Đồng Nai: Cát Tiên National Park — Rainforest Trekking, Night Safaris & Endangered Wildlife

Vietnam’s Amazon

Cát Tiên National Park in Đồng Nai province is Vietnam’s most accessible lowland tropical rainforest and one of its most biodiverse protected areas. Covering 72,000 hectares across three sectors, the park shelters over 1,600 plant species, 120 mammal species, and 350 bird species — including several critically endangered primates found nowhere else on Earth.

Night Safari

The park’s most popular activity is the night safari by jeep — spotlighting along forest roads to spot sambar deer, gaur (wild cattle), civets, porcupines, and if you’re extraordinarily lucky, the elusive clouded leopard. The experience is thrilling — darkness presses in from all sides, and the only sounds are the chorus of insects and the occasional crash of an animal moving through undergrowth.

Dao Tiên Endangered Primate Species Centre

This semi-wild rehabilitation center houses golden-cheeked gibbons, black-shanked douc langurs, and pygmy slow lorises — rescued from the illegal wildlife trade and prepared for release back into the forest. Guided tours at dawn (when the gibbons sing their territorial calls) are profoundly moving encounters with some of the rarest primates on the planet.

Ancient Trees & Hiking Trails

The park contains some of Vietnam’s oldest and largest trees, including a 400-year-old tetrameles tree with a trunk circumference exceeding 30 meters. Multi-day trekking routes lead through primary forest to waterfalls, crocodile lakes, and remote ranger stations. The Bàu Sấu (Crocodile Lake) trek is a must — a 10-kilometer hike to a pristine wetland where Siamese crocodiles bask on mudbanks.