Dong Giang Sky Gate

The wheels had barely left Hà Nha Bridge when the city fell away behind them. The sea and the long straight roads shrank in the rear window. The place the car is heading for lies about 75 kilometers west of central Da Nang, and the drive takes about two hours, because the road never agrees to run straight for long.

The road winds over gentle hills, then begins to climb. There are many steep stretches, and bends that tip every seat in the car from one side to the other. Now and then a stream cuts across the old forest. Outside the window, the green of the Trường Sơn mountains rolls on and on, so green that eyes used to city streets need a while to stop being surprised.

The land the car is climbing into is Đông Giang, home of the Cơ Tu. The Cơ Tu are a people who live mainly in central Vietnam, near the border with Laos. In places like Đông Giang commune, where the old town of Prao was joined with three neighboring communes, about eight people in ten are Cơ Tu. A traveler who stops in a village will hear people speak of the gươl. In the Cơ Tu language, gươl means community. It is the communal house of the whole village, where the elders meet to talk over village matters, where festivals are held, and where young men and women gather to dance and sing. The roof of a gươl is sometimes long and sometimes round like a conical hat. In the middle of the house stands one great central post, with smaller posts around it. On the wood the people carve a buffalo and a rooster, companions who work the fields alongside the villagers.

Then the road finally stops climbing. Ahead rises an arch of limestone mountain, two great masses of rock joined by a span that nature itself built. People here have long called it Cổng trời, the Sky Gate, or hang Gợp. A stream still flows beneath the arch, and the people see the place as a doorway into the forest.

Around the arch lies a whole world inside the mountain. The caves here have stalactites growing down from the ceiling and stalagmites rising from the floor, shapes carved by dripping water over a very long time. One legend says the Cơ Tu once found a cave here when its mouth was still so small that only one person, swinging on a rope, could slip inside. Nearby are the Trứng Rồng Falls and the Tiên Falls, where water pours over natural outcrops of rock.

It helps to keep two things apart, because this trip has two parts. The arch, the stream, the caves, the stalactites, the waterfalls and the forest belong to the mountain. The tourist area belongs to those who came later. The investing company opened its first phase at the end of April 2022, on land of more than 120 hectares. It spanned a stretch of the stream that it calls sông Ngân with bridges, built a glass bridge, and laid stone steps up to a temple high above. When the place opened, quite a few people looked back at the old stream, now with concrete embankments on both banks, and missed how wild it used to be.

But one thing no one could build is Cơ Tu culture, which has lived here longer than any bridge. On some evenings, around a fire, gongs and drums rise, and the dance called tân tung da dá begins. Tân tung is the men's part, suggesting strength and steadiness. Da dá is the women's part, suggesting rhythm and grace. The women wear woven brocade skirts with embroidered patterns and strings of beads in many colors. They raise their arms to shoulder height, palms turned back, as if offering or receiving something sacred. The circle of dancers turns counterclockwise, toward their origins. A Cơ Tu elder once said that if this dance were lost, the Cơ Tu would be like people who had lost their soul. The dance, together with brocade weaving, has been recognized as national intangible cultural heritage.

Brocade is best seen in one village of this region, where Cơ Tu women sit at the loom, using tools made entirely of bamboo and wood that they shaped with their own hands. In the past, a piece of brocade was woven only for the family's own use. Now it is also woven for visitors to buy and carry home as gifts. On the tables of the tourist area there is warm, fragrant cơm lam. Cơm lam is sticky rice cooked in a tube of young bamboo over a fire. There is also bánh sừng trâu, a name that means buffalo horn. The Cơ Tu have cooked these dishes for a long time. When the tourist area first opened, more than half of its 170 staff were Cơ Tu, children of this very land.

The Cơ Tu have a way of thinking about the forest. To them, the forest belongs to everyone and to no one alone. There is sacred forest, headwater forest that keeps water for the whole village, and graveyard forest where the ancestors rest. They protect the forest with village covenants and customary law, because protecting the forest means protecting what the whole village shares. With the green forest all around the stone arch, it is easy to see why they call it a doorway into the forest and not only a sight to look at.

As the sun leans low and the car turns back down the mountain, each bend gives back a little of the road up. The arch slips away behind, shrinking like a gate left half closed between two mountains. And beneath that arch, the stream keeps flowing, as it flowed long before there was a road.