Seventeen years, not a long time but enough to make a place that is not my hometown become attached. Strangely, every time someone asks me about Phu My town where I live, I immediately think of a river, the river named Thi Vai.
A container ship docks at Gemalink port, Vietnam's largest deep-water port located at the mouth of the Thi Vai and Cai Mep rivers.
No one knows who gave this name to the river, but we only know that the river flows near the mountain and like many other places in Ba Ria-Vung Tau, it is named after a woman such as Ba Ria, Ba To... The mountain is named Thi Vai and the river shares the same name. Thi Vai River is not long, if calculated from the starting point in Long An commune (Long Thanh district, Dong Nai) to Phu My town and then converging with Go Gia river to become Cai Mep river, flowing into Ganh Rai bay, it is less than eighty kilometers. Therefore, Thi Vai cannot be compared with the Red river, Dong Nai or Cuu Long river in terms of length and flow. But if those rivers are considered mother rivers, Thi Vai, a young girl, carries on her a great mission: Contributing to bringing us trade to the world.
When I first moved here, I stayed in Phuoc Hoa, a commune located downstream of the Thi Vai River. At that time, there were several industrial parks (IPs) along the Thi Vai River such as Go Dau, My Xuan A, Phu My 1... but the downstream area had not yet been exploited. On this river, there were still many people living by fishing and trapping.
I remember back then, there were times when I followed Uncle Ba Luon to the river to cast nets at night. From the dock, the motorboat roared along the canal through the mangrove forest to the river. After casting all the nets, Uncle Ba would pull the boat to a place where the water was "still", turn off the engine and wait to collect the nets. While waiting, I heard him tell many stories related to Thi Vai River. It could be stories about occupational accidents that always lurk fishermen or more mysteriously, the times when he encountered "ghosts" that caused the boat's engine to not start, getting lost in the mangrove forest and not being able to find a way out. I also learned that during the resistance war to liberate the South and unify the country, along with Long Tau River, Thi Vai River was the place that marked the activities of the Sac Forest Water Commando soldiers. Many battles took place on this river, contributing to the heroic victory of the nation.
Then I moved house and changed jobs many times, but it seemed that fate had not left me and I was again connected to the river.
In 2007, SP-PSA international port, Vietnam's first deep-water port, was started along the Thi Vai River. And in 2009, Tan Cang - Cai Mep international port was also started to turn this place into a gateway port cluster for the entire southern key economic region.
Looking back now, on the Thi Vai River is a system of interconnected seaports, contributing to the formation of many new industrial parks such as Phu My 2, Cai Mep... and especially Phu My 3 Industrial Park, the first specialized industrial park of our country built on the cooperation of the two governments of Vietnam and Japan. Just that alone shows the importance of the Thi Vai River to the economic development of Phu My town in particular, Ba Ria-Vung Tau and the whole country in general.
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