Monkey Balmed
Rod and I flew north from Hue to Hanoi. Hanoi is quite different from Saigon as is north Vietnam compared to the south. Hanoi is a smaller city with very few tall buildings and it has an older feel about it due to the architecture and lack of modernity. Oddly, we are finding that north Vietnam has many hip coffee cafes, but there is no such creativity for the food establishments. Of course, it similarly has the million plus motorbikes racing everywhere and basically everything spoken and written is in Vietnamese. There is a central lake and it appears the same motorbikes go around it non-stop – Vietnam’s Le Mans! As with Saigon, there is basically no street parking in Hanoi so that every inch of the roads can be used for traffic. “Sidewalks” is a joke because the sidewalks are used as parking lots for the motorbikes and many businesses flow out of their buildings and onto the sidewalks for display, seating and cooking areas. The next morning we took a car and a hydrofoil to Cat Ba Island in Halong Bay to try and find one of the rarest primates in the world – the Cat Ba Langur.
Arriving to Cat Ba after seeing a bit of the beautiful Halong Bay was dissapointing because it is quite a mess with tall, ugly hotels. Cat Ba is a quick vacation spot for the families of Hanoi and it reminds me of a dumpy New Jersey seaside destination in the 1970s minus the minature golf. It was a fishing village populated with Chinese until they got up and fled. It is not a place I care to ever see again. The park is in the interior portion of the island and has a lot of pressure from the local population. The park is absolutely beautiful with more limestone karsts covered with tropical forest. We quickly discovered that the langur population is down to 63 in seven different groups, two of which have no male and thus currently have no chance of breeding. The sixty-three langurs’ locations are kept secret so we quickly realized there would be very little chance of finding them.
Our walks in the park, though, were quite nice and we discovered birds, insects, plants, reptiles and amphibians. There is no one at the park to really support tourists who really want to see and learn anything. We asked about that and there is no interest in Vietnam for that kind of service and anyone who was educated enough to provide it would be better off finding another job rather than waiting around for the odd tourist wanting that kind of service. As we have already seen, conservation is not something in the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese population. As we were walking out the first day we met two German women that work for the NGO trying to save the Cat Ba langurs. The langurs have been poached by the hundreds for use in a traditional medicine called monkey balm. I tried looking up this monkey balm stuff on the internet and found almost no information which bothers me since it is one of the main reasons for the slaughtering of many monkeys to the point of extinction as in the case of the Cat Ba langur. We asked about seeing the langurs and they laughed telling us that a four-day trip into the forest only has a 30% chance of finding them. I’m glad they are there trying their best, but I have to wonder if their effort is really going to make a difference.
The business of trying to save one species seems impossible to me unless it involves more than just that species. Trying to save a very endangered species when their habitat is being destroyed or when locals only see the species as something to make money from is noble, but does it really save the species for more than a few years or decades. In this case, are the NGOs working on testing monkey balm to see if it a real medicine? If it is real, have they thought of synthesizing a monkey balm or producing it from the many non-threatened pest monkeys that are exterminated each year around the globe? Are they trying to educate locals as to how they can make more money from the living species rather than using it up until extinction? Are they working with the government to make conservation a national priority and launching the programs to put it in the hearts and minds of the citizens? We talked about tourism and how it can help save the Cat Ba langur (working quite well with the gorillas, chimpanzees and to a lesser extent with the orangutans), but the two researchers did not believe it is a solution here in Vietnam. I left thinking that they really do not get an all-encompassing solution and believing the Cat Ba langur has a snowball’s chance in Hell of surviving, but I am glad they are dedicated to learning more about this species and trying to keep them alive.
I wish I could have seen a country like Malaysia in the 1970s to confirm what I believe is true about conservation. My belief is that a country can only make conservation a priority of its people if it is wealthy enough to do so. Unless there is a demand internally to protect the environment, habitat will continue to be lost and there is no interest in saving the uniqueness that any country has with respect to nature. I know from seeing Borneo that there was a time when there was no respect for their natural gem (I promise to get back to Borneo stories – they are written, but not complete and my mind is in Vietnam now) and now the Malaysians are quite serious about saving Borneo as evidenced by the large numbers of Kuala Lumpur residents that visit Sabah to see the forests, mountains and animals such as the orangutans. And the people of Sabah are now making money from the Malayasian and international visitors to make saving what is left a major priority. Malaysia of the 2000s has conservation in its peoples’ hearts and minds and it is just in the nick of time to save what has not been destroyed. Whereas Vietnam does not have that conservation priority in the 2000s and if they are able to become a wealthier country by maybe 2030, I do not know if anything will be left to conserve.
Back to Hanoi before we head north to near the border with China where we will visit a couple of very remote reserves…
Tags: Asia, vietnam
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