Mang Yang Pass

The most striking moment of a trip is not always at the destination. Sometimes it comes right in the middle of the road.

National Highway 19 links the coast of Bình Định with the Gia Lai plateau. Along it runs one stretch that residents and the Gia Lai press call Cổng Trời, the Sky Gate. This is Mang Yang Pass.

The name Cổng Trời appears in no administrative document, and no official national signboard carries it. But it lives in the way people feel the land. Coming up from the Bình Định side, the car keeps climbing and rounding bends. Then the ground seems to lift onto another level, and the wide, open space of the plateau spreads out ahead. It is like a door pulled open, and people simply step through.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment records the pass as lying in Hà Tam commune, in the Đak Pơ area. Its highest point is Ông Di Peak, 1,066 meters above sea level, according to the Gia Lai newspaper. Pine forest lines both sides of the road on the way up. It is not original natural forest. These pines have been planted and protected over many years, as part of the work of greening the land around the Gate of the Sky. That work belongs to the Hà Ra Protection Forest Management Board. Its headquarters stand right beside National Highway 19, less than a kilometer from the top of the pass. The pines are close to 30 years old. They are good for photographs, and they also hold the soil, hold water and cool the climate of the whole area.

The same newspaper has described the pass through the seasons. In the dry season, it says, yellow dã quỳ flowers bloom along the road to the summit. In the rainy season, silvery cỏ tranh grass covers the mountainsides. The plateau changes its clothes with the seasons in a way the lowlands never do, and Mang Yang Pass is where that change is felt most clearly, just after the crossing.

This stretch of the highway is also a road of many layers of history. The Đak Pơ and Mang Yang area is tied to the Đak Pơ battle of June 24, 1954. French and Western accounts also call that fight the Kilometer 15 battle, or the Mang Yang Pass battle. Columns of troops passed over this pass, and soldiers climbed its slopes among the pines. Since then the name Gate of the Sky has carried a heavier meaning than scenery alone.

The feeling of crossing a pass, of going through a doorway in the land from one region to another, can be the most memorable thing a road gives.

There are lush green pines, a summit just over a kilometer high, air with a touch of chill that the plains do not have, and the story of a road that has watched many eras go by. When the car tops the summit and the plateau suddenly opens up ahead, it is easy to see why people call this place the Sky Gate.