Vietmark Travel Corproration - Team building, Vietnam Team building, Teamwork, Teambuilding, Team building service

You may wonder how thousands of stones of various shapes and sizes came to be nestled in mountain creeks and perched on the top, sides and base of the mountains and hills in the Reserve, which covers an area of nearly 30,000 hectares on the coast of the central province.

The stones look as though they have been hand-crafted into figures which resemble columns of a house, animals and stylized phalluses worshiped as a symbol of the god Shiva. But, local citizens say the harsh winds from the sea, rain and other factors have shaped the stones into natural works of art.

The asphalted approach road to Vinh Hy Bay is rather quiet, you can stop here and there on the roadside to take shots of the beautiful stones. There are sections of the road that wind around the sides and cut through the mountains and hills; those are the best places to take picture with the sea and the forest of the natural reserve in the background.

The travel firm Vietmark offers a teambuilding tour for groups of people who are interested in a trekking adventure in the Nui Chua National Park. The trek is from Vinh Hy Bay to Binh Tien, where there is a beautiful beach near Khanh Hoa Province.

The director of marketing at Vietmark, Truong Hoang Phuong, said there are options for participants to depart from Vinh Hy Bay and trek in parts of the reserve before boarding a boat to sail to Binh Tien, or walk in the forest to the unspoiled beach.

Phuong says locals need about three hours to walk through the trekking route but estimates that it will take tourists at least half a day to finish the trip.

Vietmark also offers an over-night camping package in the park.

Established as national park on July 9th, 2003, Nui Chua is a primitive forest that represents the dry ecosystem of the Southeast Asian region. The park is home to black-shanked douc langur and many other rare species, turtles and more than 300 coral species. Source: Mong Binh – Saigon Times Daily

Biodiversity values

Nui Chua National Park is situated in Khanh Hiep and Khanh Hai communes, Ninh Hai district, in the coastal zone of south-central Vietnam. The national park is situated on a wide, mountainous promontory, which projects into the East Sea between Cam Ranh and Phan Rang bays. The topography of the national park is mountainous, with elevations ranging from sea level to 1,040 m at the summit of Nui Chua.

The hydrological systems within the national park are comprised of short streams that drain steep slopes. Most of the streams cease to flow during the dry season, since the national park is situated in an area that receives the lowest rainfall in south-central Vietnam; the national park receives an average of only 650 mm of rain per year.

The original vegetation of Nui Chua National Park was a mixture of evergreen forest, semi-evergreen forest and deciduous forest. However, most of the natural forest at the site was destroyed at the beginning of the 1990s, as a result of forest over-exploitation. Currently, the only relatively undisturbed primary forest remaining is lower montane evergreen forest, distributed in the north of the national park, at elevations above 800 m. At lower elevations, there are extensive areas of degraded and secondary forest. The southern parts of the national park, at elevations between 150 and 800 m support scrub dominated by thorny trees. This habitat type is only found at sites with hot and dry climates, and is under-represented within Vietnam's protected areas network.

During 1994, the fauna of Nui Chua National Park was surveyed by Xuan Mai Forestry College. According to Pham Nat (1994), a number of mammal and bird species of global conservation concern were recorded during this survey, including Black-shanked Douc Pygathrix nigripes, Pygmy Loris Nycticebus pygmaeus, Asian Black Bear Ursus thibetanus, Sun Bear U. malayanus, Large-antlered Muntjac Muntiacus vuquangensis and Siamese Fireback Lophura diardi. However, given the high human population within the site, and the potentially high levels of hunting, the current status of these species at the site is uncertain.

Over recent years, Nui Chua has been the focus of a number of surveys by the WWF Indochina Programme. These surveys have revealed that, as well as being important for the conservation of terrestrial biodiversity, the national park is important for the conservation of marine biodiversity. For instance, several of the beaches within the national park are nesting grounds for small numbers of marine turtles. In addition, the fringing coral reefs are particularly rich, with 307 species recorded, and are generally in good to excellent condition (WWF 2003). The most recent survey identified 46 species with new distribution records for Vietnam, and a distinctly different coral community structure to other reefs in Vietnam (WWF 2003).