Here’s how we organised a bus transfer from Dalat to Cat Tien National Park. It’s worth the extra effort needed to visit this place.
Having realised that Dalat and us weren’t going to get along, we spent Christmas morning planning an escape route in the direction of Cat Tien National Park. We knew it was halfway between Dalat and Ho Chi Minh City and we’d read a blog that buses making this route will drop you halfway if you ask. We totally loved Cat Tien so we definitely recommend anyone puts in the extra bit of effort to get there. Here’s how we organised it plus some tips.
Buying the ticket from Dalat
We walked into the Sinh Tourist office in Dalat the day before and asked to go to Cat Tien the next morning. We would stop there 2 nights, then we wanted to continue onto Ho Chi Minh City.
The woman there gave us some confused looks, got a book out, then tried to just sell us a ticket to Ho Chi Minh City. We said again, ‘no, we want to stop Cat Tien’. She then made some phone calls and finally said that we could go to Cat Tien, but we would still need to pay for the full ticket, i.e. the full fare from Dalat to Ho Chi Minh City. And that we needed to pay it twice – once to get to Cat Tien, and again to get to Ho Chi Minh City.
On top of this she told us we’d also need to get a taxi from the halfway point to the national park itself (we knew this would be about a half an hour drive). She looked at us a bit crazy for wanting to pay two times the bus fare plus two times a 30-minute taxi journey. So she kept double checking this is what we wanted. The bus fare was only 140,000d per journey and we guessed the taxi fare would be about 300,000 per trip so it was going to cost us each 580,000d in total. About 20 euros to do the whole thing was acceptable for us, but clearly madly expensive for them.
She told us that the bus would leave Dalat at 8am and arrive at the halfway point (which we now learned was called Tan Phu) at 11am. She kept mentioning post office and also wrote on our piece of paper (see photo) that we wanted to stop at Tan Phu. So we paid up (via Mastercard, which added a standard 3% on top again) and then went on our way for the rest of the day.
Getting the bus from Dalat to Cat Tien
The next morning we decided to get to the bus station even earlier than the 30 minutes recommended. We wanted to be absolutely sure they knew where we wanted to go. So we arrived at about 7am and went into the office again because we knew they’d change our bit of paper for 2 actual bus tickets. When she issued the bus tickets they also wrote on these ‘Tan Phu’. She also told us that they would put our bags on last. I gave a ‘that’s a very sensible plan’ nod and with that we went and had a quick breakfast at the place across the road while we waited for the bus to show up. We knew we were looking out for a sleeper bus rather than a seater bus (otherwise known as a, well, bus).
When it arrived a man started floating about asking us where we were going. We pulled out our ticket and showed him Tan Phu because we didn’t want to pronounce it wrongly. He saw it and then indicated we should wait. So we let everyone else get on first. Then he came back and looked at our backpacks and decided they seemed small enough for us to take them inside. We were fine with that but when we were climbing up the steps into the bus the driver was of a different opinion so we got back off again and handed them over so they could go in the hold. But we noticed they put them in a different side to everyone else’s. We could tell that the driver was being told to stop at Tan Phu so we boarded feeling fairly confident. We also had seats at the front and GPS so we could start waving if we needed to.
We had also read in a blog that you should book a taxi ahead (through where you’re staying in Cat Tien) so that you don’t get mobbed by the scooter/taxi drivers that wait at the halfway point. So the day before we’d booked ourselves into Green Bamboo Lodge (it goes by many other names…) and asked them to arrange a taxi for us, telling them we’d be there at 11am. They replied to confirm, so that was all set up too.
The ride from Dalat to Cat Tien
The journey itself was fantastic – different to the scenery when we arrived in Dalat from Nha Trang. We seemed to have timed our trip nicely with the ‘coffee bean drying out on the driveway’ season. For about 2 hours we drove past house upon house where they’d laid out what looked like tarpaulin and then scattered coffee beans on them presumably so they could dry out. Further along we saw women turning over the beans which shovels, and then finally we saw the beans being put into big sacks. We didn’t see any option to do any kind of coffee farm tour in Dalat so I was happy that we got to see the process in action on this journey. It also made me wonder: do they have a coffee bean collection day like a garbage collection day, where all the coffee farmers put their coffee bean sacks by the side of the road and they come around and take them off for processing? Hopefully the farmers get a good price for it.
Two and a bit hours into our journey we started to think that we must be nearly there. So we started looking on the GPS. It looked like it was going to be more like 11.30am that we arrived. We thought it polite to email our homestay again and say we’d be half an hour late – we didn’t want a taxi giving up and leaving. When it got to about 11.25am the bus pulled over at a service station 7km from where we wanted to get off, and announced a 20-minute lunch break. Typical. We were getting quite use to the random stops in Vietnam. So we got back on the email to say it would actually be 12pm for the taxi. The guesthouse replied and said ‘we know’. Huh? Ok, so it turns out when we’d told the guesthouse which bus company we were coming with they’d phoned them up and I guess asked them to keep them posted with our progress. We had seen the bus assistant take a couple of calls during the journey, so one of them was presumably to the guesthouse. So it was all being organised for us. Just nobody told us.
Getting dropped off in Tan Phu
7km later we did indeed stop by the side of the road. The assistant gave us a couple of minutes’ heads up so we able to gather our things too. When we got off the bus the assistant pointed at a car with a guy getting out and said ‘Cat Tien’. The guy from the car rushed over, grabbed our bags, slung them in the back and we were off. The car wasn’t actually a taxi (we were expecting a taxi-looking car) so we were again a bit nervous that this could be anyone. It turned out it was someone from the guesthouse. They don’t seem to be able to differentiate between ‘we send taxi’ and ‘we send private car’.
Two minutes in the car and we were instantly more relaxed. The scooters had all but gone and we were on a quiet country lane passed only by a couple of kids on bikes and the odd chicken. Incidentally, we’re glad we did have something booked because there wasn’t a taxi in sight at Tan Phu. We’d have been waiting there for quite a while wondering what to do probably.
When we arrived at our guesthouse in Cat Tien (which was more like a homestay on speed) we were greeted with some iced lemony goodness juice we downed because we’d been rationing our fluids again (“you never know when you’ll get to pee again”). And then above reception we saw the sign saying that they could book us transfers to Ho Chi Minh City and all manner of other places, including towns in the Mekong Delta. The only reason we’d wanted (and booked) the bus from Cat Tien to Ho Chi Minh afterwards was so that we could transfer there onto a bus to the Mekong Delta (Can Tho specifically) so had we known all of this, we wouldn’t have paid for the second ticket from the halfway point to Ho Chi Minh City. And because we liked Cat Tien so much we decided to stay an extra day, throw away the second bus ticket (about 5 euros) and instead book ourselves onto a bus from the halfway point directly to Can Tho through the guesthouse.
In summary, it’s definitely possible to get from either Dalat or presumably also Ho Chi Minh City, Can Tho and Mue Ne, to this beautiful national park, but it just takes a bit of planning and persistence. Our recommendation would be that you email your Cat Tien guesthouse directly and get talking to them about how you should arrive there. Get confirmation that they’ll pick you up from Tan Phu, and they’ll probably offer to do the communication with the bus company for you, or even just book the journey for you and then add it to your bill. We’d have loved a bit more info upfront as it would have saved us a bit of cash and bit of stress but at least we weren’t surprised by it anymore, having been in Vietnam nearly 3 weeks. Final tip – don’t book a bus out of Cat Tien in advance. Wait till you arrive, see how much you like it and then decide when to leave – it’s highly likely there’ll be availability, wherever you want to go.