What everybody knows
This is some diary really. Sorry for the gaps in the story and for being so grumpy.
13/05/22
I wake up from a dream of a certain Dartmoor wood. In the dream I crept in, as I'd imagined doing with one of the forbidden forests here. Just crept in and put up my tent. It wasn't a proper wilderness vigil this time; people were talking down below in a valley that isn't really there. Also, a big bat was patrolling the tops of the oaks. A noctule, I thought, being in England in my dream. But it danced at the tips of the branches like the bats I saw sipping nectar one evening in Huế.
Bats here mean happiness, or they do in "High Culture". Or they did; it's a Chinese pun. Still I woke up from the dream feeling happy for the first time in weeks. For the first time since I found out what was really in that box.
When, fully awake, I feel a bit of uneasiness. If I went back to that wood, things wouldn't be the same. People wouldn't be the same as before.
I don't make it out to the little mountain but I have a shower and bring a chair onto the balcony and look into the tops of the mango trees. That is more than I've managed most mornings; mostly I've just checked my phone.
We drive to Vu Quang. Eat again in the place with the hanging cow's leg. Stop in a coffee-shop to explain plans. I'm excited about the plans. I have refined our method somewhat from the last trip. We're going to use the Rapid Rural Appraisal - style card-ranking exercise I developed there and expand it. A sleek system that balances the need for some standard data with the constraints of a time and money and the messiness of village life. We'll take "expert opinion" (our opinion) and smooth it like plaster on the cracks. It's going to make a nice map, a green one, I think, with the stream catchments like a string of lily-pads down the range. Lotus-leaf colours, glaucous greens, their intensity indicating our probabilities that saola survive. It will be neat.
The only problem is I don't have permission to actually stay in the villages. There's a new provincial vice-chair and he's taken the cogs out of the system for cleaning, put them back without grease. It's the way. The papers take their own sweet time but maybe the park can help us.
The park, of course, is the park office. It's on the road sign "Vu Quang National Park". Or, in strict translation "National Garden." The sign leads, appropriately, to the office. If you say you're going to the garden, you mean you are going to the office. Conservation NGOs have GIS layers and maps of pooled colour which show 'Vietnam's protected areas' but those are our maps. The offices have maps of individual forest units floating in white emptiness like fantasy islands for fantasy rule. I think our upcoming maps will also be based on forest compartments; a reticulum of them, diversely assigned.
We eat lunch in the park's canteen (again). Loads of food and, again, little metal teapots that contain a mild green liquid that is almost but not quite entirely unlike tea. It is bear-bile-plant rươu, a speciality and supposedly with all the beneficial effects of bear bile on the liver, delivered through the traditional medium of strong alcohol. It is green and tastes bitter, as you would expect. We down shots. Long tables with high-backed chairs made of dark wood. All high-backed chairs are made of dark wood and so is the desk I sit at now. Dependent on drunken promises from park staff and border army chief to get to field so can't work today as have to fall in with their programme which includes a boat trip. Have to stay in a hotel tonight. Not entirely unwelcome. In hotel room now with AC on. Waiting. There's a huge trestle table taking up most of the lobby, made of a slice from a tree bigger than you could find in the UK. It's not even the biggest slice. There's one chair at it. It serves no purpose at all.
The boat trip does happen. Over the sunken villages. We don't get close to the big island though, which I'd promised to check out as a reintroduction site. I do see that they cut the trees in a skirt around the small islands to keep the water clean when it rises. So the islands will crumble like cookies, I imagine. We can see where it's happened. The mountains loom up very big and dark the other side of the lake.
Then dinner. All kinds of pork cooking. More bear-bile-plant rượu. My good mood from the dream is now quite gone.
Back in the hotel I can't sleep and look at stupid stuff on the internet and hearing the little witchy chuckles of the geckoes behind the curtains.
The next day the team go to the village without me. I still don't have papers. I work in my hotel room on the crypto-pig stuff and get updates on the phone. A crisis occurs involving rabbits. Trung forwards me a photo of baby striped rabbits in an iron cage, sent from the field. I go into action mode: how can we acquire them, where can we send them? I raise excitement and moral dilemmas - would we buy threatened species from a hunter if we had to for the breeding programme.... and if they were also tiny fluffy baby rabbits. It's a microcosm of the earlier crisis with the box. A little spot of hope which I spread poisonously to others and then have to dash when it turns out the rabbits are already months dead. The picture had not been taken by D in the village but forwarded to him by the hunter who'd had the rabbits.
In the evening we meet this same hunter (I think) and some friends at a restaurant. We invite them out to do the card-ranking as I cannot go to the village. We lay out the cloud-coloured base map on the tiled floor. Oh yes, saola are still there, maybe, somewhere. Nobody sees them though. Nobody sees their sign. It's like serow sign, though. There are lots of serow. He shows a picture on his phone of one sprawled on its side on a big yellow boulder. He says it's asleep.
That night, as a storm rages and I long to be outside in the clearing air. We are instead sitting in the back room of a bia hơi listening to bright little Mr T- who owns it and was once a ranger of the park. He's one of those people, he says, who tells the truth and so gets no promotions but is always called on when there's work to be done. He was a ranger. He could have built his house out of timber because he was a ranger but he built it out of cement instead. Now maybe he isn't rich but he's famous. Journalists, westerners, people who come to town any time, they want to talk to him because he was there at the beginning with the scientists when the saola was discovered. He shows us an old photo of the ford where the bridge is now. Dugout punts to cross it.
Of course there are still saola in the park, the park is the home of saola so saola are still here. No, not the place where the local people say. Local people won't give you good info. They don't want to tell you things, they are secretive. There are still saola there but not where they say
"Where would you look then"
In the place where he originally wanted to build the saola station before they decided to move it somewhere more accessible. This place will still have them.
His spot is an outlier on our map. Everybody else we speak to thinks that, if they still exist, it's up in the high places near the border. Of course they're still there. Everybody knows.
Later H tells me that, after a lot of rượu that hunter showed them a photo of the other side of the 'sleeping' serow which left them in no doubt about why it hadn't woken up when a hunter got close enough to shap it with a phone. And also, the second big secret: "there aren't any saola left: people just say there are because they think they'll get some advantage from it."
Of course, maybe I've also met good liars. How would I know? But it's hope, not fear, that should be my main concern now.
Next morning the walls of the hotel are damp and big insects fly in to die in the corridors - queen termites too after the rain. They spray so much insecticide now on hotel floors. Anyway they bang themselves senseless on the lights.