows? As we’re talking, a little kid in a camo jacket points across the road and asks his dad about the statues:

“What are those?”

“Saola.”

“What’s a saola?”

“Oh there are lots of them in the protection forest.”

“Their horns are looooong” (he stretches his arms)

“Long. That’s right."

And he lifts his little boy onto the motorbike and they zoom off.

I promise I did not make this up.

OK I think we’re done. I think we’re done with this whole interview trip. There isn’t time for another day’s work and, suddenly, I feel incredibly tired. I just want to be back in the motel room. I want noodles. I want podcasts. I want sleep. I want to send another angry email while pacing up and down in the empty cafe, apparently, after my friend has left. The storm breaks as I write.

Halfway up to the forest, D- thinks perhaps we should turn back, take the other road south, the rain is so strong; but we decide to keep going. And maybe, maybe we will see something back through the forest in the dusk light. Not a saola, of course, but I did once see a serow on this road.

Looking down into a stream, a thin dam of stones forms a shape like a grin. Dusk and lighting on the distant hills but the rain stops. There are no animals on the road but the many many domestic ones which belong to the border army

We stop in the tunnel for the echo. We’ll do that at least. And then back through real night now. Red Venus over the valley. Cinnamon grin of a moon.

Now the gloom I feel has a different, and more familiar feel. Not sharp guilt with a spur to action but a dull feeling of the emptiness under the canopy. Knowing extinction is really out there, stretching away across the ranges, whether as a spectre or as a sentence, I can’t say. What we heard this afternoon reminds me how little a positive indication might mean. Finding sign like my friend found once: that was the dream, but nothing came of it then and he never saw it again. Maybe this new indication. It is always possible that another one has drifted over the border and it will always continue to be possible. The world doesn’t award any boundaries. And, just like here, on the mountain where the calf was, there are rumours of a more recent capture…

Once again I am noticing that I’m avoiding thinking about absolution because I want to preserve the sense that it is a sin. It’s not just myself indulging myself in hating myself. Not just - but it is that too.

Also I’m noticing that the emotions are present but also that they are not intense. One of my first trips in this landscape I found myself, a good vegetarian, biting into the purple meat of a muntjac, spiced with forest pepper while The Passion of the Christ played on the TV. I was crying then and trying to keep my cool. I’m not crying now. We’ve been over this so many times. It’s like being allergic to the sky.

Or it’s like it’s all a game and I want to raise the stakes by feeling stuff.

24th March

The next morning, I feel still wiped out. We can still call in to one commune on the way down, though. The hills on the descending road seem to have been planted with a particular tree that isn’t keo, that looks like it belongs here. I don’t know what it is. I have headphones on and am listening to some light-hearted radio stuff about JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis dressing up as polar bears. I have had enough.

White posts red tips. The odd dog.

Well we pull in to what, it turns out, is HN commune on the road. I visited this commune back in the day and found a new concrete village arranged, in deference to Katu tradition, in a circle. But instead of the houses being gathered in a natural crowd they'd been arranged, as if by a teacher with a whistle, in a huge circle one house thick, making the village far too wide to shout across and leaving the centre filled with Lantana scrub. From there I’d hired people to go by boat down to the Old HN, where the wartime road crossed the higher arm of the river and the beaches were covered in sambar prints. A weird story now suggests that saola emerge from the forest to feed with buffalo in Old HN. I wrote it off initially as obvious nonsense but then began to wonder. Was it possible that, in an old area of cultivation, now somewhat protected, the beasts would settle again into their old haunts with the humans gone from the lower slopes. Wild animals feeding with domestic is hardly unheard of. But we’d failed to track down the man who reported this and, reviewing the report I realised that it sounded distinctly like only footprints had been seen. If that were so, it was instantly worthless.

Well we pull into the drive of a rather wide and elegant house. Long yard covered in tin roof, tree clustered with orchids and great feathery ribbons of river-driftwood enclosing a tea-table and chairs. There’s a day-bed under a thatched roof in the garden, which is unusual. There’s also a chubby little black dog who barks at us incessantly.

Mr N- in his crisp black shirt comes out, pours tea. Tells us about his work dragging back the driftwood so it can be carved and sold to cafe gardens. They carve and paint it into dragons. Of course they do. Can’t let those dragons hide in ambiguity. Except, as I’m noticing this trip, richer classes are swelling in Vietnam, able to consume and transform the wild to their purposes with better taste. Anyway, ‘sure there are saola in the old places’ but he doesn’t go there any more. The people grazing buffalo there are from the commune we were in before.

D- has raced off to do something or other, leaving us chatting. This was where the team stayed in this commune last time, H- tells me. After a while, D- & Hi- come back and D- asks me if I’ve seen inside. So I’m shown.

It’s the first room in the house, like an entryway, in fact it reminds me in one way of the entryway to the Manor at Hemingford Grey, the house on which Green Knowe was based. Not that it is in any way grand or old, or even the same shape; it’s just that it’s full of reverently placed natural objects. Placed, though, not along a sill as signposts along the path in deeper but in pride of place over a great wooden altar. And not collected after their owners have departed in their own way. There is a stuffed douc langur with a mason wasp’s nest on its upturned eye and there are 4 sets of saola horns placed around the altar on the wall. Except that the small one is actually an exceptionally long and smooth pair of serow horns, which is unusual. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a set that could seriously be confused with saola horns before. Really it should be reminding me of the trophy rooms of other manors where the masters brought back big game but, for some reason, it doesn’t.

I wonder what the purpose of the shrine room is. Bowing to the altar, if he does that, would be facing the old lands.

I realise after we leave that these are the only saola horns I saw on this trip and that this dapper little man is the only Katu person I spoke to.

And that is the end. Soon we are down among the big glassy river and the rice paddies where some are wearing traditional conical non and others pink frilly umbrella hats. I am sure the latter are very practical and I’d probably have one myself if I were a farmer there but there’s definitely a certain elegance that has been lost.

The team are heading home and I’m going to stay two days in this city, which I have been missing rather, and then head back to Vinh by train.