The park gained its name from the two mountain ranges surrounding it, the Bidoup and Lang Bian. Local people have handed down a story of the birth of the mountain. According to the legend, a young man named Lang, a member of the Lat tribe, fell in love with a girl Bian from the Sre tribe. An ancestors’ spell between the two tribes prevented them from getting married, so the young couple chose death as their everlasting union.
Touched by their love, the people in the region buried them on a mountain with two tops side-by-side and named the mountain Lang Bian. The lovers inspired their tribesmen to break the ancient spell and live together in peace. Even the animals were touched by the fateful death: two elephants that Lang tamed crossed 10 mountains to mourn their master. Soon after they arrived, so the legend says, the elephants collapsed from exhaustion and died, turning into the mountain named Bidoup, forever looking over at Lang Bian. This powerful tale of tragic love united the tribes of Lat, Sre and Cil, which merged into today’s K’Ho ethnic group.
Bidoup-Nui Ba National Park ranks among the five largest national parks, covering 64,800ha of forest. According to biologists, because of the natural protection provided by the two mountain ranges, the national park is home to the oldest primordial forest in the Central Highlands.
The park’s three mountain tops form the roof of the Indochinese peninsula: Mt. Lang Bian at 2,189m, Bidoup at 2,278m and Cong Troi, or Heaven’s Gate, at 2,272m.
Visitors to the famous Da Lat City often mistakenly assume that the pine forest there is the same as their European pine forests. In actuality, Bidoup-Nui Ba National Park contains 10 out of the 11 endangered species of pines. Along the slope of Lang Bian range, the khasia pines, according to biologists, are a distinct species of the park as they only grow between 1,000 to 2,000m above sea level.
On Bidoup, across the valley from Nui Ba, the forest contains merkus pines, a variety unique to the Asian mainland and one of the rarest species of pine in the world. The trees’ trunks can measure 4m in diameter, and the trunks can reach up to 20m in length before branching out.
On the branches of these rare pines, visitors can spot over 200 species of birds. Many of these species are endangered species, including the grey-crowned crocias (crocias langbianis), the black-hooded laughingthrush (garrulax pectoralis) and the collared laughingthrush (garrulax yersini).
The park also possesses the largest orchid gene pool in the country, with 250 different species. Orchids that originated here take the mountains in their scientific names, such as dendrobium langbianense, oberonia langbianensis, elaeocarpus bidupensis and vanda bidupensis. Among the most distinctive features of Lang Bian forest are its bulls, which once reigned over the forest in herds of six or seven. Biologists believe that only one or two of these enormous creations, measuring 2.5m and weighing nearly one tonne, still live in the park.