The Con Dao Conundrum

My quest in Con Dao is how to reconcile the dueling emotions from experiencing the peaceful, quiet and friendly island of Con Son with the horrors of its past. These horrors, of course, include impacts from the American War (aka the Vietnam War). They also include the unrelenting vision of plastic waste everywhere except in places controlled by the most upscale of hotels and resorts.

We spent 10 days (January 4^th to 14^th) on Con Son Island in the Con Dao Archipelago less than 100 km off the coast of SE Vietnam. Hubby took some time off from work to see much of the island, and I walked every day to new areas.

I clipped this map from our Rough Guide on Vietnam. It provides a visual for our wanderings on this small (~ 3 mile long) island.

Map of the Con Dao Archipelago from the Rough Guide

Our first adventure was to rent a motor scooter. Unfortunately, we do not have an A1 international license so we could only get a small electric motor scooter. And this is probably the smallest one on the island!

Darrell on our mini-mini scooter

We headed uphill to the Con Dao National Park headquarters and the scooter was so slow – especially with me on the back – that I had to get off and walk so Darrell could get it up the steepest hills! Most of the island is part of Con Dao National Park with controlled access to trails through the forests to the beaches or other sites. It was hard to get information on the trails even at the Park Headquarters. They don’t have a trail map so we learned from websites, travel guides and other tourists the best places to go.

We did get a tour of some caged animals, statues of animals, and some other displays – e.g. dugongs in giant tanks, and other sea critters. We paid about $2 each for a trail pass to towards Bai Bang beach. Trees were labeled but I only took a photo of the Truong tree – Indian Prickly Ash – that looks like it has limpets all over its bark. We reached the coast where the acclaimed waterfall was dry, but we did see some intertidal life – black sea cucumbers, hooded oysters and some small corals.

Truong tree (Xanthoxylum rhetasa)

We planned to walk on to Dat Tham beach but we were just knackered from heat and humidity so returned to the scooter. We were happy the ranger had told us to park by the headquarters as the indigenous Long-tailed Macaques had opened the seats of the parked scooters at the trailhead and taken out whatever food they could find there!

The scooter battery showed it still had some charge left – so we took the road to the SE point of the island. The chain came off the scooter and we were aided by a young Russian couple to get it back on. We had just limped back to town when the battery died. Darrell pedaled it the rest of the way to the rental shop! Adventure 1 complete.

Hubby worked the next few days and I wandered more trails – looking for the mostly absent birds. We can hear some, not a lot, but rarely see any. I finally saw the striped-cheeked bulbul (photo from Merlin) which was described as looking like a chrysanthemum had exploded across its face.

Stripe-throated bulbul (photo from Merlin)

Our next adventure was renting e-bikes for a hike past the runway and beach on the NE end of the island. Incredibly, Darrell’s e-bike ran out of juice just after we crossed the hard-packed sand of Vong beach. We locked the bikes up and hiked to the scenic north bay.

Hubby enjoying the swing!

On the return hike, we saw a beautiful bird - the white-vented shama. We aren’t seeing a lot of birds – as I mentioned in the last post from our bike trip. We can walk through miles of rainforest and only hear a few birds...

With our days on the island dwindling, I headed to the Con Dao Museum and walked through the chronologic displays beginning with artifacts from 2,500 to 3,000 years ago and culminating in modern progress. While the history of Vietnam is incredibly complicated, two key timeframes that included photographic images were the French colonial period (roughly 1847 to 1941) and the American (Vietnam) War. Both periods included significant tolls on life and liberty in Vietnam and on Con Son Island - termed Devil's Island at the time - with many prisoners held and killed in Phu Hai Prison.

Con Dao Museum

I can't improve on this excerpt from The Rough Guide to Vietnam: “The many cells in the now-defunct Phu Hai Prison remain littered with shackles, placed painfully close together. In a couple of exhibition cells, emaciated statues show how the Vietnamese inmates spent their days crowded together, unless they were selected for the “tiger cages” or the “solariums”, where they were exposed to the elements in roofless rooms.”

I'll only include one photo - since the images are distressingly graphic - but if you are intrigued by how the American's found out about the atrocities of the Tiger Cages in 1970 you can read this interesting article from the History News Network. This event was weell-described and illustrated with statues at the prison and articles in the museum.

Phu Hai Prison "Tiger Cages"

Respite from these atrocities comes from the nearly constant honors and blessings displayed at the Hang Duong Cemetery. The roads there are lined with dozens of shops selling memorial displays for people to purchase to honor relatives, slain martyrs, unknown soldiers, and more. People were also walking the grounds with bundles of lit incense to place a few at a time at different graves.

Grave of a martyr in Hang Duong Cemetery

Vendors selling memorial displays in the cemetery

So, Con Dao, both beautiful and disheartening. My moodiness here was also due to the significant onslaught of the present regime in the United States. The devastation to people and to nature at home made me want to shout - why haven't we learned from history? What happened to the Golden Rule we were taught as children?

Two parting images - one of the many restaurants where you can select your seafood for dinner. We are used to eating our food that isn't swimming or crawling - just wrapped in plastic on styrofoam trays in the refrigerator section of the grocery store. I cannot bring myself to eat seafood right now.

Seafood restaurant in Con Son Town

And an image that actually gives me hope. It reminds me that nature, despite our degradations, is amazingly resilient and powerful.

Nature reclaiming some lost ground