SouthEast Asia: The Fabulous Caves of Phong Nha

As posted by Helen:

The alarm went off at 5.30am so that we could be ready for our 6:40 a.m. bus pick up. Already at this early hour there were speeches to be heard via a loud sound system and as I looked out our hotel window we could see a few people exercising! People are up early in SE Asia and late to bed, it seems!

The Mini Van was at our hotel promptly at 6:40, however, until we picked up all the other passengers another hour went by before we left Hue (luckily we managed a quick few minutes of breakfast at the hotel before we left).

On the way we stopped at the Lady of La Vang shrine which commorates a vision of the Virgin Mary that was seen there in 1798? (I had not hear of this apparition before.)

We travelled along AH1 through areas very much affected by the Viet Nam (American) War - close to the DMZ, and the US Doc Mieu base (some tanks were still on the roadside as a reminder?). We passed numerous cemetaries in this area where so many villagers killed during the war were buried, including the larger Martyrs' Cemetary. We also crossed the 17th parallel and passed the Hien Luong Bridge which was the boundary dividing Vietnmam into 2 regions in 1954 as per a Chinese proposal during a Geneva Conference and then ratified by a UN Accord.

After some time we turned off AH1 onto the Ho Chi Minh Highway - a two lane highway (or should I say road?) which roughly coincides with the Ho Chi Minh Trail of the Vietnam War. It is unique in that it has a yellow dashed line down the middle.   At the moment this highway has a total length of 1,234 km and the plan is to connect many more provinces from north to south and total some 3,160 kms.  The scenery off this highway was lovely especially as we got closer to the National Park - multi-dimensional mountain ranges, valleys with tiny villages lush with rice paddies, corn fields - so verdant.

Just before our cave tour we stopped for lunch (at this point we had been on the road for some 4 hours and we were hungry!). We were a table of 8 people and within minutes of sitting down there were a dozen different dishes placed before us, none of which had any serving fork or spoon. I was a little taken aback when many of the people just helped themselves to each of the various dishes with the same chopsticks they used to feed themselves (talk about double dipping!). I happened to sit beside a very friendly young (late 20's) Vietnamese girl from Saigon. She was an insurance underwriter who worked for AIG - and was so proud of her country. She seemed to love her job - we got on the subject of vacations and she indicated it was difficult for her to take more than one week per year - a vacation had to be arranged well in advance with her superior (and we thought we worked hard in North America!).

Well fed, we were ready to board our boat and cruise along the Son River to the Phone Nha Cave. It was somewhat of a challenge to get onto the seats of the boat as we had to bend ourselves into two in order to crawl through a 16" opening!   It was an extremely hot day (40 with the humidity) and it was suggested we don the life jackets, which I did. But within minutes I was sooo hot, my blood pressure must have skyrocketed and I yanked the jacket off - I would rather have drowned!

Phong Nha Park is a Unesco World Heritage site and the area is considered a paradise for researchers and explorers of grottoes and caves.  The Phong Nha Cave is the second largest in Viet Nam  (some 7,000 metres long but tourists are only allowed to explore the first 1500 metres. It can only be visited by boat given its underground river - it was truly beautiful with many fascinating rock formations which had been given imaginative names such as the Buddha, The Lion, etc.   It is hard to put these special images into words, so here is what we saw through Ingrid's camera.

We spent the night in Dong Hoi, a residential town without souvenir shops or hawkers trying to sell you trinkets. Unforturnately, also a town without a decent restaurant. This is the hungriest we have been on this trip. Our hotel was close to the river front which had a beautiful promenade, however without shade. The town is a good base for visiting the National Park and the DMZ sites.

At this point, Vietnam is only 40km-50km wide (it depends who you ask), with the South China Sea in the East and Laos in the West.
The second day we visited the longest cave in the Park - Paradise Cave. At 31 km long, 60m at its highest point and only discovered in 2005 it has created quite a buzz - National Geographic did an article on it last year. Only the first km. is open to tourists at the moment. While we thought yesterday's cave visit was great, today's visit was like WOW - SPECTACULAR! It required a climb of some 500 steps (or a uphill walkway which we used) to reach the mouth of the cave, and we were lucky to have had a cloudy somewhat cooler day, which made the uphill walk a breeze.