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Published: July 17th 2006
Brian and I just got back from a wonderful weekend out of the city, which was SO good that I can't wait any longer to tell you about it! We booked a two day tour to explore around Ninh Binh, which is about 2 hours south of Hanoi. I think we would have been happy anywhere where there wasn't constant honking, but we really found a wonderful place.
Day one took us to Cuc Phuong National Park, the oldest in Vietnam, which sits on a limestone mountain range. We didn't see much of the legendary inhabitants of the park (including ocelots, monkeys, snakes, etc) but the rainforest itself was just incredible. We had a great hike (about 8 km) to see the "1000 year old tree" which is probably more like 600 years old, it was gigantic! We looked as though we'd gone swimming from all the sweat, and the cicadas were loud enough to actually hurt our ears at times, and we saw some freaky-looking hand-sized spiders, but it was great! We also toured a cave where people lived 7000 years ago and got to walk quite far inside with our torches. The landscape is full of caves
and fissures, because of the limestone, and its amazing to see both the jagged cliffs and the trees that grow so large in only inches of soil, the roots go on forever! We saw a vine over 1.5 km long!! They also have a primate rescue centre (for you churchgoers, the monkey kind, not the church kind!) where they rescue them from hunters and rehabilitate them slowly, from small cages where they're monitored for sickness, then on to progressively larger and more natural enclosures until they can be released into the wild. They also have a captive breeding program. It was awesome. Then our driver and guide invited us to go swimming with them at a hot springs. The locals were very surprised to see us, and brought their kids over to meet us and it was great fun. The driver disappeared into a "private room" and it was all kind of weird, but the guide went in the big swimming pool with us. Vietnamese people can't swim very well, its kinda funny! We were too tired to do the karaoke, which is one of the best reasons to come to a National Park...
After a blissfully quiet sleep,
1000 year old tree
Notice Brian's see-through shirt - mmmm, sweaty!we headed off to Tam Coc, which is an amazing landscape of paper-flat land used for rice paddies with big spires of limestone spearing up out of it. Unbelievably beautiful. Tam Coc itself has great caves that you reach by rowboat, but the main site is like a tame Canada's Wonderland ride, dozens of boats all in a row. We cycled instead to a less busy site, and had two women row us for 2 hours down a river meandering through the limestong mountains, through lotus farms, duck farms, etc. to a cave that was so low at times we had to fold ourselves in half in the boat and the ceiling still touched our backs! Brian was pretty freaked out with all this caving we were doing, but it was really interesting. Did you know that lotus seeds taste like peas? They do!
Then we took our bikes on a beautiful ride for about 12 km to see Hoa Lu, the ancient capital of Vietnam, and home to a pretty pagoda. The bike ride was wonderful, very flat but roads in pretty bad shape! Kids kept running out yelling "Hello!" and they were very happy to see us.
Cows and water buffalo and ducks and fish ponds and rice fields and tiny hamlets and puppies and all that is good surrounded us. Don't forget kittens!
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Kara
non-member comment
Have a great time!
Hello, it's Kara. I am glad to here you guys are having a good time. I hpe that more adventures await in the future! Love,Kara