Vietnam’s illegal loggers turn to tourism as forests shrink
- Some 250 former loggers have retrained to become adventure tour guides taking visitors through deep jungle and some of the world’s largest cave systems
- Vietnam lost about 3 million hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2020 – a 20 per cent decrease driven primarily by the commodities sectors, activists say
Vietnamese logger turned jungle tour guide Ngoc Anh knows the value of trees.
For years he chopped them down illegally to sell as timber, often working with others to carry 100kg logs out of a rapidly thinning forest.
But as extreme rainfall and floods increasingly devastated his community in the central province of Quang Binh, the 36-year-old read up on the ongoing climate and nature crises and turned instead to tourism and conservation.
Now, Ngoc Anh is one of 250 former loggers trained by an adventure tourism company to lead mostly foreign tourists through jungles and into some of the world’s largest cave systems in the Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, a Unesco world heritage site.
“Before, whenever I saw a large tree, my head calculated how tall the tree was and how to cut it into logs of different sizes,” Ngoc Anh said, perched on a mossy vine thicker than a person’s arm.
“But now that I’m in the tourism business, when I see such a tree, I tell the tour group how valuable this tree is because there aren’t many left.”