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Published: December 5th 2015
Here are some words to describe the bus ride from Hue to Phong Nha: terrifying. fast. harrowing. confusing. unsleepable (it's a word now). We woke up wicked early in the morning in Hue, packed, ate a quick breakfast at the hostel, and then were rushed out with all of our stuff to another one of those tiny Vietnamese buses that doesn't fit Westerners. I actually had to stick both my legs out into the aisle. Smaller than airplane seats. Sylvan was on a day tour of Phong Nha, and I was going to my hostel. But we were on the same bus. Confusing point number 1.
Then the tour started, led by a Vietnamese man who barely spoke English. I mostly stuck my headphones in and tried to sleep while the bus twisted and turned at the speed of light. We got off at a strange church, and I had to ask to make sure I wasn't on a tour. I wasn't. Everyone on the bus seemed to be on different tours and no one seemed to know where they were going. We eventually stopped and some people in the bus pointed out Easy Tiger hostel, so I got off
the bus and got my bag. The tour guide man seemed to be asking me about the other three people who were supposed to be getting off the bus. I had no idea, so I got my bag and walked away. I got into the hostel, which was GORGEOUS, and checked in. I was taken to a 4-bed dorm room, where an American girl named Nancy (don't worry, she's my age and not 80) was checking in at the same time. We instantly became friends, put on our bathing suits, and lay by the pool next to a limestone cliff for a few hours until the sun went away. Her Australian friend named Kate joined us too. After plenty of pool time, I was starving, so I went out to Bamboo Cafe, which had been recommended to me by a couple in Hue.
I never ate anywhere else for the next 4 days. Only Bamboo Cafe. Always Bamboo Cafe.
When I went back to the hostel, Kate and I got money from Nancy and went to book a tour for the next day. Here's the thing about Phong Nha. The caves were discovered very recently, so the town
is only emerging as a tourist town. There are a bunch of hostels and restaurants situated on one road. There is one ATM in the city. When I went on hostelworld.com to find my hostel, only one showed up, so I had to do other research. I found Easy Tiger hostel, and it looked great, so I booked it. Then in Hue I met an older couple who had just come from Phong Nha and said Easy Tiger is a great hostel but they're really expensive, so I should book my tours through another hostel and eat at Bamboo Cafe.
So, Kate and I went down to the Backpacker's hostel where there were tours of the Paradise Cave and Dark Cave for 1.1 million dong each ($48). Easy Tiger has the exact same tour for 1.45 million dong ($64). We went back to the hostel and went to bed early.
When I woke up in the morning, Nancy wasn't in the room, so I went down to Bamboo Cafe and found her (duh). Then Kate found us. We went to Backpackers hostel and met some of the girls on our tour. There were 10 of us in total.
9 girls and 1 guy. We got in the van, drove down about a block. and sat in the van and waited while the guide got the tickets. A lot of waiting on this tour. However, WORTH IT. When we got back in the van, we did introductions and the guide told us his name three times. He said after 3 times, if we pronounced his name correctly, he'd buy us a beer. His name is Ngoc, and don't ask me to pronounce that, but I did it correctly once and won a free beer.
We stopped the van around 50 km from the border of Laos to get out and take pictures of the beautiful park. Phong Nha is 330 square miles and filled with dramatically rising limestone cliffs and blue-green rivers. We continued to the entrance of Paradise Cave and hiked up for a while to find the entrance. Paradise Cave is the second biggest cave in the world and was only discovered in 2005. Phong Nha is also home to the biggest cave in the world called Son Doong Cave, discovered in 2010. However, it's difficult to go to Son Doong cave as a budget backpacker
because the 7-day expedition costs $3000 and is booked until 2017 (anyone wanna go in 2017?)
Paradise Cave was nothing short of spectacular. When you first walk down into the immense cavern, you're greeted by a stalagmite about 30 meters high. You continue into what could be a huge concert hall. The scale is incredible, and then the cave keeps going. The first 1.2km of the cave is open to tourists. The next 7km are open to tourists who pay more money, and the cave is 31km in total. The walkway is flanked by stalactites and stalagmites unlike anything I've ever seen in shapes and colors that took millions of years to create. One giant structure that looks like a waterfall touched by medusa is surrounded by an infinity pool so still it creates a perfect reflection. Groups of stalagmites look like the drip castles we used to make on the beach but 10 feet tall. Nature is amazing. We were so sad when we got to the end, but it was time to move on to the dark cave. We took buggies down to the van, piled in, and headed to lunch.
After a 15 minute drive,
we landed at a restaurant and were served barbecue on a banana leaf. Your basic delicious food that you roll in egg rolls and eat. We were all so hungry. At the restaurant there were more puppies, so we spent time with them. As we ate, people zip lined over us. The bluest river I've ever seen ran right next to the restaurant.
After lunch, it was time for us to do the dark cave. We stripped down to our bathing suits and watched a safety video (in Vietnam??). Except this was not a safety video. The star of the film was a really good-looking German who clearly spoke English as a second language. He spent the first 10 minutes of the video getting his gear on, and telling us how much everything cost to replace should we lose it. Then he got on the zip line and we got to see an instant replay of him landing 3 times with techno music blasting. The music ended abruptly, and he continued into the cave where he (spoiler alert!) told us everything we would be seeing in the cave, down to the fossils. He also continued to tell us not
to lose our equipment. Those life-jackets are really expensive and high-end after all ($20). He came out of the cave and did the activities near the restaurant including zip lining into the water and zip lining into a net that hung suspended over the water. What do you do once you land in the net, you may ask? He didn't show us in the video! We were so lost! We booed when the video ended because we were so sad it was over. Now it was time for us to get our gear. We signed wavers (in Vietnam??????) and got harnesses, lifejackets, and helmets with headlamps. These really expensive high-end lifejackets unclip if you breathe in too deeply, by the way.
Then we waited. While we waited we sat around and everyone told all the bad jokes they knew. We had picked up a few more people in our group for the dark cave trip, and they fit in like a glove. We were all best friends at this point. Once everyone was geared up we walked over to the zip line and flew 400m over the river. So fun. We had to wait for everyone, so we jumped
in the river and swam around and cheered as people zipped in. Once everyone was there, we swam over to the cave entrance and walked into the cave on a really slippery walkway. We found the fossils, which would probably have been more exciting had we not already seen them in the "instructional" video. We walked single-file waist-deep in pitch-black water following Ngoc. Once we made it to land, we took off our lifejackets (which had mostly unclipped themselves anyway) and went into the mud portion of the cave.
How to describe this...I've been thinking about it for a few days, so here goes. You walk through a narrow damp cave with muddy floors and wet walls in your bathing suit, headlamp, and helmet. That's it. Bare feet and everything. Eventually you start stepping into ankle-deep mud. Finally, you climb over a wall and sort of walk into (or slip into) a pool of mud. It feels like being in a pool of melted chocolate. Imagine how hard it is to stir pure melted chocolate. We walked through the mud, which was up to our chests in slow motion because it was impossible to move any faster. We kept
falling and having to twist ourselves around to get back up as we moved further back in the pool. When we sat down, we weren't sitting on the bottom, but we weren't sinking either. We merely remained suspended in the thick thick mud. Once everyone was in, Ngoc told us to turn off our headlamps, and we sat in the pitch black. We sang "We Wish You A Merry Christmas," "Waterfalls," and "Total Eclipse of the Heart" before we turned the headlamps back on. It was the coolest experience. I have never done anything even close to that. It was over too soon.
We slowly and sadly left the mud pit and trudged back to the water. We washed off in the cave and said no to swimming in the pool of dark water that was full of snakes and eels. NOPE. Instead we left the cave, took off our helmets, and swam until kayaks arrived. Nancy and I shared an inflatable kayak equipped with canoe paddles while paddling on our knees and singing "Colors of the Wind" at the top of our lungs. I think everyone around us appreciated it. When we landed we all took turns on
the zip line that you just hold on to and drop into the water. I went twice. Turns out the net thing from the video is an obstacle course. If you fall, you fall into the water. I did not try that. We hung out there for a good long time playing in the water, and then it was time to go home. We drove back to the town and got beers at Ngoc's restaurant. Then we all met at Bamboo Cafe for a big family dinner. We had some drinks back at the hostel and went to bed. It was the best day.
The next day was also the best day. We got up in the morning and met at Bamboo Cafe. We hung out there for a while because it was a rainy day. When it stopped, Kate, Nancy, and I got bikes from the hostel (for free) and rode around. We rode down the Old French Highway next to the river avoiding cattle, dogs, and chickens the whole way. We were clearly the only Westerners around for a while. It started raining, so we pulled over into a cafe. Or, a house with a cafe sign
on it that had some tables and chairs and a pool table. Still not super sure if it was a cafe. We sat around while no one offered us drinks or food. Eventually a woman came out of the house (cafe?) and asked if we wanted to play pool. Of course we said yes, and we started shooting. It took us a really really really long time to figure out what we were playing. When I got a ball in, she pointed to a bunch of numbers and said those were mine to shoot. We weren't sure if we were trying to get a range, or a hue, or what. So I just remembered some of the numbers and kept asking. She got the 8-ball in, which apparently wasn't a problem. About halfway into the game we realized we were odds and she (and the 3 boys who had joined by now) was evens and the 1 ball is the last one you get in. By the end of the game, about 8 people had joined in, and they won. We said goodbye, promised we'd stop by again, and continued on our way.
We biked along the river until
we came to...the river. While we biked, every person on the side of the road shouted "hello!" so we started singing about the adventures of 3 white people on bikes. The river had no bridge, but we wanted to see a church on the other side. Cue an old woman on a very interested ferry charging us 5000 dong to take us across with our bikes. No problem. We made it across and visited some churches and got yelled at by more children who probably should've been in school. On the way back into town, we took the ferry back across and stopped at our friends' house. These women were basically the real housewives of Phong Nha. They were dressed to the nines. Nancy pulled out her translation book and Kate butchered the language while Nancy and I played pool. The women loved it. They fed us snacks and took loads of pictures of us and introduced us to a 2-year-old named Ming who was wearing a fedora, a chain necklace, and a chain bracelet. We ate, played pool, and took more pictures before it was time to go. No word of the same language was uttered the whole time.
We relied on the translation book and somehow attracted the whole village.
We biked back to town and continued on until the road ended because the Phong Nha cave was there. We decided to come back properly with a boat the next day, and biked home. We ate dinner at Bamboo Cafe and looked through my pictures while the security guard at the hostel looked through with us, thoroughly entertained. Kate left on the night bus to Hanoi, and Nancy and I went to bed wicked early. So good.
Our last morning in Phong Nha, we woke up, ate breakfast (guess where), and checked out. We walked down to the boats to hopefully glom onto a tour and see the Phong Nha cave. The woman told us to wait for more tourists, but none showed up, so we went back to the hostel to get tourists of our own. We walked around recruiting before we were recruited ourselves to a group going to the cave. 14 of us walked down to the boat, and after a lot of finagling with money, we had a boat and entry tickets to two caves. The boat took us down the river
and into the cave where the engine turned off, and the silence was only broken by the oar hitting the water. The roof of the boat was peeled back, and we got to see the cave while floating down the river that cut through it. Again, unbelievable natural structures, spectacular space, beautiful cavern. When we turned around we got off the boat and got to explore the land part of the cave on our own. We touched the rocks, ran around, and took a ton of pictures. When we exited, we walked up all of the stairs with a beautiful view of Phong Nha to the next cave. We were the only ones besides 3 Chinese men who made themselves heard. Caves are really amazing places.
We took the boat back to town and Nancy and i spent the rest of the night in Bamboo Cafe researching Halong Bay and Sapa (next destinations) and writing this blog. We have both fallen completely in love with Phong Nha, and it is with heavy hearts we leave. This is not a place to be missed, and I guarantee you it will not be the same in the next 20 years. I
came to this place at a time when it is virtually unknown, undeveloped, and full of warm people who take a lot of pride in where they live.
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Samuel
non-member comment
Question
Hello Kate- First of all, your blog was very very fun to read. I would love to go to that mud cave one day. I noticed that you booked your hostels on Hostelworld. But is there any other site to book hostels in Vietnam. Also, how do you book train or bus journeys? Can you use US credit cards in Vietnam, and in your experience, is this as well as using ATMs safe enough to do so? Very well written piece! Sam