The profile pictures were irresistible: emerald volcanic craters plunging into a turquoise sea, dramatic black cliffs, fishing boats bobbing on the swell, miracle garlic supposedly capable of purging every one of my sins.
Then the ferry docked.
And suddenly the Tinder date went spectacularly wrong.
The filters had done their job.
Instead of a magnetic adventurer, I found an island thrown together in a hurry. Everyone had poured their own concrete slab, stacked their own cinder blocks, to hell with the neighbor, to hell with the story the landscape was supposed to tell. The result is an island as old as its volcanoes but wearing the face of a grey suburb trapped in permanent construction.
Ly Son may be one of Vietnam’s greatest natural treasures.
It is also one of its greatest missed opportunities.
Because nature and the old generations had already done 90 percent of the work.
All that remained was not to ruin the last 10 percent.
Nature left out of the prayer
I cling to the rim of Thới Lới crater telling myself, if I look out to sea and squint, I can almost believe it. But the moment I make my way back down to the harbor, the spell is broken.
I find myself wondering.
Here, beliefs know how to coexist.
A pagoda faces a church, which answers a Cao Dai temple. Different faiths live side by side without stepping on one another’s toes.
People still know how to speak to the gods.
They’ve simply forgotten how to speak to the land.
Why is nature excluded from the prayer?
I can’t shake the feeling that respect often stops at the temple gate. Beyond the sacred entrance, the ground is swept spotless, incense rises in perfect columns, proportions brush against poetry. Outside, the landscape becomes territory to conquer once again.
Perhaps you first have to understand where that mindset comes from.
For generations, nature wasn’t a postcard.
It was an enemy.
The volcano was unforgiving ground where you shredded your hands just to grow garlic. The sea was a daily gamble that not everyone came back from.
So when tourism finally brings money, concrete isn’t experienced as desecration.
It feels like revenge.
Pouring a slab means escaping poverty.
The tragedy is that this victory eventually devours the very thing that made it possible.
The cliff becomes a photo booth.
The panorama becomes a business opportunity.
The shoreline becomes another façade waiting to be monetized.
The gods kept their sanctuaries.
The landscape is still waiting for its own.
The shipwreck
Or rather, her influence.
On Ly Son, the influencer is magnificent.
A sand-colored linen dress, the regulation straw hat, flawless makeup, carefully rehearsed posture, eyes lost somewhere beyond the horizon as though she had personally invented contemplation.
A few hours later I find her again, perched precariously on a tiny blue plastic stool ten centimeters from the asphalt, pretending to experience culinary ecstasy. While she’s hunting for the perfect light for her story, her sandals are soaking in the juice of reality: a carpet of chicken bones, greasy napkins, used toothpicks, beer cans, and cigarette butts.
The contrast is so brutal it becomes funny.
The girl in the straw hat refuses to see that the scenery she came to consume is a dump.
Just like the edges of the beach where, only a few hours earlier, she had struck such delicate poses.
Is she even aware that she shares exactly the same mental machinery as the guy tossing chicken bones onto the ground?
The religion of me, right now.
Minimum effort.
After me, the flood.
He throws his rubbish away to save himself three steps to a trash bin.
She cleans the landscape with a wide-angle lens to purchase herself an existence that’s a little more photogenic.
Same laziness.
Same cynicism.
Same sabotage.
One dirties reality.
The other bleaches it.
The next day, on the return ferry, the mask comes off.
The sea grows rough.
The hull slams against the waves.
Poetry drowns.
The sand-colored linen dress is wrinkled.
The straw hat rolls down the filthy aisle.
As for the influencer, she’s vomiting uncontrollably into a plastic bag, in perfect harmony with everyone else on the bench. Her makeup runs together with the bile.
Every carefully rehearsed mannerism collapses under the spasms.
There is no more wide-angle lens.
No more filter.
No more crop capable of erasing misery or ridicule.
The sea couldn’t care less about her story.
Reality reclaims its rights from below, somewhere between the diesel engine and the collective waves of nausea.
The photoshoot is over.
End of the line.
Everybody out.
A masterpiece. A bloody one !!!!