Nov. 6: Hike to the Marsh



Greasing up the Gators



At 6:00 AM we were up and headed for breakfast.  The storm was over and the weather was warm and humid.  It was the type of morning that you knew the rest of the day was going to be hot and very humid.  We had a Viet Nemeses breakfast of beef noodle soup before we started to suit up for our jungle hike.  Suiting up consisted of putting on our blue gators and greasing up.  Gators are cloth booties that come up just below the knee.  You put them on, and then you put on your hiking shoes.  Once on, you use a stringent Vaseline type salve around your shoes and around the top of your gators.  The purpose of this process is to keep the leeches from crawling onto your shoes and up your legs or, because leech live on the underside of the leaves, from jumping from the bushes to your legs.  The salve around the top of the gators is to the leeches from crawling up your leg if they get by the ring of salve on your shoes.  Next we sprayed ourselves with bug spray to keep the mosquitoes away and lessen the change of malaria.  Once we completed getting gators on and salved, we boarded the open air truck and headed for the trail head with our resident guide who was also a naturalist.



Tung Tree at its Base



The hike today is a 10K round trip to a wetlands area where they have an ongoing project to repopulate the alligators.  During the hike our guide pointed out 600 year old Tung trees, coffin trees where local natives used to bury their dead, rattan vines used to make furniture and many types of insects.  The hike was two hours of hot sweaty walking along trails that were created and used by both the Viet Cong and the South Viet Nemeses army who had fought in this area.  By lunch time, we arrived at the marsh area, crossed a rickety walkway and ended in a wooden structure overlooking the marsh.  The lookout had chairs and tables where telescopes and camera tripods could be set up to watch and photograph the birds and other wildlife.  A lazy crocodile lounged in the water just off the small boat dock in front of the lookout.  Lunch was being prepared over an open wood fire just beyond the lookout building by the local Viet Nemeses who worked on the restorations of the marsh area.  They were preparing fresh fish, rice and chicken.  The meal was delicious as is most outdoor meals after a long hike.  It was a beautiful spot to put our feet up, play with the cat and watch the beautiful butterflies and birds.  Once we were well fed and rested we started our trek back to the truck.

Lunch Being Prepared

View of Marsh from Overlook

We were about 500 meters from the end of the hike; our students were about five minutes ahead of us when we saw someone yelling at us and waving his arms.  Since this person was yelling in Viet Nemeses we had to get our guide to translate what was going on.  We were told that the students had been attacked by giant hornets as they passed this section of the trail. The person waving at us was the truck driver dressed in plastic we could determine if the hornets would calm down and return to their nest.  Four of the 8 students had been stung, some multiple times.  They were in the truck and had been given Benadryl to help ease the pain and a doctor had been called to meet us at the lodge.   We had been stopped short of where the incident had occurred.  After about 20 minutes, our naturalist arrived using a new path that he cut through the jungle and we followed him to the waiting truck bypassing the area of the trail where the hornets were active.  All of us returned to the lodge to wait for the doctor.  The doctor arrived , treated the students and told us the stings would be painful, but not serious.

The day ended with dinner and another rain storm that ended about the same time as dinner.  The weather appeared to be clearing so we were able to take the evening tour where we saw a few deer.  By now everyone was ready to call it a night.