More comforting is a thick, soupy coffee, brewed in the cup the Vietnamese way. Hoa is slowly teaching himself English from a dog-eared text. Time to put it away and wash up the breakfast dishes in water hauled from the well with a counter-balanced plastic bucket. As the fog lifts, a gentle, diffuse light bathes the lake. The lake surface is almost tactile, choked with weed which forms hatched patterns across an otherwise unruffled surface.
Rangers paddle off to fish for eels, their course leaving a groove through the beds of weed.
Beyond the lake are patches, at least, of undisturbed primary forest. Back on the road, we squeezed into vintage jeeps to plough home through muddy ruts. Two tribes of Montagnards, Vietnam's minority tribes, have been displaced from these forests, resettled two decades ago to locations ninety minutes down-river from park headquarters. The S'tien now live in little boxes all in a row, out across the fields from the Cho'Mai, with whom they share a schoolhouse. In the Cho'Mai village, the government's stucco boxes, straggling along a dusty road, are being supplanted by the bamboo cabins the people prefer.