From illegal logger to jungle tour guide

Nguyen Ngoc Anh (36 years old) used to be a "forest bandit" who illegally cut timber in Vietnam. After many years, he decided to become a forest tour guide, protecting nature and trees. 

Nguyen Ngoc Anh (36 years old), who used to illegally harvest timber, has now become a forest protector in Phong Nha National Park, Quang Binh province, Vietnam, on April 8, 2022. (Photo: Reuters / Hoang Trung)

For many years, he illegally cut trees for sale and often teamed up with others to quickly get logs weighing about 100 kilograms out of the sparse forest. But as heavy rainfall and increasingly floods wreak havoc on his community in Quang Binh province, The 36-year-old man learned about the ongoing climate and nature crises and decided to turn to tourism and conservation.

Now, Ngoc Anh is one of 250 former "forest bandits" trained by an adventure travel company to lead most foreign tourists through the jungle and through the jungle to visit some of the world's largest cave systems in Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site.

Phong Nha - Ke Bang National Park.

Ngoc Anh said: “In the past, every time I saw a big tree, my head would calculate how tall the tree was and cut it into logs of different sizes. But now I'm in the tourism business, when I see a tree like that, I tell the tour group how valuable it is because they don't exist anymore."

According to Global Forest Watch, Vietnam lost about 3 million hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2020, down 20% from 20 years ago, mainly due to the commodity industry. The government's crackdown on illegal logging since 2007 has helped slow the rate of deforestation, and Vietnam recently joined a global pledge to end deforestation by 2030.

Ngoc Anh was trained by an adventure travel company to become a forest tour guide. (Photo: Reuters)

Ngoc Anh and other tour guides are always accompanied by a ranger who helps patrol the trails to deter poachers, remove animal traps, and remove litter. They do it for less than half of what they made in their logging days, but hope to earn more as the travel and tourism industry slowly recovers from the pandemic.