Chicken Rooster: A shallow well - Chicken Rooster: A deep sea

Van Ke Hamlet, belonging to Van My Commune, is the name of a village located on the slope of a sand dune (now Tan Thanh Commune, Ham Thuan Nam District, Binh Thuan Province). Actually, Tan Thanh is the name used since the years of the resistance war against the French.

In 1956, there was a primary school here, situated on the Cây Cốc hill. The school had a thatched roof and mud walls (a mixture of mud and straw, an invention of the barefoot farmers and fishermen who smoked hand-rolled tobacco – a testament to their ingenuity!). Yet, it provided shelter from the rain and wind year after year. Here, teachers who had graduated from Saigon teacher training colleges taught students almost their own age. The students sat in class, eagerly awaiting the end of their lessons so they could go home and join the buffalo in the fields or go to the sea to collect fish. Some even dozed off at their desks because they had stayed up late the night before milling and pounding rice.

Then came the time to leave school, each going their separate ways. Those who could afford it continued their studies. Those who couldn't dropped out. Some went to the forest to join the revolution, others went to sea to become fishermen.

Van Ke is a place perhaps unlike anywhere else in the country. Here, there are shallow wells that never run dry, even during the dry, grass-withering seasons. The gardens, orchards, and wells are situated on a slope of white sand; walking barefoot in the sun can burn your skin, yet the gardens are sloping, making daily ascents and descents tiring. Despite their slopes, the soil remains consistently moist, and the fruit trees thrive year-round. Each garden has at least one well, and wells can be found almost everywhere. Simply dig about half a meter deep with a hoe, cover the sides with planks, and a well will burst with clear, bubbling water, its flow gently filtered by the white sand, reflecting your face, its clear blue color, and its sweet taste! The spring water has sustained the villagers from generation to generation, flowing down to the rice paddies for lush green rice, and the water overflowing from the wells into the fields creating soft mud puddles for the buffaloes to soak in after plowing.

During our lunch breaks, we would go into the garden and drink from the well, even sticking our bottoms up in the air, because the well was so shallow we didn't need a ladle or bucket... It was called a well, but in reality, it was just a pond with a spring gushing out.

I regret that those wells are gone today, because people filled them in to make way for dragon fruit cultivation.

When mentioning the shallow well of Văn Kê, one also mentions the deep sea of Kê Gà. They both contain the name Kê, but one side has freshwater, the other has saltwater.

I suspect that if the Ke Ga hamlet didn't have a lighthouse, no one would know where Ke Ga was located on a map, and in the diaries of voyages, people would remember that this place once caused much suffering to ships passing through the deep waters of Ke Ga.

Before the Kê Gà lighthouse was built, ships navigating this area often encountered difficulties due to the inability to determine their location or the coordinates of the coastline. Recognizing the danger of this sea area, in 1897 the French colonial government built a lighthouse to guide merchant ships passing through the region. The lighthouse was designed by the French architect Chnavat and put into operation in 1900. Construction took three years.

The lighthouse is 65 meters high from sea level, 3 meters wide at the base and 2.5 meters wide at the top, with a wall thickness of 1-1.6 meters. To reach the top of the tower, you use an internal spiral staircase, and the island itself is only 5 hectares in size. On low tide, you can wade out to sea, sometimes with water only reaching waist-deep.

One thing people want to know is whether the construction workers were French or Vietnamese, and whether anyone was injured during the construction? Because at the foot of the tower there is a shrine with bundles of incense and half-burned incense sticks left by visitors.

The Kê Gà Lighthouse is the oldest in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Today, tourists come to this windy, sandy land to admire the beauty of the ancient lighthouse, and looking far into the distance, at the boundary where the sky and sea meet, they will see a deep body of water. This area was where countless ships were sunk before the Kê Gà Lighthouse was built.

The Văn Kê well has dried up and is gone. The island, sand dunes, and deep sea of Kê Gà still remain, but where are the people of the past?

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