The most unknown wonder of the world?!

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K- A rare mistake by our usually infallible head researcher led us to take an overnight train to Dong Hoi in order to tour the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) in central Vietnam. On arriving at 8am we discovered that a trip to the DMZ was going to be impractical but fortunately our infallible researcher had a back up plan and by 9am we were in a taxi heading to Phong Nha Cave - a UNESCO World Heritage site that no-one appears to have heard of. Or at least no-one we have so far met on our travels here.

On arrival we met Tony, an Aussie who was trying to make sense of the rather un-user friendly price board. It was in English but may as well have been in Vietnamese. After some help by our taxi driver we worked out that we needed to pay entry for the cave but could separately rent a boat. Which unless we were going to swim was the only way to enter the cave. Anyway, we of course teamed up with Tony, enduring the company of an Aussie in order to save a couple of dollars (joke mate!)

And wow. The cave was just wow. Going in by boat made us feel like adventurers (OK - sad) and there were only a couple of boats in there with us - all with local tourists which always feels less touristy than if its full of Westerners. The formations were incredible. We were offloaded after 20 minutes of "wow" and walked along a sandy shore being more and impressed by each formation we saw. I have never seen stalagmites and stalagtites like this - they were ginormous.

We paused for a lunch of catfish which was in itself interesting. We know the names of basic proteins and we both eat virtually anything so are perfectly happy ordering from Vietnamese menus or pointing at food but ordering here took over 10 (frustrating) minutes. At one point I was taken in to the kitchen to see a live catfish...... I know its fish - just let me order it please! This is a phenomena we are noticing more here than elsewhere in Asia. There seems to be a real panic when we turn up and people do not speak English. We dont expect people to speak English but please work with me - if I point at something and hold up 1 finger then I want 1 portion of what I am pointing at. Works elsewhere - I once did a great chicken mime in China (and got a delicious piece of beef but that is another story!)

Anyway finally fed and watered we headed off to Thien Duong (Paradise Cave) - with Tony tailing our car on his moped. This cave was alot more expensive and we had to climb over 500 steps to enter it and as we could not believe that anything could outstrip the first caves we were not quite sure why we were bothering. But amazingly this cave surpassed the previous one! We found out later that Paradise Cave was only discovered in 2005 and opened to the public in December 2010. It is also said to be the largest discovered dry cave in the world at nearly 31KM long.

It is certainly stunning and without proper photography lighting our photos can only give an idea of what it looks like. If you want to see more apparently it featured in National Geographic in January 2011.

So our infallible researcher pulls it off again. A great travel day and all the better for being such an unknown wonder.

The next day, nicely full of smug traveler atttitude we headed off to Hue, where we booked ourselves on to the DMZ tour for the following day. It is not a breathtaking tour but an interesting introduction to the history of the war and the magnitude of what was happening. A highlight of the tour was seeing the Vinh Moc tunnels. These were dug by the Vinh Moc villagers to shelter from the blanket bombing of the area (as an aside, more bombs were dropped during the USA - Vietnam conflict than in the whole of the First and Second World Wars). Made up of over 60 tunnels and covering more than 2KM the tunnels were built on 3 levels from 10-30 meters the tunnels included an infirmary and meeting rooms. Over 60 families sheltered here, some for weeks at a time, and apparently none of them lost their lives.

As you would expect the tunnels are very small and whilst I think I would be OK if it was just Mark & I walking through them there was a crush of tourists in front and behind and after 20 meters I knew that this was not a good idea! While I could still see the entrance I decided to exit quickly so as to avoid the traffic jam and the inevitable claustrophobia. Mark accompanied me as he also felt a little uncomfortable. We joined a few other people at the exit and 20 minutes later we watched 30 or so rather wan looking people exit. No-one was smiling and some people looked very unwell. A good call on our part. We were also told that the Cu Chi tunnels near Saigon are even smaller so have elected not to visit - no point.

And so on to Hoi An, another UNESCO site but a little more well trodden and certainly worthy of a blog in its own right.

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Photos

Entering Vinh Moc Tunnels
I exited pretty sharpish! Too claustrophobic for me.

Phong Nha Caves
Note Mark at the bottom

Vietnam isn
Mark on our boat to the caves with his head sticking through the roof!