Bay Mau Coconut Forest 2026: The Basket Boats of Cam Thanh and the Ticket That Caught the Old Town

There is a moment on the drive east out of Hội An, past the last tailor shops on Nguyễn Duy Hiệu, where the road stops being a town and becomes water with a road laid over it. Rice, then reeds, then a bridge, and then on both sides the palms close in: not the tall coconut of a postcard but dừa nước, nipa palm, growing out of brackish mud in a low green wall about head height, cut through with channels wide enough for one boat.

That is Cẩm Thanh. Four or five kilometres from the Old Town, ten to fifteen minutes in the car, and in 2026 it is quietly the busiest ticket in Hội An.

How busy has the coconut forest actually become?

Busier than most people realise, including most people in Hội An. Before the pandemic, admissions at the coconut forest brought in under 20 billion VND a year. In 2025 that reached 37 billion VND, and 2026 is on track for around 40 billion. The site now draws in the region of 700,000 visitors, of whom roughly 80 percent are international. Local officials have said that at points this year ticket sales here ran at about twice the Old Town's.

That reverses the usual mental map of Hội An. The mangrove out east is not a side trip from the lanterns any more; on some days it is the main event.

The management side has been catching up in real time. On 1 June 2026 the Hội An Đông ward opened two additional ticket counters at the site, to spread the queues and stop revenue leaking through unticketed entry; day one reportedly ran without congestion, with boat operators and agencies all working to the new arrangement. If you visited in 2024 and remember one bottleneck kiosk, that is no longer the picture.

What does the ticket cost, and what does it actually cover?

Two separate payments, and confusing them is the single most common misunderstanding we hear in the car.

• Site admission: 30,000 VND per adult, with a reduced 15,000 VND for children roughly 1 m to 1.3 m tall. In May 2026 the fee was formalised through a draft resolution setting 30,000 đồng/người/lượt for the heritage site, collected by the ward's public service centre, which retains 50 percent for management and operation with the balance going to the state budget. Exemptions run to children, poor households, journalists, researchers, members of the Vietnam Heritage Association and people with severe disabilities.
• The basket boat, separately: generally 200,000 to 300,000 VND per thúng, the boat carrying two adults and a small child, for 45 to 60 minutes on the water.

So a couple doing the standard version is looking at roughly 260,000 to 360,000 VND all in — a few dollars for the ground, most of it for the boat and the man paddling it. Which is the right way round, and worth knowing so nobody feels ambushed at the second window.

What is a thúng chai, and what happens on the ride?

The thuyền thúng is a round bamboo basket boat, waterproofed and paddled with a single oar in a figure of eight. It is a working fishing craft, not a tourist invention.

The hour on the water is: out through the narrow channels under the palms, a demonstration of net casting from a standing boat, sometimes crabs pulled out of the mud, folded grasshoppers and rings made from nipa leaf, and at the wide spot, the spinning — a boatman rocking a basket on its own axis until it turns like a coin. That last part is a show, it is loud, and it is entirely opt-in. Boats that want quiet get quiet.

Wasn't this place notorious for loudspeakers?

It was, and that story has an ending worth carrying with you.

By late 2023 the site had a genuine noise problem: loa kẹo kéo, the portable trolley speakers, blasting karaoke across the water from boat after boat, with complaints from residents and visitors alike. On 20 November 2023 the then Cẩm Thanh commune banned karaoke on the water outright, citing waterway safety, noise pollution and the living conditions of the households along the channels, with penalties and confiscation of the offending equipment for those who continued.

Enforcement did not land overnight — reporters were still hearing speakers three days later, and Báo Quảng Nam wrote about how awkward noise rules are to police on open water. But by the end of that December, Tuổi Trẻ's headline was that the forest was no longer thumping. Ask for a quiet boat and you will now generally get one.

Where does the car stop, and which entrance?

Here is the part nobody writes down. There is no single gate. Cẩm Thanh has a string of landings along the channel road, each with its own parking, ticket counter and fleet of baskets. The dock your booking names is the dock you need — turning up at the wrong one is a fifteen-minute correction, not a two-minute one, because the road along the water is narrow, one lane in practice, with nowhere to turn a car around between the docks.

From the driver's seat:

• Old Town to Cẩm Thanh: 4–5 km, 10–15 minutes
• An Bàng beach to Cẩm Thanh: about 6 km, 15 minutes
• Central Đà Nẵng: about 30 km, 45 minutes
• Đà Nẵng airport: about 32 km, 45–55 minutes
• Marble Mountains: about 30 minutes

The car parks at the landing and waits. It cannot follow you along the water and there is no useful second pickup point, so the arrangement is simply: your driver holds the car at the dock you went in from, and you come back to the same place. Coming out of the channels wet and sun-hit to find the car exactly where you left it is the whole point of doing this with a driver rather than a taxi you then have to conjure again.

When should you go?

Early or late. Roughly 08:00 to 09:30 or from 15:30. The site generally runs 07:30 to 18:30 in the summer high season and closer to 08:00 to 17:00 in the low season, and the middle of that window is when the coaches arrive and when there is no shade anywhere on open water.

Season matters differently here than at the beach. October to January is the wet half of the year, and the mangrove is at its most beautiful then — heavy green, mist off the water, hardly anyone about. What the rain affects is the boats: high water or a bad forecast can pause them for a day. In the wet months treat the basket boat as a call made on the morning, with the Old Town or the Marble Mountains as the same-afternoon alternative.

Is it worth it, if you already know it is touristy?

Yes, with one adjustment: go for the water forest, not the spinning.

This mangrove is not scenery invented for visitors. It is a working nipa forest that supplied the roofing and walling trade of Cẩm Thanh for generations, planted by local account some two hundred years ago from seed carried up from the Mekong Delta. It shrank badly — hundreds of hectares before the 1980s down to a fraction of that — and has been replanted since around 2010 with NGO support and, from 2015, tens of billions of VND of provincial investment. Recent figures put the nipa mangrove in the old Cẩm Thanh commune at about 84 hectares.

And these channels were a base. During the wars against France and then the United States, the terrain — dense water forest, hidden by palm, ringed by rivers, impossible to sweep — made this the most important revolutionary base in the Hội An area. That history is now being told properly, through a new themed route around the revolutionary history of the Bảy Mẫu coconut forest that links the sites in the mangrove with narration and folk performance.

One last piece of housekeeping. Since 1 July 2025, under Resolution 1659 of the National Assembly Standing Committee, Cẩm Thanh no longer exists as a commune: it was merged with Cẩm Châu and Cửa Đại into a new phường Hội An Đông of 18.22 km² and about 31,109 people, inside Đà Nẵng city. Every older address still finds the place. Only the paperwork moved.

If you want this run driven properly — early boat, right dock, the car waiting where you left it — tell us the trip at hoiandriver.com/quote; a real driver prices it, 10% books the date, and the balance is paid at trip end.