Footprints in the coal
The section of Highway 4 from Lang Son city to Na Duong town near the Vietnam-China border is flooded with dust and a winter mist. Headlights of oncoming trucks and motorbikes flash past. On the foothills of the mountains alongside me the black-roofed houses of the Nung ethnic minority jut out almost sheepishly.
By a steel-structured bridge, I meet a Nung woman and ask her if she's heard of a 'fossil forest' here in the region.
"What is a fossil?" she says. "There is only coal and waste here."
When I find my friend's house located by an industrial dumping site, her father is there but he has never heard of a 'forest of fossils' as someone had described it to me. No one here has.
It turns out to be a short distance from the bridge where I met the Nung woman. It is not a 'forest' but the remains of one. Where we walk, Ngan explains, there once was a forest. Now there is just a rocky, dusty terrain. Large petrified tree trunks jut out of the ground.
Ngan says there are a lot of fossils down in the tunnels of the coal mine. He says that the locals either don't know about these fossilised pieces or don't care. But I can't help thinking that perhaps if they knew, they'd care.
Further research is needed. Fossilised objects are well preserved but much may be lost in the absence of proper preservation and protection.
In 2005, the Geology and Mineral Department and the Geological Museum under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment proposed establishing a system of geological parks of which the fossilised forest in Na Duong would be revived together with a stone fall in Tuy An, Phu Yen province, a basalt fall in Trinh Nu waterfall in Dak Nong province, and stalactites in Cuc Phuong Park in Ninh Binh province.
These parks are chosen among 29 sites of high geological value across Vietnam but according to La The Phuc, Deputy Director of the Geological Museum, this project remains on the drawing board due to financial issues.
(Source: Time-out)
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