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Winding:
The
road to Ba Na resort. — VNS Photo Quang Nhut
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Ba
Na resort captivates tourists again
by
Phanxipang
Travelling to Ba
Na health resort from the suburbs of Da Nang City, tourists may
experience four seasons in a day: spring in the morning, summer at noon,
autumn in the afternoon and winter by night-time. And what else besides?
When we met at
Song Han Hotel, journalist Pham Phuc from the Da Nang Tourist Review
asked if I’d been to Ba Na? Not yet, then I must go there. In summer,
when the temperature in Da Nang is 32oC, it is 20 to 25oC at Ba Na
during the day, and refreshingly cool at night.
We drove down
Highway 1A, arriving at An Loi Bridge, after 30 minutes we hit Vong
Nguyet Hill, and there we boarded a chairlift for a three-minute ride up
to Ba Na’s summit, an altitude of 1,487m.
The VND22.5
billion (US$1.4 million) chairlift was built by Doppenmayr from Austria
and opened in March 2000 – the fare for a single chairlift ticket is
VND25,000, and VND36,000 for a return.
But Ba Na wasn’t
always this easy to reach.
Resurrection
of Ba Na
In February 1900,
Governor-General Paul Doumer ordered infantry captain Marine Debay to
conduct an expedition in the Truong Son mountain range within a
150km-radius of Da Nang and Hue to find a suitable place to locate a
health resort for French nationals, so they didn’t have to retreat to
France to escape the tropical heat.
In November 1901,
Debay reported that he had found the right spot at Tuy Loan, or Ba Na,
as it was known to the local Ba Na people.
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Colourful
welcome:
Ba Na offers a myriad of accommodation: villas,
hotels, rest houses, and bungalows. Tourists can
even camp out in the forest. — VNS Photo Truong
Van Quan
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Getting
there
Danatours
offers two Ba Na packages:
One-day
tour at VND150,000 for Vietnamese and
US$15 for international visitors.
Two-day
tour at VND265,000 for Vietnamese, and $30
for international visitors. (one night
stay included)
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The process of
recording the transformation of Ba Na into a health resort, and
documenting its forests, climate, geology, fauna and flora was done by
Henri Cosserat, Dr A Sallet and Dr L Gaide in the Bulletin des Amis
du vieux Hue (Bulletin of Friends of Old Hue) in 1924.
Dr Sallet wrote
that before Nguyen Anh became King Gia Long (1802-1819), the lord had
visited the area to recruit loyal people from the ethnic minorities, and
one of his concubines had turned this area into 50ha of arable land.
Dr Gaide noted:
"Ba Na really is the best in climate, vegetation and
landscape."
Huynh Thi Bao Hoa
(1895-1982), a native of Hoa Vang District, was the first Vietnamese
woman to write a novel in the Romanised Vietnamese script, titled
Western Beauties, which was published in 1927.
After a visit to
the resort, Hoa wrote Journey to Ba Na, published in Nam Phong Review in
June 1931. In the book she recorded that French colonialists had built a
prison at Ba Na to detain political prisoners.
By this 1942, Ba
Na had become a town accommodating French officials and the Vietnamese
aristocracy in comfort, with a grand hotel, medical clinic, stadium, and
post office.
After the August
Revolution in 1945, the French withdrew from Indochina, and for a time,
the tourists withdrew from Ba Na.
Later, when France
tried reclaim its former colony, locals from the Dai Loc and Hoa Vang
Districts at the foot of Ba Na adopted a ‘scorched earth’ approach
and destroyed the town before retreating to the forest.
Over 50 years on,
in 1992, Danatours, or Da Nang Tourism Company, proposed rebuilding Ba
Na, but the project failed because of lack of finance.
In April 1994 the
Da Nang Tourism Service submitted a similar plan, calling for an
investment of $60 million, and in October 1997 the Da Nang People’s
Committee approved funding for a sealed road to Ba Na.
By early 1998 the
committee finally decided to go ahead, and on September 1 the same year,
Ba Na reopened as a resort.
Da Nang Tourism
director Nguyen Hong Duy Phuong said that in 2000, Ba Na received 20,000
guests; in 2001, the resort welcomed 35,000 guests; and by last year the
number of guests had doubled again.
Ba
Na today and tomorrow
"You should
stay in Ba Na at least two days and one night to see all the seasons in
a day and other interesting things," said photographer Dinh Lac.
Ba Na is now
populated with villas, hotels, rest houses and bungalows, and tourists
can even camp out in the forest.
Food and drinks
are supplied by restaurants, along with recreational activities such as
karaoke, billiards and electronic games.
What attracted my
attention when I first arrived were the flowers – dao chuong (bell
peach) – the clusters of pink flowers looked very beautiful as they
swung in the wind.
At night, we
gathered in the square in front of our bungalow, as the night got
colder, we made a bonfire and drank rice wine through a bamboo straw, by
midnight the temperature had dipped to 11oC.
At dawn, we
climbed the Chua mount to watch sunrise from its peak, and were rewarded
with 360-degree vistas of Re Island in south Quang Ngai Province; Cham
Island in the south-west Quang Nam Province; Ngu Hanh Son and Thung Bay
(or Da Nang Bay); to the north-east, the lagoons in Thua Thien–Hue;
and in the west the summit of A Tuat, at 2,500m the highest peak in the
Truong Son mountain range, close to the Viet Nam-Laos border.
A trip to Ba Na
would not be complete without a stop at Suoi Mo (Dream Spring) – the
area comprises of Suoi Mo, Thuy Duong Lake, and Kim Hien and Toc Tien
waterfalls – all in close proximity to Ba Na. — VNS |
