Good morning SE Asia!: Phong Nha National Park

So we had two nights booked in the Saigon hotel in Son Trach, giving us one full day. We only really wanted to see the caves, but there was also supposed to be a Primate sanctuary, but that turned out to be closed to the public so you could only walk around the outside. So the plan was just to get up to the cave.

The night we arrived it tipped down so we didn’t do much other than stare out of the door of the room and wonder when it would stop. We hoped by the next day it would be clear enough to rent a motorbike and head the 18km up to the cave entrance. We arranged it the night before for 11am, when the forecast looked a bit better.

Dinner and breakfast in the hotel are served in the open-sided restaurant, and when we had breakfast the wind was really blowing us around, still raining heavily. It didn't look good but we waited until just after 11, and it started to look slightly like it would clear. We got on our waterproof jackets and went for it. The motorbike we had was by far the oldest yet, probably a 15 year old Honda dream. It was actually OK to drive even though the auto clutch was almost worn out and it had a buckled wheel and ancient tyres. We belted down the highway, outrunning the darkest and heaviest looking clouds, only getting really wet again just as we arrived at the cave park entrance. Lucky escape. We hoped the cave was not flooded!

After paying our £2.40 each to get in we headed up the 1km path towards the steps up to the cave in the rain. You can get a golf cart if you pay a bit more! Then there were 300 steps up to the entrance. It is a nicely done place, quite new as the cave was only discovered in 2005 by a local guy from Son Trach. The entrance to 'Paradise' Cave as it is known is actually really small, so no wonder they didn't find it. It is actually 31km long, but only the first 1km is lit up and walkable.

We were almost on our own when we went in due to the crap weather and the fact it was Vietnamese lunchtime/siesta.

It was amazing, hard to put into words really. There were about three or four huge chambers connected by smaller chambers full of stalactites and stalagmites, waterfalls of limestone and other minerals. Stepped pools of water made out of various deposits that aped the rice paddies in the North. Surprisingly it was very tastefully lit (we assumed being Vietnam it would be lit by multicolour flashing LED's) and each interesting sculpture was given its own space in terms of light pool. The shapes of these naturally occurring blobs of stone are so complex and huge that you can stare at one for minutes. Getting a sense of scale is very difficult in the pictures (especially as our wide-angle lens has broken and we only have the zoom lens). There were a few big wooden platforms in the walkway in the centre of the big rooms, would be great place for a gig! Being Vietnam I think you could get it for the right price. Unfortunately, we have just realised that about 2/3rds of the pictures from Paradise Cave have gone missing somehow. Shame as they were really good. We still have a few though.

We headed back for the hotel, getting a bit wetter in the process. We decided to try a place for food in the main street of Son Trach that is in the guidebook and advertises cheap rooms and cold beer outside. Nice place and full of travellers coming and going, most seemed to be touring on Motorbike. We spent the evening drinking with a couple of Scottish guys and a guy from Essex and laughing about the other super-styled backpackers who take themselves far too seriously! One of the guys was working in Haiphong teaching English for the last year. It was a good night and we headed back to the hotel after 10 as the other guys carried on.