Take a poled boat into Vân Long to look for Delacour's langur

A boat that mirrors, a monkey that watches

The only one on Earth

A dark langur with a pale grey ruff holds a stem while feeding among broad green leaves — Charles J. Sharp · CC BY-SA 4.0

A langur with black limbs and a white rump patch sits upright on a bare grey cliff face — Charles J. Sharp · CC BY-SA 4.0

A langur with a very long tail perches on a grey limestone face, its pale rump patch catching the light — Charles J. Sharp · CC BY-SA 4.0

A small buff and brown chat with a dark head perches on a broken reed stem — Charles J. Sharp · CC BY-SA 4.0

A rust-breasted stonechat grips a diagonal green stem against a blurred wall of reeds — Charles J. Sharp · CC BY-SA 4.0

A shallow, still, flooded plain between limestone towers, worked from flat-bottomed boats poled by hand along fixed routes, in a wetland nature reserve about 16 km north of the city. It is the flattest and quietest water in the province, and the least like a tourist ride.

Why it's unique

Delacour's langur is Critically Endangered and lives nowhere on earth outside a small area of northern Vietnam. A 2022 survey recorded 44 groups comprising 308 individuals in the Vân Long–Đồng Tâm area, about 60 per cent of the entire species, and this wetland reserve is where you can go and look for them.

The looking is as unusual as the animal. There is no hide, no jeep and no engine: you sit in a flat-bottomed boat poled by hand across a flooded plain that is only a few tens of centimetres deep in places, which is why the surface behaves like a mirror and why the animals tolerate the boats at all. The langurs are primarily terrestrial for a leaf monkey and the males stand watch on rocky outcrops, so you are scanning bare grey limestone above the waterline rather than searching canopy, which is the single most useful piece of search advice for the site.

Before you go

Bring binoculars. Almost nobody does, and almost nobody sees the langurs as a result. Go early morning or late afternoon, and scan the bare rock above the waterline rather than the trees. Because this is a protected reserve the boats keep to set routes and you do not land where you like, which is a feature rather than a restriction.

Tickets are 100,000 VND adult and 50,000 VND child, and the hotline on the official price page is 0963 106 222. One thing to carry with you: the peer-reviewed literature lists tourist infrastructure development among the named causes of this species' decline. Keep the visit quiet, do not ask the boatman to get closer, and treat a distant sighting through binoculars as the good outcome.

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