Trekking up Chua Mountain

      The disappearance of two Raglai porters around lunch time warned us of the risks and challenges on the way to the peak of Nui Chua (Chua Mountain) as they shouldered foods for our dinner and breakfast as well as hammocks for us to sleep at night in the forest in the central region during our recent trip.
Fortunately, we were able to find the ethnic porters after nearly an hour of searching and shouting. They were seen sitting by a pristine stream resting and waiting for us as they thought we would stop by the stream to rest and take water for drinking as they did.
“We should walk closely together otherwise some of us will get lost in the forest, and it will be difficult to find them,” Nguyen Si Hung of the Ecotourism and Environmental Education Department in Ninh Thuan Province spoke out the warning.
Hung also insisted on the early warning because kidding is forbidden in the forest as this makes people think of jokes when real danger comes, and the consequence is immeasurable.
After a lunch of bread, cheese and banana, we continued trekking up and down through bushes of thorny plants and big trees and crossed streams on the way to a camp 785 meters above sea level where we would cook dinner and sleep overnight.
The weather was pretty good from the time we began our journey at Da Hang Village in the early morning until around 4:30 p.m. when heavy rain suddenly poured down through the forest canopy, making it more difficult for us to proceed as we had to manage our way through slipperiness and straw grass whose sharp leaves sometimes cut our skin in moments of carelessness.
Hung said the rain was a strange phenomenon as Chua Mountain sits on the driest land in Vietnam where it only rains for three months from September to November. But this rain was understandable, a result of tropical lows and storms in the East Sea.
Hung explained that the leaves of many of the trees in the nearly 30,000-hectare Chua Mountain National Park became thorns to keep water so that the plants could survive and grow in a region of harsh weather.
Finally, with great effort, we walked through the rain to the camp where we had a dinner of hot rice, soup and simmered chicken and pork before going to sweet sleep. This delicious meal was the reward that the two porters gave us to compensate for worrying us at lunch time when they left us for nearly an hour.
The crackling sound of the wood on the fire and the songs of birds woke us the next morning. After a breakfast of rice, chicken soup and instant noodles, we headed for the top of Chua Mountain. The road was so steep that it took us almost two hours to walk through the straw grass and the forest where the leeches were waiting to suck our blood before we finished the less than 1.4 kilometer hike.
An old landmark sits on the top of Chua Mountain at around 1,040 meters above sea level, where we took many pictures while watching out for the bloodsuckers ready to crawl on us. Of course, we were excited about this moment as we had successfully conquered one more mountain in Vietnam after reaching the top of Mount Fansipan.
Truong Hoang Phuong, director of marketing at the travel firm Vietmark, made an interesting comparison between trekking mounts Fansipan and Chua that there were more deep slopes on the way to the top of Mount Fansipan but it required trekkers of more capability to endure the baking sun when waking up Chua Mountain.
For me, there is more to see along the nearly 19 kilometer hike up and down Chua Mountain than Mount Fansipan, which I trekked two years ago. In addition to the 1,265 species of fauna and 306 species of flora, I can see the sea and swim in the turquoise waters of Vinh Hy Bay, one of the most beautiful bays in Vietnam.
Vietmark organizes a three-day tour to Vinh Hy Bay and the peak of Chua Mountain for a group of 10 guests.