Con Quy Islet

In a garden house on Cồn Quy, the đàn kìm, a lute, and the đàn tranh, a plucked zither, play beneath a voice held long, drifting with the scent of longan blossom and the river wind. Cồn Quy is not a place for sightseeing. It is for slowing down a little and living, for a while, at the pace of the people of the western delta.

The Tân Cồn Quy eco-tourism area lies in the middle of the Tiền River. It sits between two communes, Tân Thạch and Quới Sơn, in the Châu Thành area of Bến Tre. That province has since merged into Vĩnh Long. The islet is about 23 kilometers by river from the center of Bến Tre city. The ride out is already part of the experience, with green banks on both sides and the open sky of the south.

Cồn Quy is also called Cồn Cát. It is one of four islets that local people and visitors often name together as the four sacred creatures: Long, Lân, Quy and Phụng, which are the dragon, the unicorn, the turtle and the phoenix. Local tourism sources link the name Quy to the image of a turtle, in the folk tradition of feng shui that gives the four creatures their meaning. That is a tourism explanation. It is not an official finding about how the islet was formed.

Stepping ashore, the first thing is a cool, shaded path and then the orchards. Pomelo, orange, longan, rambutan, banana, coconut, mango and mít tố nữ all grow here. These are the typical fruits of the Bến Tre orchard country. Each has its own season, so every month brings a different flavor.

The next stop is usually a place for honey tea. People on Cồn Quy keep bees, and honey from longan blossom has a taste of its own that is hard to mistake for anything else. Over a cup of honey tea in the middle of the orchard, it is enough to think of the bees' journey from the longan trees to the glass on the table.

A workshop making coconut candy and other coconut products is another familiar stop, and a very southern one. In Bến Tre the coconut is not only a crop. It is an economy, a culture, an identity. The water, the flesh, the stalk, the shell and the trunk can all become a product, and a story. Watching a candy maker at work, and hearing the candy bubble in a big pan, is not easily forgotten.

Then comes what many people count as the high point of the whole trip: listening to đờn ca tài tử. UNESCO describes it as an art of music and song tied to the life of people on the land and rivers of southern Vietnam. In 2013 UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. That list is for living traditions, passed on from one generation to the next. Anyone in that garden house is sitting inside a living practice. Anyone sitting there is sitting inside a living practice that the world has recognized as a shared treasure.

The meal on the islet is a part of the visit that cannot be left out. Everything on the table comes from the water right beside it. There is tép rang dừa, tép stir-fried with coconut. There is a fish, cá bông lau, cooked in a sour soup with bần. There is another, cá điêu hồng, steamed, and a hotpot of cá kèo. There is cá lóc braised in the kho tộ way. All of it is cooked with the full, rich taste of the western delta, unlike any other.

Cồn Quy is loveliest not at any one stop but in the slow rhythm of the whole trip. It is the rhythm of life among the orchards, hard to explain and easy to feel once you are there. It runs from the boat leaving the landing, to the fruit set out on the table, to the sound of đờn ca tài tử drifting from a corner of a garden house.