Hon Tam Island

In 2009, Hòn Tằm could be summed up in one neat figure: about 110 hectares. That was all. An island in the middle of Nha Trang Bay, in Khánh Hòa province, quietly turning its steep side toward the sea.

One way into this story is an imagined photograph of the island, taken that same year from offshore, looking in from the east.

In this first photograph, the eastern side of Hòn Tằm is only a slope. It falls from high above, touches the edge of the water and stops there. Waves wash at the foot of the island. Wind blows overhead. The sun rises out at sea, so the eastern slope catches the earliest light. It brightens before the rest of the island has had time to wake.

There is not a single mud pool in that photograph. No pools of water stepping down the slope in tiers. Nobody sitting and soaking while gazing out over the bay. The eastern slope is simply the eastern slope, just as it had been for a very long time before.

Beside it goes a second photograph, taken from the same spot and facing the same way.

The second photograph carries a very clear date: June 2019. That month, the MerPerle Hòn Tằm Mudbath opened its doors. It is a mineral mud bath, and it sits right on the eastern slope, in the very place where the first photograph showed nothing. The mud bath covers 42,000 square meters in all.

The interesting part is how it was built. The side of the island is steep. A slope is always a nuisance for builders, and the easiest answer is to flatten it. Here, though, the builders kept the slope as it was. They laid out the mud bath on the pattern of terraced rice fields. The pools sit in tiers, one level above the next. They follow the exact tilt of the island as they step down toward the sea.

Terraced rice fields are a familiar sight in the high mountains. People there cut the hillsides into steps to hold back the water, to keep the soil from washing away, and to give the rice a level surface to root in. Each step is a small mirror that catches the sky. That shape was borrowed and brought here almost unchanged.

What fills each step, though, is completely different. Not paddy water, and not rice. Instead there is mineral mud and mineral water, thick and warm. And these terraces do not look down into a valley either. They look straight out over the bay.

The people who built the mud bath did not try to make the island obey. Instead, they borrowed a shape that already existed on mountainsides very far away, and set it down beside the sea. That is why the mud bath does not press down on the island. It follows the island.

A figure like 42,000 square meters is hard to picture when it is only heard aloud. Here is one way to see it. Walking from the highest step down to the lowest, at the edge of the waves, takes a good while on foot. The eye cannot take it all in at a single glance either. Seen from offshore, the whole mud bath looks like one giant terraced rice field. The only difference is that it runs down into the sea instead of down into a stream.

And the island itself is about 110 hectares. The mud bath takes up only part of it. The rest is still island, still steep, still windy, with waves still breaking against the rocks at its foot, just as in the first photograph.

When it opened in 2019, the Vietnam Records Organization confirmed it as the largest mineral mud bath in Vietnam located on an island. The phrase that matters most in that sentence is the last one: on an island.

A mud bath on the mainland can be reached simply by car. But the way to the eastern slope of Hòn Tằm lies across water. To reach the island, people board a speedboat at the port and cut across the bay.

The trip is short, but it stays in the memory. The engine crackles, and the bow throws up water that trails behind in two long white streaks. The salty wind slaps at faces and tangles everyone's hair. The shore behind grows smaller, while the island ahead grows larger. It turns from a dim, dark smudge into a real slope, with shape and mass, with sunlight and shadow.

Then, while the boat is still some way off, the steps of water appear on the eastern slope. In that very moment, the first photograph quietly turns into the second, right before the eyes of the people on the boat.

A day here passes very slowly. In the morning people go down into the sea and let the salt water wake them up completely. Then they climb the terraces and sink into the mineral mud. The mud wraps around the shoulders, heavy and soft at once. It holds the body suspended in a very strange way, not quite lying down and not quite floating.

Lying still in it, a person hears only two sounds. The sound of the waves below, and the sound of the wind above.

When they have soaked long enough, they rinse off with mineral water, then sit in the sun to dry. The skin feels a little tacky with salt. Arms and legs feel weightless. Below lies the bay. Above rise the higher steps of water, and over them all, the sky.

Now lay the two photographs one over the other and look through both. The same slope. The same direction of the wind. The same sea out there, just as salty, lapping at the foot of the island in just the same rhythm. The island is still the same size. It still lies quietly in the middle of Nha Trang Bay, as it lay long before any photograph was taken.

Only one thing has changed. On the eastern slope, there are now steps of water.

And every morning, when the sun lifts above the bay, its first rays still touch the eastern slope before anywhere else, as they have for ages. The only difference is that now the light falls step by step. It moves in turn from the highest tier to the lowest, down to the last step at the edge of the waves.