Bạch Mã

I rented a motorbike in Huế and drove south along Highway One, then turned west at the Cầu Hai lagoon and climbed into the Bạch Mã massif on a narrow road that gained a thousand metres in sixteen kilometres. The temperature dropped as I rose — ten degrees by the time I reached the summit plateau, where the cloud was so thick that visibility was down to twenty metres and the rhododendrons along the roadside were dripping with moisture. At the top, a French colonial villa sat in the mist, its plaster walls green with moss, a sign identifying it as a historic site without explaining whether anyone intends to restore it or simply document its disappearance. I sat on its collapsed veranda and ate a bánh mì I had bought at the base of the mountain, listening to hornbills somewhere in the trees above and thinking about the particular sadness of something beautiful being reclaimed.

Bạch Mã National Park covers a section of the Trường Sơn mountain range that separates the coastal plain from the Mekong watershed, and its altitude and position at the meteorological border between north and south create a botanical complexity that is genuinely extraordinary. The park shelters over two thousand plant species, three hundred bird species, and the last significant populations of saola — the extraordinarily rare large mammal, related to cattle, discovered by science only in 1992 and almost certainly extinct in the wild now, or very nearly so. I did not see a saola. No casual visitor does. But the knowledge that something that rare was walking these ridges until recently — and perhaps still is — gives the forest a quality of possibility that changes how you walk through it.

The trails from the summit plateau descend to a series of waterfalls — Đỗ Quyên, the most spectacular, drops three hundred metres in stages through a ravine so narrow that the spray from one level wets you before you reach the next. The descent takes three hours from the top and you emerge at the bottom thoroughly damp and scratched from the trail’s sides, which are overgrown in the way national parks get when visitor numbers aren’t enough to keep the vegetation back. I take that as a compliment. Bạch Mã has kept its edge while Phong Nha has become polished, and the difference is worth knowing about.

The park entrance is at Phú Lộc, about forty kilometres south of Huế and sixty north of Đà Nẵng, which makes it easily combinable with either city. There is a guesthouse at the summit — basic, cold at night, and entirely appropriate for a mountain that gets three meters of rain per year. The birdwatching along the summit trail at dawn is some of the finest in Southeast Asia: bar-backed partridge, crested argus pheasant, green peafowl in the lower zones. A serious birder could spend a week here and not exhaust the list.

When to go: March through August is the window when the access road is reliable and the waterfalls are at full volume. The summit receives significant rainfall year-round but the worst flooding comes in September through November. February and March are often clear at the top in the mornings before cloud builds; the rhododendrons bloom in March and give the whole ridge a colour it doesn’t have at other times of year.