Phong Nha, Vietnam – March 13th – 17th, 2017

Our travels to Phong Nha began with an eight-hour ride on the train with backwards facing seats and a fogged window. Not the best conditions for a long travel day, but thankfully neither of us got motion sickness. Our seats were actually the ones in the exact middle of the car so we had a shared table with strangers. The strangers were a sleeping elderly Vietnamese couple that sported some seriously impressive foot fungus that always seemed to be just a little bit too close to our bags. After hours of craning our necks to look out the other side of the train at the magnificent Vietnam countryside, we arrived at Dong Hoi. From Dong Hoi we caught a minibus posing as a local bus to Phong Nha proper, an amazing national park filled with some of the world’s largest caves.

Our train experience to Phong Nha and a few goofy pictures for your enjoyment! The top right picture includes the famous local egg coffee: a coffee with a whipped egg on top. I really love eggs but I have to admit it had a funky texture.

On our first day, we rented a motorbike and got going early in an effort to beat the crowds to some of the caves. We went to Dark Cave first, where we heard you were able to swim in the river and take a mud bath in a cave. Turns out our early morning was for naught, as the tour operator at the cave (apparently required) made us and the growing crowd of tourists wait until there was over 20 of us. After a quick zipline ride to the opposite riverbank, the group of 20 waited patiently for another 20 minutes with no instructions until, finally, an additional 10 people joined us along with the “guide”. We swam the 20 feet from the zipline landing platform to the cave entrance platform and queued into the cave. We walked and swam for a few hundred feet through narrow and twisty passages and eventually piled into the main attraction, the mud pool! The mud had a liquid consistency like a milkshake, but was denser than water so that you can literally float on only your butt! It was the craziest sensation to not be able to even stand in the mud because you kept floating upwards before your feet could touch the bottom. The feeling is hard to put into words, but it was incredible and totally worth the tour operator gimmicks. Once we had found two bandaids swimming in the muck, we called it quits and headed back out with the crowd.

Welcome to Phong Nha!

The gimmicks continued with a canoe trip 500 feet back up the river to an adult waterpark area with ziplines into the water, a suspended obstacle course, and paddle bikes. Ziplining into the water was fun, but the most entertainment came from watching people nearly maim themselves on the obstacle course. You had to zipline about 100 feet over the river and release yourself at the right moment to land on a net to begin the course – this is a lot harder to do than it appears. You end up going much faster than is appropriate and end up landing in ridiculous fashions on the painful, thick-roped knotted-net. It was hilarious watching people releasing the zipline late and get whipped into summersaults and flips before landing upside down on the net. We had big bruises on our bodies for the next week from the experience. Our time at Dark Cave was highlighted by the cesspool (I mean mud pool) and the zipline entertainment, but it was a painfully obnoxious example of a tourist trap in Asia. It was obvious that they were simply padding their brochures with the various types of adventure sports. Leaving Dark Cave, we continued riding through the national park taking in the jaw-dropping beauty of the jungle, cliffs, and mountains.

Our motorbike day escapades. Sorry, we couldn't get any pictures in the Dark Cave.

The following day began our two-day trek to the third-largest cave in the world, Hang En. In the company of 11 other tourists from America, Germany, Canada (but living in Vietnam), and the UK, we hiked five hours through jungle and along a riverbed to our camp. Though we were expecting rain, the first day’s trek turned out to be simply overcast so thankfully we could see the beautiful scenery. Gratefully, we also had boots on loan from the tour company so we didn’t need to worry about destroying our only pair of shoes with all of the river crossings and muddy tracks. After settling in at the camp, we put our caving gear on and swam into a bonus cave, Hang Lanh (aka Cold Cave). This cave was basically a super long and twisty tunnel (cross-section about the size of a school hallway) with a cold river running through it. We swam and trekked a further 1.5 hours into this cave, seeing a tiny cave worm with its trail of sticky, silk traps and many amazing cave formations. We were quite cold by the time we exited the cave, but the experience was out of this world!

Our first day trekking: there's Dani showing us what we did a lot of (wading across the river) and there's the whole crew enjoying the lunch spread on the ground.

The view from our camp, our dinner spread, our sweet caving gear, and an amazing crystallized formation inside Hang Lanh.

After a fun night of cards, decent Vietnamese food, and getting to know our fellow trekkers, I woke up and was startled when Dani discovered that my foot and sleeping bag were covered in blood! Thinking we knew the culprit to the persistent bleeding, a lengthy search ensued and I eventually found a fat and lazy leech in my bedding! I must have picked up the blood sucker when I visited the loo in the early morning. According to our Vietnamese guide, they are nothing to worry about since they “only suck the bad blood.” It took a clotting agent to finally get the bleeding to stop.

There it is! It stole my blood! Also, the bottom left shows the "swallow entrance" to Hang En in the background. The bottom right is the river entrance we actually took.

With a bit less blood in my body than the previous day, we ate breakfast, packed up, and headed over to the main attraction, Hang En. As we approached the cave, you could clearly see the large and gaping “swallow entrance” in the cliffside, and we could feel the excitement and sense of anticipation rising in the group. We entered through a smaller side entrance and climbed up through old collapsed rubble. All of a sudden, we were standing on an enormous pile of boulders with a breathtaking view into and over an enormous chamber with a dark ceiling high above us and a river/beach low below. The scale of the place was staggering. The main chamber is nearly 350 feet tall by 600 feet wide. The sense of scale and perspective was aided by the tiny people and tents on the beach at the chamber’s bottom. After soaking in the chamber’s enormity, we headed further into the cave and explored the many formations and fossil-lined walls. At the far end of the cave, we took a rest and basked in the gorgeous view of the massive cave exit with jungle in the background. The cave was out of this world and truly extraordinary. The scale really was impressive, though, honestly, it was surprising that it is the 3rd largest cave in the world (by volume). Though the chamber dimensions were vast, the length of the cave was only about a mile and we had expected it to go on for much further. I suppose it’s simply a different sense of scale compared to the seemingly endless and maze-like caves we have experienced in the US.

Hang En: Massive.

Amazing stalagmites, stalactites, terraces, other formations, and fossils in Hang En.

Still grinning from the experience, the trek out of the cave and back through the jungle seemed to go quickly. We soon found ourselves at the end of excursion. Now sweaty, smelly, muddy, and tired, we stripped the nasty boots and socks off our wrinkly water-logged feet and boarded the waiting vans. Although over too quickly, the experience was fantastic! Visiting these renowned Vietnamese caves will forever be a pinch-me moment for us.

Our trek out from Hang En brought us through a village and up a steep and sweaty hill.