Thoi Loi Volcano

On an island ringed by salt water, the most precious store of fresh water sits inside the mouth of a volcano. It sounds backward. A volcano is a place that pours out fire and molten rock, so it seems a strange place to keep water. Yet on Mount Thới Lới, in the rocky bowl of an extinct crater, a lake lies still. When wind passes over it, it raises only small rings of ripples.

Mount Thới Lới stands in Đông An Hải village. The village lies in the Lý Sơn special zone of Quảng Ngãi province. The mountain is about 169 meters high, and some sources round it up to nearly 170 meters. It is the highest point on the whole island. From a distance it rises sheer out of the open sea. Stand at its foot and look up, and the slope looks like a city wall. Blocks of rock in every shape are stacked one on another around the mountain. The summit pushes up into a cone, as if it were lifting its head to meet the wind.

The lake is young, but the stone bowl that holds it dates from the time when the island itself was being born. Lý Sơn carries many traces of extinct volcanoes. There is the crater of Thới Lới and the crater of Giếng Tiền. There is the cliff of Hang Câu and the stone arch of Cổng Tò Vò. Each is a mark left by an earth that once boiled. Thới Lới was active in a fairly shallow stretch of sea. Each time it erupted, ash rose into the air and fell back into the water. It settled slowly in layers, the large heavy grains in one place and the small light grains in another. It was as if someone had patiently sifted flour and stacked it tier by tier. Today, at the foot of the mountain, pieces of coral are still mixed into the volcanic ash. There are also rock terraces worn down at the level of the sea. These small clues show that the slopes of Thới Lới once reached farther out to sea than they do now.

The surprise is that Thới Lới has not one crater but two. The larger one is nearly a kilometer across. The smaller one is about 500 meters across, and it is this smaller crater that was put to use as a freshwater reservoir. The footpath starts from a flat clearing and climbs gradually toward the south. It winds, and it feels fairly steep to anyone coming for the first time. Then suddenly the ground opens up ahead. A huge bowl sinks down, shaped like an enormous funnel, and at the bottom of the funnel lies the water.

The Thới Lới reservoir was built and put into operation in 2012. It holds more than 270,000 cubic meters of water. It was made to irrigate 60 hectares of garlic in the Đông Xuân crop, the winter-spring season. It was also meant to supply daily water for 1,000 people, and for 300 fishing boats. In practice, the lake irrigates about 120 hectares of farmland. It also tops up the groundwater that the islanders rely on every day.

On Lý Sơn, fresh water is something to be saved drop by drop. When the hot, dry season comes, there is too little water for the fields and too little for the kitchen. Salt seeping into the water is a constant worry for the people who live here. At one point, the island's water supply works met only about three parts in ten of what was needed. And Thới Lới is the only reservoir on the island. So the calm water in that volcanic bowl is the lifeblood of the whole small island.

From the summit, it is easy to see where that water goes. The land of the island spreads out in long rows of onions and garlic, deep green, grown on rich volcanic soil. In season, the garlic fields seen from above look like a picture pieced together from many bright patches of color. The mountain that once spat fire now gives water to every row of garlic at its feet.

On the northern slope, the story is quite different. There, waves, tides, wind and sand have gnawed together at the foot of the mountain for countless years. They have carved sheer cliffs, caves and rocky ledges. Hang Câu lies right at the foot of Thới Lới. It is the outer flank of the volcano, worn away by the sea.

On the summit stands the Fatherland Flagpole, inaugurated on December 16, 2013. The structure is 20 meters tall. The flag platform has a white body wrapped by a band of red. The foundation of the pole is buried deep beneath the layer of rock. The builders used a technique like the one used to raise a lighthouse. Beside the flagpole the wind usually blows hard. The flag snaps high overhead, and your hair whips into a tangle.

In January 2020, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism designated the Thới Lới Mountain Scenic Site a national scenic landmark. So the stone wall, the pointed summit, the two craters and the lake in its funnel became a landscape that the whole country recognizes and protects.

The finest moments on Thới Lới are sunrise and sunset. Along with the Giếng Tiền volcano and the lighthouse area, it is one of three places where the whole volcanic island can be seen at once. When the sky first brightens, sunlight touches the cone of the summit first. Then it spills slowly down into the crater bowl and onto the rows of garlic. It reaches all the way to the rocky ledges on the north side.

A bird rising from the summit would watch Thới Lới grow smaller and smaller, until it was only a dark mass of rock in the wide sea. The fire inside it went out long, long ago. Now, in the mouth that once poured out lava, a lake lies still beneath the sky. Quietly, it keeps every drop of fresh water for the whole island.