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[Carrie McLaren <carrie AT stayfreemagazine.org>]

Courtesy of Lisa Levy:


Vietnam's Vanishing Primates
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/28/travel/VIETECO.html
[ Click "Slide Show" on the right side of this page to see the images.]

By CONNIE ROGERS

I NEVER thought my wildlife tour of northern Vietnam would begin in a zoo.

But last November, when I visited the Cuc Phuong National Park, 75 
miles south of Hanoi, I discovered that most of the animals I'd come 
to see - Vietnam's unique gibbons, leaf-eating langurs and pygmy 
lorises - were just outside the gate. More than 100 animals, 
confiscated from wildlife traders, hunters, pet owners and a 
restaurant, live in the airy tree-shaded cages and five acres of 
semiwild enclosures of the Endangered Primate Rescue Center.

Ordinarily, viewing primates is like trying to watch a party in a 
fifth-floor apartment while you're standing outside on the street. 
But we were all at street level at the rescue center as I walked 
along the paths between cages. In one, two baby gibbons swung on 
boat-hook arms taking noisy dives at their mother. Without looking up 
from grooming herself, she'd pluck one from the air and tickle the 
squealing bundle on the tummy mercilessly before letting it go.

Nearby, two douc langurs, with the porcelain faces of china dolls, 
white whiskers and scarlet calves, fought over food. The loser leapt 
across the cage and embraced a friend, who soothed it with small, 
agile hands. Fifteen different primate species and subspecies live 
there, but some of them are likely to disappear soon.

One-fifth of the world's 25 most endangered primates live in Vietnam, 
and one or more of them will become extinct in the next few decades, 
according to Eleanor Sterling, director of the Center for 
Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural 
History. She had told me that it's still possible to see two of the 
rarest, the Delacour's and the Cat Ba langurs, in the wild, and the 
rescue center is the only place in the world where they both have 
survived in captivity. The man who runs it, Tilo Nadler, has spent 
the last 10 years counting and mapping the few populations left in 
the wild.

I talked to Mr. Nadler, a biologist from Germany, outside the 
electric fence of a semiwild enclosure while we watched two 
white-cheeked gibbons weave a net in the branches and black langurs 
stride through the tops of trees. Eventually, he said, these primates 
can be set free in the park when the ban on hunting is fully enforced.

It's hard to know when that will be. Created in 1962, Cuc Phuong is 
Vietnam's first national park, and it's still a showpiece in a 
country that ranks 16th in the world in the number of plant and 
animal species. Today, it's the largest contiguous piece of primary 
forest in northern Vietnam, covering an area nearly four times the 
size of Manhattan. Each year, according to Mr. Nadler, a section of 
forest the size of several city blocks is cut down and carried off as 
firewood to heat the houses of the people who live around the park - 
500 in the early 60's, 51,000 today.

I'd planned to hike in for several days to see the few Delacour's 
langurs that live in the most impenetrable part of the park. Instead, 
Mr. Nadler suggested I go an hour's drive away to Van Long, where the 
villagers had just opened a wildlife viewing area.

Six of us, four French backpackers and an Australian wildlife 
photographer, joined forces at the park and hired a van to drive us 
there. The narrow country road was hotly disputed by all forms of 
animal and human traffic, and the driver fought his way through with 
an ear-piercing horn. He left us with three farmers who poled us over 
flooded rice fields in woven reed boats. We glided along in blessed 
silence toward a cliff that stood out in the late-afternoon sun.

Just as the light turned deep gold, eight Delacour's langurs emerged 
from the bushes like a troupe of black-clad dancers in peaked caps 
and white shorts. Long feather-boa tails streamed behind them as they 
made breathtaking 30-foot leaps across the vertical stage. Then, as 
if cued by the setting sun, they coalesced into a line and scampered 
single file into the mouth of a cave.

Delacour's and Cat Ba langurs are among the few primates in the world 
that take advantage of the climate-controlled comfort of caves. I 
realized that looking for sleeping caves would be my key to finding 
the Cat Ba, or golden-headed, langur, perhaps the rarest primate on 
earth. Two years ago, Mr. Nadler told me, there were 125 of them; 
this year he's counted fewer than 60.

They live in a natural paradise. Cat Ba Island, their home, is 137 
square miles and the largest of 3,000 islands scattered across Halong 
Bay like a breadcrumb trail leading up Vietnam's northeastern coast. 
Part of a rare karst formation, the islands have bizarre 
weather-eroded shapes and a jewel-like setting that have won them a 
designation as a World Heritage Site.

The morning after my trip to Van Long, I walked to Cuc Phuong Village 
just outside the park to catch the 6 a.m. bus to Hanoi. The red 
running lights of the idling bus shone cheerfully in the gray dawn. A 
woman with a little boy in a bright yellow cap and Tweetie Bird on 
his sweatshirt were the only other passengers.

The gibbons began their early morning calls in the forest behind us 
as the driver revved the motor and set off. The bus swept up 
villagers and their bundles along the road, and was packed by the 
time we got to Hanoi three hours later.

I went straight to a travel agency that advertised tours to the 
"hidden Vietnam" and asked if they could help me find the Cat Ba 
langur. After making some telephone calls, the enterprising young man 
at the desk shook his head. He doubted I'd see a langur, but I asked 
him to make the arrangements anyway.
The next morning, a car picked me up and we sped along a highway 60 
miles to Haiphong to catch a high-speed ferry. Mr. Dzung from the 
Giang Son Hotel, one of about 30 pastel-colored hotels that line the 
harbor in Cat Ba, met me at the dock.

The Cat Ba langurs are heavily hunted even though it's illegal, he 
warned me. They're a prized dish at the island's two wildlife 
restaurants frequented by the more than 100,000 Asians who vacation 
here each year. But if I insisted on seeing the living monkeys, he 
would fix me up with a local boatman who knew where to look. I'd have 
to spend the night on the boat, he added.

This idea didn't appeal to me much because Ta, the boat captain he 
introduced me to, didn't speak English and I wasn't equipped to sleep 
outdoors on the deck. But it seemed silly to be scared off by a 
little discomfort.

I wasn't warned about possible danger until too late. As we agreed on 
a price and I was about to step into Ta's ample 30-foot turquoise 
junk, Mr. Dzung asked me if I had a money belt. I didn't. It turns 
out, while he knew Ta, he couldn't vouch for the man who was going 
along as crew and, once, he said, one of the excursion boats had been 
robbed. As we set off, I reminded myself how completely safe I'd felt 
in Vietnam up to now.

The harbor of Cat Ba is the most densely inhabited part of the 
island. Fishermen, shellfish harvesters and pearl divers in boats 
large and small raft together in city blocks. We threaded through 
them until we reached a floating suburb of single-family homes with 
tree-size house plants and dogs sleeping on docks in front of them.

Ta brought out a plastic armchair for me and I sat contentedly in the 
bow as we entered a fairy tale landscape of karst islands sprinkled 
like green gumdrops across a celadon sea. We passed inlets with empty 
white beaches. The few excursion boats were clustered around Deu 
Island, known as monkey island after the long-tailed macaques brought 
up from southern Vietnam and let loose as a tourist attraction. 
There, people and macaques were mingling on the beach in some 
friendly interspecies contact.

But finding the Cat Ba langur is not at all like landing on an island 
overpopulated with macaques. As we chugged up a long fingerlike 
fjord, the dimensions of the problem became dismayingly clear. The 
shoreline was pleated like an accordion and pockmarked with more 
sleeping caves than I dreamed possible.

Training my binoculars on the wrinkled cliffs that rose 150 feet 
straight out of the water, I saw halong fan palms and the dragon's 
blood tree, two of the island plant species that have just been 
discovered - but none of the monkeys.

As the sun sank, we headed back out to the mouth of the fjord. Ta had 
made it clear from the outset that poachers hunt after dark with guns 
and it wasn't safe to stay overnight in the fjord. So we anchored 
outside near a shrimp farm and the floating shack of a fisherman who 
turned his wailing boombox down when he realized he had neighbors.

From the tiny cabin behind me came the sound of something boiling, 
and before long Ta emerged carrying a plastic table and a bowl of 
noodle soup with unidentified marine life floating in it. It was too 
delicious to question.

I was busy taking notes when Ta joined me for what turned into 
after-dinner charades. He wrote his name in my notebook and asked me 
mine. We settled on Callie, which was as close to the pronunciation 
as he could come; his name was well beyond my reach.

We were the same age - old enough to have been directly affected by 
what the Vietnamese call the American War. He gracefully gave me the 
thumbs up and proclaimed "America No. 1" as if we were a soccer team. 
We both had sons in their 20's; his three were (hand in the water 
flapping) fishermen in Laos.

We stumbled along until we could no longer see hand signals in the 
dark, and Ta brought out a paper-thin mattress and frilly pillow for 
me to sleep on. I woke several times in the night and noticed a 
lantern lighted in the back and water boiling. Ta kept an all-night 
vigil, either to guard against robbers or because I had his bed.
But he was perfectly clear-eyed at 6 a.m., when he sent his crewman 
below deck to beat the engine into action, and we set off to see what 
we could find. Nothing, it seemed, as the hours passed.

The higher the sun rose, the deeper I despaired and the harder Ta 
focused on the cliffs rising perhaps 30 feet from us. Finally, he 
pointed and yelled at the crewman to slow the boat. I followed his 
finger and 100 feet up, four black faces with golden-tipped heads 
looked down at us. Sitting on a ledge, they gave us a worried look - 
heads hunkered down on their shoulders - like Disney dwarfs caught in 
a game when they should have been hard at work.
Ta was ecstatic. He paced the deck chanting "Lucky Callie!," borrowed 
my binoculars and summoned his crewman to have a look.

We could have been hunters, but the langurs didn't run. They stared 
down curiously at the pandemonium on deck and I stared back hoping to 
learn something about these creatures we know next to nothing about. 
But all I saw was that their brown and gray coats blended into the 
cliff and their teardrop heads looked like tree blossoms.

Eventually, they tired of us and jumped from tree to tree until they 
were over the hilltop, four flame-tipped silhouettes disappearing 
into the sky.   

CONNIE ROGERS is a book editor in New York who is studying primatology.