Subterranean adventurers

5 December 2018

The reason we “rested” yesterday was so we could go on a proper cave expedition today! We took on the 7km Paradise Cave trek. The first km of the cave is a show cave, but at the end of the show cave you go through a little gate and don your head torches to continue into the darkness…

Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park (to give it its full name) has an amazing diversity of wildlife, including the Saola; a species of antelope only actually discovered in the 1990’s. But the park is far more renowned among backpackers and tourists for its caves.

There’s the main Phong Nha cave we visited by boat, closest to town and with some history; the Viet Cong used it to hide troop and supply movements from the Americans, who realised and tried sending a huge air force raid to collapse it, but the Viet Cong had set up anti-aircraft positions and the raid ended up costly and unsuccessful.

There’s Dark Cave, beloved of backpackers because you take a zipline across a river to the cave entrance, splash around in thick mud in the cave in your swimming costume, and then take a kayak paddle back to the pickup point. Not my kinda hijinks.

There’s the Son Doong Cave, the largest cave in the world by volume, way off in the jungle and only visitable by $3000 guided trek. There are many others too, with new ones being discovered every year (and often then available as part of an organised caving tour just a year or two later).

Paradise Cave is the second show cave. It doesn’t have a river, but it’s even more vast and impressively stuffed with stalactites and stalagmites than Phong Nha cave. Real “woooooow” material, for a whole kilometer into the earth. I’m honestly not sure I can imagine myself being bothered to visit any other show cave in the world after this. Wooooooow.

And that was only the first bit. Head torches on we headed into the bowels of the underground. One of the most astonishing things was just how much of this trek was exactly that: just trekking. I’ve done a bit of caving in England and Wales, and you spend most of your time either climbing, or crawling, or squeezing, or at least clambering. For most of the next 6km we just walked through huge subterranean passages with towering cave formations sparkling on either side. Occasionally there’d be a cave spider or cave shrimp to see.

Then we got to the bit where the cave is lowest and the water highest, and had to swim. This made it a bit more exciting! The water was cold, but after climbing out at the other end we were fine to finish the whole trek in swimming gear; it was 22 degrees underground and of course not a breath of breeze. There was the odd bit of scrambling or clambering towards the end, which tested my dodgy ribs and shoulder a bit, but we finally made it to our destination: an even more huge underground chamber with a shaft of green daylight spilling down from a hole in the roof above.

Rather a splendid spot to stop and have lunch; sticky grilled chicken, garlic veg and rice which our porter had somehow kept warm the whole way. And then of course, the 7km trek back again!

What a wonderful, exciting, and yet surprisingly easy adventure beneath the earth.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2018 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Vietnam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.