The Bay Without Waves
- VEN Partnership
- Jun 25
- 5 min read
In the she limestone country of Ninh Binh, a flooded valley of still water and stone shelters an animal found nowhere else on Earth. This is Van Long Wetland Nature Reserve — and the white-trousered langur that depends on it.
VEN Journal · Photography by the VEN team
Glide out onto Van Long early in the morning and the first thing you notice is the quiet. There is no surf and no engine — just an oar dipping, and a sheet of water so still it doubles every limestone tower rising out of it. Locals have a name for this mirror-calm: the “bay without waves.”[25] It is one of the stillest, strangest and most important landscapes in northern Vietnam.
VAN LONG — at a glance | |
LOCATION | Gia Vien, Ninh Binh Province · roughly 80–90 km south of Hanoi |
LANDSCAPE | Limestone karst and freshwater wetland — about ¾ forest, ¼ open water and marsh |
PROTECTED | Reserve since 2001 · Ramsar site (2017) · IUCN Green List (2022) |
KNOWN FOR | The Delacour's langur — its largest wild population on Earth |
• Where the towers meet the water
Van Long Wetland Nature Reserve sits on the northern tip of the Pu Luong–Cuc Phuong limestone range, in the Gia Vien area of Ninh Binh Province, roughly 80–90 km south of Hanoi. [1][2] It protects one of the last large, intact lowland wetlands left in the Red River Delta — a freshwater maze of lake,
marsh and slow channels threaded between karst towers that rise sheer from the plain, fed by hidden underground streams. That combination is now genuinely rare in mainland Southeast Asia. [1] About three-quarters of the reserve is forest on limestone; the rest is open water and marsh. [2][4]
It is easy to confuse Van Long with its more famous neighbours. It lies in the same karst country as Trang An — a UNESCO World Heritage landscape — close to Tam Coc and the ancient capital of Hoa Lu, with Cuc Phuong National Park off to the west. But Van Long is its own reserve: quieter, and far more focused on wildlife than the busier boat-tour sites nearby.[2][12][25]
• A wetland worth protecting
For all its calm, Van Long carries serious credentials. In February 2017 it was named Vietnam's ninth Ramsar site — a wetland of international importance [1][2] — and in June 2022 the IUCN made it Vietnam's, and Southeast Asia's, first Green List protected area, a global mark of places that are both well managed and fairly governed. [4] It is biologically rich, too: botanical surveys have
recorded more than 450 higher-plant species here, alongside dozens of vertebrates, several of them threatened. [4] The wetland we see today partly owes its shape to a flood-control dike built in 1960, and it was formally gazetted as a reserve in December 2001. [2][25]
Found nowhere else on Earth - and this quiet wetland is its last real stronghold.
• The reserve's rarest resident
Among the reeds and cliffs lives the animal that makes Van Long internationally important: the Delacour's langur. It is found nowhere else on Earth — endemic to the limestone karst of northern Vietnam [5][6] — and Van Long is its last real stronghold, holding the largest wild population and, as the Ramsar listing notes, being the one place the species can reliably be seen in the wild. [1][2] A few
much smaller groups hang on in other karst pockets, among them Kim Bang and Yen Mo, [9] but none compares to Van Long. You would know it on sight. The coat is glossy black, cut by a clean band of creamy-white across the rump and down the outer thighs — exactly like a pair of pale shorts. That marking gives the animal its Vietnamese names, vooc mong trang and vooc quan dui trang : the “white-rumped” or “white-trousered” langur. [16][17] Long white whiskers frame the face, a pointed crest runs over the crown, and a tail longer than its body trails behind as a balance pole. [16] These are cliff specialists — sure-footed on sheer rock, sheltering on ledges and in caves at night, and feeding mostly on leaves. [10][17]
The babies are impossible to miss. Where the adults are black and white, newborns arrive a vivid golden-orange and keep that natal coat for their first months before slowly darkening — a bright flag that probably helps the group keep an eye on them. [21]
• A comeback, built locally
Van Long is also one of Vietnam's clearest conservation success stories. When the reserve was created in 2001 it held only around 60 to 67 langurs; a 2018 survey counted roughly 176 to 184 inside it — close to a quadrupling.
[2][7] That recovery was no accident. From 1993 the Frankfurt Zoological
Society worked alongside the reserve's management board, funding rangers and guard stations, running awareness work in the surrounding communes and helping set up village-based patrols. Gun-hunting was halted, and strict protection took hold. [13][2] Nearby, inside Cuc Phuong National Park, the Endangered Primate Rescue Center — founded in 1993 and now supported by Zoo Leipzig — made the Delacour's langur its flagship, achieving the first
captive birth in 1996 [11][17] and later releasing small groups back into the Van Long area. [13][11] But the thread running through all of it is the local community: the awareness programmes and village guard units around Van Long are repeatedly credited as the reason protection here has held. [13]
• Visiting the bay without waves
The way to see Van Long is the slow way. Its signature experience is a small, oar-powered sampan gliding across the still water beneath the cliffs, where langurs are sometimes glimpsed moving on the rock above. Bird life is richest in the cooler, drier months from late autumn into spring, and in May and June lotus blooms spread across the wetland. [25][17] The local ecotourism cooperative
channels income to families who once relied solely on farming — which gives the whole community a stake in keeping the forest standing. [4]
A few simple habits keep a visit a help rather than a pressure: go with licensed local boat operators, keep noise down and distance up, never feed or bait wildlife, carry your litter out, and don't buy wildlife products.
NOT TO BE CONFUSED |
V an Long's langur is sometimes mixed up with the colourful red-shanked douc of the Son Tra Peninsula in Đa Nang — but they are different species, in different genera, hundreds of kilometres apart. [23][24] |
• A place worth keeping quiet
Van Long asks for very little: stillness, care, and a slow boat. Give it those, and it returns a mirror-flat morning, a wall of limestone, and — if you are patient — a flash of white “trousers” high on the cliffs: an animal that lives here, and almost nowhere else.
• References
All sources accessed 23 June 2026.
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