Everywhere you look in Phong Nha you see rolling mountains both off in the distance and even up close.
I stayed at the Easy Tiger hostel, the top choice for backpackers visiting the area. It had a really good hostel atmosphere, the first time in Vietnam I had felt that. The pommie boys and I spent a good few hours taking over the pool table they had for free play.
While in Phong Nha I visited three caves, the Phong Nha and Tien Son caves on one day and Hang Toi, aka the Dark Cave, the next.
To get to the Phong Nha cave you can organise your own group and take a dragon boat down the river to the cave. A group of five of us from the hostel got a boat and went out along the river.
At the base of the cave you have to climb what feels like endless staircases to get to the entrance. In the humidity of Vietnam it was a killer. The view from up there is quite nice, which does make up for it a little!
Upon entering the cave you can feel an instant cooling sensation, the sticky heat from the outside air disappears. The Phong Nha cave features a board-walk to guide tourists through the cave, and much to my pleasure we were the only ones in there!
Unfortunately photos simply don't do this place justice; the lack of perspective from a camera phone really ruins the shot.
From here we jumped back on the boat and took a tour through the mouth of the cave along the water, into Tien Son. This bigger, more open cave was apparently used during the Vietnam War by Vietnamese as a weapons depot and hospital. As such the Americans tried to drop bombs into the mouth of the cave, unsuccessfully.
That night I ventured out to the Phong Nha Farmstay, a more upmarket residence for travellers. The views from here at sunset are absolutely stunning.
===
While in Phong Nha I caught up with Rowan, the Kiwi that I met in Japan all those months ago. He had been travelling through Thailand before flying home for his sister's wedding and had come back out to trek Vietnam with his mates he met in Thailand. It's still crazy to be able to meet up with people whom I met thousands of kilometres away, months later.
My group and his all headed down to the Dark Cave together. The Dark Cave is an adventure cave, not simply a walk through.
We were suited up in life jackets and helmets and told to climb up a tower to the zip line down to the cave entrance.
From the end of the zip line, we swam into the mouth of the cave.
It was then time to turn out headlamps on and venture through the cave!
After walking through shallow water followed by a bit of swimming, we reached the muddy entrance and began our traversal.
The deeper into the cave we went, the more sludgy and muddy it became...
Until we were completely covered.
From here you could just lay in the mud. It was only a metre or so deep but the sensation of laying in mud is bizarre - you are totally buoyant! You could easily lay flat on your back and float a few inches below the surface. The mud didn't really feel much thicker than water either, it didn't really have much substance to it. Very unique experience for sure.
From here we walked back out through the path we took and slid down a rock face into an open water pool to swim through and rinse off a little.
The final part of the cave tour involved swimming for a hundred metres or so to the end of the cave, switching our headlamps off and swimming back in darkness, with only a very feint light in the distance lighting up our surroundings.
After leaving the cave we got to kayak back to where it started. All in all it was a great day!
===
You can really just turn a corner anywhere in Phong Nha and see amazing scenery. There are a few expat-run accommodations and each one has its own brilliant landscape on its doorstep. It's really not surprising why people are moving out there to live. I'll finish this post with a few more random photos from the area.
No comments:
Post a Comment