Yok Don National Park

In the dry season, the trees of Yok Đôn drop most of their leaves, and sunlight falls through to the grass below. Few people know what a khộp forest is before they come here. Once inside, it is hard to forget.

Yok Đôn National Park lies about 38 to 40 kilometers west of Buôn Ma Thuột. It stands in Krông Na commune, in Đắk Lắk Province. The park belongs to the Forestry and Forest Protection Department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment.

Yok Đôn became a national park in 1992. In 2002 it was enlarged to 115,545 hectares. The park's own website records 1,006 plant species in the khộp forest, and 650 animal species.

According to that website, the name comes from the M'Nông language. The M'Nông are one of the peoples of Vietnam's Central Highlands. Yok means mountain and Đôn means hill. Together they can be understood as a tall mountain built up from hills.

What sets this place apart from most national parks in Vietnam is the khộp forest.

A khộp forest is an open forest of broadleaf trees that lose their leaves in the dry tropical season. An evergreen rainforest stays lush all year. A khộp forest sheds heavily in the dry months, so its canopy is broken and light reaches the grass layer underneath. Khộp forest is rare in Vietnam, and this park protects it. The open, dry forest suits large animals such as elephants, deer and other hoofed animals, and the wild cattle called bò tót and bò rừng. A visitor who walks in and finds the forest emptier and drier than expected has not found a poor forest. That dryness is exactly the feature that needs protecting.

Yok Đôn has a tropical monsoon climate with two clear seasons. The rainy season runs from May to November. The dry season runs from December to April, and it is when the khộp forest looks most like itself. The rainy season brings more green.

Visitors explore on foot and by bicycle. They watch birds, take a motor boat on the Sêrêpôk River, and some camp for several days. Every trip goes with a guide, who leads people into the right habitat and tells the story of each patch of forest.

The most important story of Yok Đôn today is the story of the elephants. The park's tour page says plainly that elephants here once carried visitors, but now their welfare comes first. Visitors go with a guide to watch elephants in the forest. They hear the story of each animal and learn what part elephants play in the ecosystem. In 2023 the park signed the second phase of a memorandum of understanding with Animals Asia, to keep and grow this elephant-friendly kind of tourism.

This model does not mean visitors can no longer meet elephants. It means the way of meeting them has changed. No riding. No making elephants perform. No unguided contact. Visitors keep a respectful distance and listen to the story of each elephant, and they come to see why every one of them has its own history and character. A meeting like this leaves more meaning behind than fifteen minutes on an elephant's back.

The Sêrêpôk flows through Yok Đôn and shapes its landscape and some of its sights. One is Thác Bảy Nhánh, where the Sêrêpôk divides into seven branches, as the park describes it. Another is Thác Phật. Its name comes from a story local people tell, about monks who once built a hut beside the river in order to cross it. The park's website records this as a local account.

The zone around the park holds old villages with Ê Đê and M'Nông communities. Jang Lành and Drang Phok are two of them. Buôn Đôn is another. Here the story of the forest, the elephants, the river and the culture cannot be pulled apart.

On a morning at Yok Đôn, birdsong carries up through the tall trunks, and early light pours straight down onto a carpet of yellow grass. In that stillness, in a dry forest that is rare in Vietnam, a visitor understands why this place must be kept just as it is.