Con Chim Islet

Shrimp and rice take turns, season by season, current by current. On Cồn Chim there is no wide road, no hotel and no gate where anyone checks a ticket. People reach it by ferry across the Cổ Chiên River, from what used to be Trà Vinh province. The crossing is short, just long enough for the pace of the day to slow. On the far side is a community that makes tourism out of its own daily life.

Cồn Chim lies in the middle of the Cổ Chiên, in Hòa Minh commune. It belongs to the old Châu Thành area of Trà Vinh province, which is now part of Vĩnh Long province after the changes to administrative boundaries. The islet covers about 60 hectares. Of that land, 34 hectares are farmland. More than 200 people live here.

There is a popular explanation for the name. Longtime residents say the islet was once a place where many kinds of birds took shelter. They flew out to feed in the morning and came back in the evening. So people grew used to calling it Cồn Chim, the Bird Islet. This is a folk account, not an official finding of place-name research. Still, it sketches the original quiet of the place.

Cồn Chim has been built up as a community tourism spot in a way called thuận thiên, which means going with nature. The phrase is not fancy. It has a practical meaning. When the salty water arrives, from about March to September, families raise shrimp and crabs, because the salt water suits both. When fresh water returns, they plant rice and catch wild shrimp and fish in the canals around the islet. This is how the people of Cồn Chim read the river and live by its rhythm.

There is no single service area selling entry tickets. Instead there are many households, and each one offers its own experience. Each household runs one line of business. One keeps an old-style kitchen. Another serves sương sâm or fresh coconut in the garden. Others take visitors crab fishing and setting traps for shrimp and fish. Others have them cook bánh xèo, grind flour with a stone mill or make bánh lá dừa. Another takes them to a country market that sells farm produce.

The community also keeps its own set of rules. No fishing with electric shocks. No harvesting aquatic animals in the breeding season. No nets with too small a mesh. Less plastic waste. These are not rules handed down from above. They are promises made from within. It is a place that has chosen to protect its resources this way.

The recognition for Cồn Chim does not stop at the border. It won the ASEAN Community-based Tourism Award for 2025, and was honored in Malaysia on January 20, 2025. A small community on an islet of 60 hectares was named alongside the best tourism models in Southeast Asia. That story matters more than any score or title.

Newspapers often quote the slogan of Cồn Chim. It goes: "Come to Cồn Chim, where country people have only their hearts." It is not advertising. It is how the people here describe what they can give a visitor. Not luxury comforts, not a swimming pool or an air-conditioned room, but the experience of a real life, in a patch of the Mekong Delta's river country.