Qualla: U Minh Thượng National Park

U Minh Thượng National Park: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Đông Phương Huỳnh Gia, CC0. Two species of crocodile once lived in this forest — the saltwater crocodile and the smaller, rarer Siamese. In 2002, the year the reserve was upgraded to a national park, a survey went looking for both and concluded that neither was there any more. That is the shape of the story at U Minh Thượng: a place recognised as internationally important at roughly the moment people began counting what it had already lost. It is still, by a wide margin, the most biologically varied ground in the Mekong Delta.

Image: Đông Phương Huỳnh Gia | CC0

U Minh Thượng National Park: Forest on a Peat Mattress

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mongnt, CC BY-SA 3.0. The rarity here is not any single species but the substrate. U Minh Thượng protects flooded melaleuca forest growing on peat — layers of organic matter laid down over centuries in acid, standing water, a formation classed among the scarcest forest types in the world and nearly ex...

Image: Mongnt | CC BY-SA 3.0

U Minh Thượng National Park: The Richest Corner of the Delta

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dongson.vmvn (thảo luận), CC BY-SA 3.0. Surveys have recorded more than 243 plant species here, along with 32 mammals, 187 birds, 39 amphibians and 34 fish. The mammal list carries names that have largely vanished from the rest of the delta — hairy-nosed otter, fishing cat, pangolin, sambar deer, civets. Eight waterbir...

Image: Dongson.vmvn (thảo luận) | CC BY-SA 3.0

U Minh Thượng National Park: A Landscape Built for Disappearing

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mongnt, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before it protected otters, the U Minh forest protected people. Dense tràm, chest-deep water and a network of channels navigable only by those who knew them made this one of the most effective natural strongholds in southern Vietnam. During the First Indochina War it was a V...

Image: Mongnt | CC BY-SA 3.0

U Minh Thượng National Park: Five Years in a Bamboo Cage

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mongnt, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 29 October 1963, three American advisers were captured in the U Minh forest during an operation with South Vietnamese irregular troops: Captain Humbert Roque Versace, Lieutenant James N. Rowe and Sergeant Daniel Pitzer. Versace refused indoctrination outright, attempted escape...

Image: Mongnt | CC BY-SA 3.0

U Minh Thượng National Park: The Escape

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mongnt, CC BY-SA 3.0. Rowe lasted longer. He spent 62 months in the forest, most of them in a bamboo cage measuring roughly three feet by four by six, and on 31 December 1968 he took the only chance he was ever going to get. American helicopter gunships passed overhead, his guard's attention went with...

Image: Mongnt | CC BY-SA 3.0