Head to the scorching sands of Ham Tan to taste cool, refreshing dragon fruit.
Binh Thuan only has two seasons: the hot season and the other, very hot season - that is what a friend born and raised here told me when I asked about this land.
Setting foot in Ham Tan on blindingly sunny days, the heat lashes against your face, and the wind carries the briny scent of the sea and fine sand that clings to your clothes. Amidst a stretch of land where the sun seems to wring out every drop of water, one easily thinks of dryness and exhaustion. But miraculously, right on that scorching sandy foundation, the green dragon fruit shoots still quietly rise, proud and succulent.
Ham Tan farmers do not use flowery language to describe their homeland. To them, the land and climate are a fierce struggle for survival. The more than 26,000 hectares of dragon fruit stretching across Binh Thuan represent that much sweat spent carrying water and applying fertilizer, and nights spent wide awake keeping lights on to force off-season fruiting. There is a rare coincidence that the locals often recount. Around the time approaching Tet in the 1990s, Mr. Tran Van Hai's family was raising a batch of ducks in the garden behind their house. To keep the ducks warm and guard them while they laid eggs at night, he lit an incandescent bulb hung near the coop. Coincidentally, the duck coop was located right next to some dragon fruit posts. After a period of continuous nightly lighting, he was overjoyed to realize that the dragon fruit branches receiving light from that round bulb were blooming and bearing fruit brilliantly, while the rest of the orchard was in its off-season resting phase.
From this accidental observation, Mr. Hai and the local people experimented with bringing light bulbs to the entire dragon fruit orchard, initiating the technique of using lights to stimulate off-season dragon fruit flowering, which created a turning point that completely changed the livelihoods of Binh Thuan farmers. Now, the energy-saving LED lights illuminating the nights of Ham Tan are not just a farming technique achieving yields of 20 - 22 tons/ha, but the biological heartbeat of an entire land that refuses to surrender to fate.
Walking between the straight rows of dragon fruit posts as sunset falls, the harshness of a scorching day gives way to a cool breeze blowing in from the La Gi sea. The night in Ham Tan glows as brightly as a galaxy on the ground. That night, sitting under the thatched hut of an old farmer, peeling a red-fleshed dragon fruit just cut from the branch, and biting into the succulent flesh, the cool, sweet taste spreads quickly on the tip of the tongue. That sweetness is not merely the sugary taste of fruit, but the salty essence of night dew, of precious groundwater filtered through deep layers of sand, and of the simple, honest human spirit.
Coming to Binh Thuan, visitors will not see a flashy, staged scene. It is the moment we sit down, listen to the sighs of farmers before the fluctuating prices of the seasons, and then see them smile, wipe away their sweat, and continue to cling to their gardens. Standing in the middle of the scorching sands of Ham Tan, tasting the full, cool sweetness of fruit ripened on the tree, we finally understand that: what makes the most sustainable appeal of a land is never ease, but the way people extract life from the very barrenness of life itself.
Leaving Ham Tan while the glow of the night lights still flickered behind me, I suddenly realized my friend was right, but also not entirely right. Binh Thuan may only have two seasons, hot and very hot, but deep beneath that heart-scorching sun exists a third, cool season: the season of the human heart and sweet, red fruits. That season does not depend on the weather or a schedule; it only waits for those willing to stop, slow down, open their hearts, and sit amidst the barren sands to feel and love.
photo source: B Nguyen
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