Thursday, March 17, 2011

Cat Tien National Park II

Following from my last post, the next morning, our guides took us on an easy forest ride on the back of a pickup.

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Below are some of the interesting plants that we saw along the way.

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An unknown legume climber with fruits.

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This forest is full of these huge trees with flaky bark. They are called Bang Lang in Vietnamese and apparently, they are a kind of Lagerstroemia species. Pretty amazing to compare these giants with our the tiny roadside Lagerstroemia trees in Singapore.

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Climbing all over the forest are this climber which looked like Thunbergia laurifolia. This is also a very commonly planted climber here.

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One of the first giant trees we saw was this tree called Tung, or Tetrameles nudiflora.

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They have all shaded their leaves and started flowering.

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Some interesting climber was attached high up on the tree trunk.

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And beneath, between the buttress roots, was another climber with pretty pink flowers.

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Our guide told us that this is the sapling of Tung.

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Some other flowers: Pink ones from a tree,

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Mosiac red probably from Acanthaceae family,

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and fruits and flowers of a Euphorbiaceae.

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One of the most fascinating climbers was this woody thick liana with big thorns. It looked quite similar to Caesalpinia sumatrana which can also be found here.

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And just above the climber was a mango tree, Mangifera species.

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Just to get a feel of how big the buttress of the Tung tree can be, we took a picture with the buttress roots.

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I loved climbers! This one reminded me of a belt.

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And lastly, a tree trunk almost totally black in colour.

Vietnam is truly a wonderful place to visit for a plant lover, no matter in the city or forest. =) Will definitely come back again ^^

1 comment:

Naturanaute said...

The pink flowers look like Plumbago indica.

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