Ho Thuy Tien is one of those places that shouldn’t exist anymore, and maybe that’s exactly why it’s worth seeing. An abandoned waterpark in the middle of Vietnam, swallowed little by little by the jungle around it. The kind of place where concrete dreams went to die, leaving behind a strange mix of rust, graffiti, and ghosts.

The day I went, the heat was unbearable. That kind of sticky, oppressive heat that glues your shirt to your back and makes the air feel alive. But it didn’t matter—I wanted to see it. To walk the cracked pathways where kids once ran dripping with chlorinated water. To climb the steps that now belong more to vines than to people.

Everyone comes here for the dragon. And yeah, it delivers. A massive beast rising from the lake, its scales chipped, its belly hollowed out, graffiti scrawled across its ribs. Up close it’s both ridiculous and awe-inspiring, like some strange relic from a forgotten carnival. Standing inside its jaws, staring out over the water, you realize how fast nature reclaims things we thought would last forever.

I met a couple of tourists wandering around with the same mix of curiosity and disbelief, and a few lizards darting between shadows like they owned the place—which, honestly, they probably do now.

I left sweaty, sunburned, and weirdly satisfied. Ho Thuy Tien isn’t polished, it isn’t curated, it isn’t “Instagram-perfect.” It’s rotting, crumbling, alive in its own strange way. And that’s what makes it worth the detour.