Qualla: Cat Tien National Park

Cat Tien National Park: Introduction

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before dawn at Cat Tien, the gibbons begin. Their calls travel through the old-growth forest like something between music and a distress signal — a liquid, rising whoop that echoes across the canopy and has no equivalent in the temperate world. Visitors who rise before five in the morning and cross the Dong Nai River by ferry can follow guides into the dark to find the source of that sound, waiting for the light to come up and reveal golden-cheeked gibbons swinging through the crowns of trees that were old when the first European explorers arrived in Southeast Asia. It is, by most accounts, one of the finest wildlife experiences in Vietnam. And it is happening in a park that was nearly lost before anyone knew what they had.

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Cat Tien National Park: A Forest That Survived

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cat Tien National Park sprawls across 720 square kilometers in three provinces — Dong Nai, Lam Dong, and Binh Phuoc — about 150 kilometers northeast of Ho Chi Minh City. It is divided into two sections: Cat Loc to the north and Nam Cat Tien to the south and east, where the park h...

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Cat Tien National Park: The Rhinoceros That Is Gone

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1992, wildlife surveys in the Cat Loc sector of the park detected something unexpected: a small population of Javan rhinoceros, a critically endangered subspecies found nowhere else in mainland Southeast Asia. The discovery triggered the incorporation of Cat Loc into the park'...

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Cat Tien National Park: The Lost Temples

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the northern bank of the Dong Nai River, just outside the Nam Cat Tien sector, archaeologists working between 1994 and 2003 uncovered something that rewrote a corner of Southeast Asian history. A group of temples — belonging to a Hindu civilization previously unknown to schola...

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Cat Tien National Park: The Creatures of the Dark

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cat Tien's wildlife rewards patience and an appetite for the hours before and after daylight. The golden-cheeked gibbon, the park's signature species, sings at dawn. Siamese crocodiles — one of the rarest crocodilians in the world — can be seen at Crocodile Lake in the late after...

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Cat Tien National Park: Across the River

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Entry to Cat Tien requires a ferry crossing of the Dong Nai River — the park is on the far bank from Nam Cat Tien village, and the river is the boundary between the human world and what the forest protects. The first ferry runs at around 6:30 in the morning; the last return cross...

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