Cat Tien National Park — Hotel in Xã Nam Cát Tiên

My friend and I spent 2D/3N in Cat Tien Nationalpark. There are several activities you can do. Here I am gonna explain the main ones and give you my opinion:

Walking/Hiking There are some nice walkways and bushwalks in the park - longer ones and short, easy ones. As short walks I can recommend visiting the botanical garden (1,5-2 hours walk) and the Tung tree (1 hour walk).

Boat trip In our opinion the best booked tour you can do. You go along the Dong Nai Rover by boat where you can see lots of animals like different birds (e.g. kingfisher), warans and sometimes monkeys. The are different tour operators: the main one at the National Park and the one at Green Bamboo Lodge Hotel. We did the afternoon tour of the Green Bamboo Lodge Hotel which was great. We were alone and the boat driver was showing us the animals and explained as good as he could in English the area and the birds. Also we saw the sunset on the boat what was incredibly beautiful.

Night Safari This tour is offered by the National park. And it is absolutely NOT worth it! You sit in a very loud jeep, following a road that is not even in the jungle and the maximum you get to see are some deers. Totally boring! Even if it's cheap it's not worth the money and time.

Crocodile Lake This tour we enjoyed a lot. You can rend bikes at the National Park. With those you ride 9km through the Jungle on a paved road to the crocodile lake parking area. Here you park your bike and then walk 5km to the lake. Return the same way. The tour lasts 6-7 hours and is very beautiful. The lake is stunning and you see many birds and crocodiles (even at day time). The hike there is also very lovely and on a paved path directly through the jungle. Here you see many animals (monkeys, birds, spiders) and really feel the jungle. There is an entry fee of 10$ for the lake but it's worth it.

Comment about the bikes: yes, as others have already written, the bikes are not good. There are about hundred bikes to rent though. So if you take a few minutes, check the brakes, the tires, the chain and choose wisely, you will find one. The tour to the crocodile lake is not very difficult since the path is paved and flat. For that the bikes are totally sufficient. Also they only cost 5$ for the whole day. What do you expect?!

Hundred trunked tree We combined this one with the crocodile lake. Take your bike here and enjoy the beautiful ficus tree with it's many trunks. It's 16 km one way (on the way you will pass the crocodile lake).

Gibbon Trek This tour is the most expensive and.most famous one. You go with a small group of 4-5 people into the park and look for gibbons. The tour starts at 4.30 am and goes until 7.30 am. At first I booked it but after the experience with the night Safari I cancelled because I was afraid it was some tourist trap as well. That's why I cannot offer an opinion about it. For me the negative points are that it costs 40$, starts very early in the morning and that there is no guarantee to see the gibbons. Also if you take the bike to the crocodile lake and walk a bit in the jungle you can see monkeys for free. So for me it was a good chance to not do it.

Comment to entry fees: It's true what others wrote that every attraction in the park costs extra. You pay around 2$ for the boat to cross the river to the park. The bikes cost 5$ for a full day and the crocodile lake 10$. Of course the booked tours cost extra as well. The focus tree and the tung tree are for free though. I don't see the payment as a big problem though. There are national parks where you pay a pretty high entry fee. In Cat Tien you don't have that but only pay for what you actually want to do and see. The prices are also totally reasonable I think.

In summary, visiting Cat Tien National Park is recommendable. 2 full days (3 nights) are enough to see the most. The jungle is impressive and there is lots to see and do. The paved roads are somehow disturbing at first but if you leave the road into the jungle,...

upfront: this national park only gets only 2 stars because of the rude staff at the reception (2 stars removed) & the very unclean bathrooms or almost wrecked up rooms they offer (1 star removed) our vietnamese cousin booked the reservation for us, because sadly nobody taught us vietnamese when we were little so we can't speak it ourselves. when we arrived there, they couldn't find our booking (luckily we did an upfront payment for one room out of three & my brother showed him the receipt). when my mother tried to translate for us she couldn't understand his dialect (she's from the south) & had to ask him multiple times to repeat what he just said. she had to flee from vietnam when she was 16, so there are also some words she never learned & wasn't in her homecountry for more than 40 years! so there's no need to be annoyed with & almost yell at her! because my brother didn't like how he talked with our mother, he continued to talk with the guy behind the counter. then they told us that the whole package that my cousin booked isn't available, just the afternoon safari tour, the night tour & visiting the rescue center in the morning. no other options. at the safari tour later on my brother was chatting with the (very nice) english guide about birds, because he's an biologist. so the guide told him that there are bird watching tours & also one with wild gibbons, that he can rent a bike to go bird watching on his own (so he can take better pictures of them) or go visit an island. so after the tour we went to the reception to ask about the gibbon tour & if there are any space mirs left (only 4 people per tour & we were 6). very annoyed & not even looking at my brother, he asked him which time HE WANTS, so my brother answered "6 in the morning". even more annoyed the guy from the reception said, "no! only 7 a.m.!" why does even ask which time we prefer when there are only fixed times? this morning we had the same guide for the rescue center tour & he told my brother, that there are books available at the reception that he could buy. when my brother went to the counter, the guy at the reception said to his co-worker in vietnamese "what does HE want again?!" maybe we can't speak vietnamese, but my brother is currently learning it so he understands it quite a bit! i don't know what problem the receptionist had with us, maybe because my siblings & me are half vietnamese & can't speak our mothers language (it's not like we choose not to speak it). i don't think he "only had a bad day" because the exact moment he got unfriendly was when my mother tried to speak with him in vietnamese, because of HIS weak english skills. after that he was very arrogant to us & thats not how you treat PAYING CUSTOMERS! the tour guide was very nice, because he noticed that my mother was leaving out important stuff while translating it for my only vietnamese speaking aunt so he guided us in english AND vietnamese. he got a good tip for this extra effort! also the park is very beautiful & really worth visiting! the other staff was very nice & polite to us (even with language barriere sometimes) & everyone was trying their best to give us a nice stay, even the driver from the safaris went out of his way to give us a wonderfull time (helped the young waiter with serving our drinks, so we don't have to...

We spent 3D2N there. The park has website and is quite responsive so it is easy to plan our trip. First day Saigon-Nam Cat Tien Park: We checked in to our room which is inside the park and had lunch at Tre Vang restaurant, beef sauteed forest harvested veggies. The room with queen bed and separate bathroom is clean, very spacious and well ventilated. We then headed out to rent bikes and began exploring around. The park is quite easy to navigate and has clear signages on the road to signal the sightseeings located in the woods. We had to park our bikes outside on the pathway and walk in to the forest. Here we encoutered the leeches for the first time. Make sure to wear high ankle socks and long pants. We ended our day with the satisfying Lau Ca Lang, hotpot with Lang fish, bamboo shoots in sour and sweet broth. Second day Crocodile Lake: Breakfast with hearty Bun Suon Moc at Tre Vang restaurant. We took a jeep 13km into the woods and continued to trek for 5km more to reach Crocodile Lake. We was very much welcomed by the forest guards after being much traumatized by the leech apocalyse on the way trekking there. We chose to stay in a wooden house looking out to the lake with separate bathroom. Pretty much private and poetic when it rains. We got served lunch and dinner in the concept of 50 shades of cooking fish caught in the lake by the forest guards. They also took us around the lake to take in the landscape. At night, we could see the crocodiles emerging and hunting. However, the stary night was the most unforgetable moment as we have never seen that many while living in the city. Third day Crocodile Lake-Nam Cat Tien Park-Saigon: In the early morning, the forest guard fed the crocodiles with all the leftover food and we could see them in day light more clearly. The landscape was quite blurry because of fog but somehow to me it was more captivating. We equiped ourselves quite hard to cope with the 5km trekking nightmare, but turned out it was not as bad as the last time, maybe because there were lots of people going in to the lake on our way out, the leeches got them first already =D. Lunch with roasted Lang fish and forest harvested veggies Overall, the nature is worth all the hassles with leeches. The food there was a highlight of the trip as well, some of them we can't find elsewhere but there. The staff and forest guards were overworldly nice and helpful, glad to meet and...