Cua Lon River

Most rivers begin in the mountains and run to the sea, carrying silt from the forest down to the plain. The Cửa Lớn River is not like that.

The Nhân Dân newspaper once called it a special river of Cà Mau, and that is fair. It has no upper reach or lower reach in the usual sense. One end is the Bồ Đề estuary, where the river meets the sea to the east. The other end is the Ông Trang estuary, which opens onto the sea to the west, also called the Gulf of Thailand. When the tide rises, water pours in from both seas and meets in the middle of the river. This is the river that joins the two seas of Cà Mau.

Press accounts differ on its length, so the careful way to say it is about 56 to 58 kilometers, though some accounts give more than 58. In one stretch the river is about 600 meters wide. There it is more than 20 meters deep. At the Ông Trang estuary, on the side of the sea to the west, it spreads to more than 1,800 meters in places. Yet there the depth falls to just over 4 meters.

The river has several other names, depending on place and time. Many local newspapers call it the Tam Giang or the Năm Căn, after the lands it flows through.

Both banks are lined with the mangrove forest that Cà Mau is known for. In the wider picture, this area lies inside Mũi Cà Mau National Park and the Mũi Cà Mau World Biosphere Reserve. A biosphere reserve is a UNESCO-recognized area where nature is protected and the people living there keep working the land. UNESCO nominated this reserve in 2009, and it covers more than 371,000 hectares. The national park was established in 2003. On December 13, 2012, it was recognized as the fifth Ramsar site in Vietnam, a wetland listed under the international convention on wetlands. In the world it is number 2,088.

Where the Cửa Lớn flows out toward the sea to the west, there is a patch of land that silt has built up on its own. It is called Cồn Ông Trang. The national park describes its landscape as a mangrove forest in the making. The first to arrive is the mắm tree, which grips the new mudflat and holds the silt. Once the ground settles, a mangrove forest of đước begins to form. Local people and the park's own materials often put it in a saying: the mắm goes first, the đước follows. It is the story of land being made, day by day.

The river is also a livelihood for hundreds of fishing families. The Cà Mau newspaper records more than 50 rows of đáy on the river, holding more than 500 đáy mouths. A đáy is a large fixed net, set in a strong current to catch fish and shrimp. This is the đáy fishing trade, a trade of river country. It takes forms called đáy bè, đáy cặm and đáy neo. The work is hard and follows the tides, tied to the breathing of the river from father to son.

The Cửa Lớn is tied to the war as well. The Cà Mau provincial web portal records that in 1968 the siege that forced the Năm Căn military post to withdraw helped keep an important waterway on the river open. That made it possible to receive weapons and carry them to the battlefield of the southwest.

From the Bồ Đề estuary to the Ông Trang estuary, the Cửa Lớn is a passage between sea and sea, forest and forest, past and present, in the southernmost land of the country. From the bow of a boat, the banks of deep green đước lie mirrored in the water, and the sound of waves carries in from the sea on either side.