Ta Dung Lake

Seen from above, Tà Đùng Lake looks as if someone broke a great mirror and dropped the pieces into the forest of the Central Highlands. The wide water is cut by dozens of islands and peninsulas, rising green out of green. For this reason many official tourism materials call it the Ha Long Bay of the Central Highlands. That is a comparison about scenery, not a title awarded by UNESCO. Still, it says something about how special the place is.

The lake lies inside the national park of the same name, in the commune of Tà Đùng, in today's Lâm Đồng Province. It is about 50 kilometers northeast of the center of Gia Nghĩa city, along National Highway 28. One thing needs saying at the start. This sheet of water belongs to the reservoir of the Đồng Nai 3 hydropower project, upstream on the Đồng Nai River. When the water rose, it drowned part of the land and left hilltops, patches of forest and higher banks standing above the surface. Those became the islands in the middle of the lake. That is where the beauty of the place comes from, and knowing it lets a visitor appreciate the landscape for what it really is.

Official sources give slightly different figures for the lake and its islands. The Department of Nature Conservation and Biodiversity records a water surface of 3,400 to 5,700 hectares, with more than 47 islands and peninsulas. A 2024 promotional brochure from Đắk Nông gives more than 3,600 hectares and about 40 islands and peninsulas. By either count, this is a broad sheet of water with many small islands. Each time a boat slips past one, the view changes completely.

A boat is the best way to feel the space of Tà Đùng. It can reach the little islands and stop at fishing villages, where local food is served. The scenery shifts with every small island, in a way the shore cannot show.

The park is more than a lake. Forest around the water covers about 85 percent of the park's core zone. The conservation department records more than 1,400 plant species and 574 animal species, many of them endangered or rare. It is one of the important conservation areas in the Đồng Nai River basin and in the endemic bird area of the Da Lat plateau. Looking at the dark green bands of forest from a boat, a visitor is looking at real biodiversity, not decorative woods.

The summit of Tà Đùng, at 1,982 meters, is the highest point in the park. From the top, the whole lake of islands and the old forest spread out like a painting with no clear horizon, only forest and water running together.

Tà Đùng also lies within the Đắk Nông UNESCO Global Geopark, recognized in 2020. A UNESCO Global Geopark is an area with landscapes of international geological importance, managed for protection, education and sustainable development. UNESCO describes this geopark as a landscape shaped by volcanic activity and tropical weathering. The lake is the highlight of lake-and-island scenery in the geopark, different from the volcanic cave sites elsewhere in it.

Around the lake live the M'Nông, the Mạ and several other peoples. A Đắk Nông tourism brochure records villages around the lake that still keep their customs, traditions and folk festivals. No photograph can hold the sound of water against the side of a boat, the smell of kitchen smoke drifting from a fishing village on the shore, or the birdsong carried from deep in the forest. They stay in memory for a long time.

When the boat turns back toward the shore, the shadows of the small islands still lie on the water, as if they had always stood there, quiet and needing no one to know their names.