Vietnam is a country in Asia located on the Indochinese Peninsula, The country borders to the South China sea, the Gulf of Tonkin and the Gulf of Thailand. Its closest neighbours are China, Laos and Cambodia and the nation is a part of the biologically and culturally important Mekong River Delta region.
The country is home to a large amount of animals and plants, the lowlands are hot and humid and the highlands are densely forested. Since the process of cataloguing the Vietnamese wildlife is still in its infancy new species are added on a regular basis. In addition to iconic mammal species like the two newly described species of Muntjac deer, there are also over 800 species of wood, 100 species of amphibians and over 150 species of reptiles to be found in this comparatively small nation, and the recorded number of plant species in the country surpasses 2,000. Click here for more info on tropical flowers in Vietnam and around the world.
Vietnam is located in a spot where various atmospheric currents converge and has therefore received plenty of airborne seeds from the north, west and south, so the monkeys, gibbons and langurs found in the dense limestone forests can certainly feast on a multitude of fruits and berries. One of only four previously unknown large land animals to be discovered during the 20th century can be found in Vietnam and is a type of wild ox belonging to a new genus. Two new species of muntjac deer has as earlier mentioned been discribed in Vietnam recently, both of the new species was founf in the same nature preserve, the Vu Quang nature reserve.
Vu Quang is a remote forested part of Vietnam in the Ha Tinh Province along the country’s north central coast. The area is well known for its steep mountains and dense rainforest and history buffs might know this as the base for the Phan Dinh Phung, the Vietnamese revolutionary army that fought the french colonial forces for independance during the late 1800s. The Nature Reserve is a very hot and humid place since the tall mountains trap moisture coming in from the South China Sea. The preserve is covered in fog during the the dry season and home to continuous rains during the wet season. Traversing the Nature Reserve is difficult since virtually all surfaces are wet, slippery and covered in algae. It is so hard that not even hunters from the area want to enter the forrest.
A more accessible element of the Vietnamese geography is the spectacular 30 meter long Ban Gioc Waterfall the 4th highest waterfall in the world along a national border. The fall separates the Chinese Guangxi Province from the Cao Bang province of Vietnam, 272 km north of Hanoi. The border is marked out by a stone tablet that has been placed at the top of the fall and engraved in French and Chinese.
Another fantastic sight near the waterfall is the amazing Tongling gorge which can only be accessed by going through a cavern from another gorge. (A gorge is a deep valley between cliffs, typically carved out of the landscape by a river.) The isolated Tongling Gorge is home to a high degree of endemic plants that can be found nowhere else in the world. The Tongling Gorge use to be a favoured hidey-hole for bandits and locals still report finding treasures in the caves.
