Can Gio National Park
This weekend we had the opportunity to go to the Can Gio Mangrove Forest as part of our Environmental Studies class. We have been learning about the tremendous environmental pressure Vietnam is facing as the population continues to expand, tourism grows and resources shrink. The Can Gio forest is a perfect example of environmental problems that Vietnam has faced.
During the Viet Nam war, mangroves in the south provided strong resistance bases for Vietnamese people. Consequently, the foreign military used bombs, cannonfire and toxic chemicals (herbicides and defoliants in high concentrations) to destroy the forests. Nearly 40% of the mangrove population was destroyed. In recent years, there has been a large-scale reforestation project underway with help from UNESCO as well as community based natural resource management projects that have widely been considered a success.
We saw the army base where Vietnamese troops were stationed during the war. I am just constantly marveling at how very, very different Vietnam is from anything I have ever experienced. We took a boat 20 minutes into the jungle and arrived at a series of elevated huts built to house that the troops had lived there for over ten years during the war. We were told that more people than they could count died at this base; it was a very eerie and unnerving experience.
The biggest draw to Can Gio is the monkey population in the park. As an aspiring primatologist, I was extremely interested in this! Unfortunately, this turned out to be the most terrifying and least favorite experience of my entire time in Vietnam. When the mangroves were destroyed during the war, the macaque population was decimated. In an attempt to restore the monkey populations, macaques were transplanted into the park and kept there by feeding them. Now the population has exploded and the monkeys are no longer wild but completely used to human presence and ALWAYS looking for more human food. In our short time there, three of us (myself included) were attacked by the monkeys. One girl in our group had two monkeys leap out of the tree and land on her back in an attempt to get the wrappers out of her backpack. We fared better than the woman who had a monkey scratch her face but it was still an extremely unpleasant and terrifying experience. As I’ve said before, I am so lucky to get to experience first hand the problems we are studying, I hope to be able to come back to Vietnam and work in this field!