Phong Nha Caving Adventures

It was a bit of an adventure to get to Phong Nha - the bus we had booked broke down (I received a WhatsApp message), so our tickets were cancelled. It was 30/12, so it was hard to find transport the day before New Year’s Eve. We ended up booking train tickets in a sleeper carriage, but during the day. It was the most expensive transport of our trip -  by a long way. A sleeper sounds moderately comfortable, but sitting on a thin mattress 8 hours isn’t that much fun. The good news was that nobody else had booked the other two beds in the carriage, so we essentially had our own private carriage for the day. 

Random train station picture - you just walk over the tracks to access the train!

We then got a taxi from the station to our accommodation in Phong Nha - it was a long journey!

The next morning, we had a big sleep in. It was raining, so we weren’t super motivated to get up and going. Turns out that northern, central and southern Vietnam all have their own weather systems, and December in the central Vietnam happens to be the rainy season. 

Nonetheless, we focused to brave the drizzle and head out. First stop was coffee - coconut coffee, in fact. We had been so keen to try this! Whilst egg coffee is more of a northern speciality, iced coconut coffee is on offer in central Vietnam. It’s amazing!

We walked into the main part of town, where you can essentially hire a boat and a rower to take you to visit some caves. We waited a while to see if any other tourists wanted to join and split the cost - only one other guy showed up, so we shared with him.

Funnily enough, we saw lots of packed boats going to and from the cave, so it was kinda nice to have a boat almost to ourselves.

The first stop was at Tien Son Cave, which not all boats stop at. You have to pay marginally more for the stop.

We walked up about 100-200m worth of stairs to get to the cave entrance, and it was really cool.

I kept calling it Aladdin’s cave of wonders because it genuinely gave me that vibe! It was huge - and hardly anyone else was exploring it. 

We spent quite a while exploring this cave - it was well lit and had a clear path, but it was also just huge and took a while to get through. 

Back on the boat, we made our way to Phong Nha Cave. This was a cave that had a river running through it. It wasn’t bad, but it was overshadowed by Tien Son, that’s for sure! 

It was still raining quite a lot, so, aside from stopping for another coffee, we relaxed at our hotel for the afternoon.

The next day was the reason we had come to Phong Nha - the Ruc Mon Cave tour. When I’d showed Michael the photos of the caves in this area, he said he really wanted to go on a cave tour - so here we were. 

Phong Nha has only recently become a tourist destination as more caves are discovered in this area. Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park is now become a UNESCO World Heritage site. The biggest cave in the world (Son Doong) was discovered here - it has its own ecosystem and you need to book almost a year in advance to visit, which is a four day trip due to its size. 

Back to our tour - Ruc Mon Cave.

We did this tour with Greenland Tours and they were great. First, we drove for about an hour to get to the start of the hiking trail.

We then hiked about 7km along a trail in the Quang Binh jungle, which invoked a lot of mud and hiking through small streams, just to get to the cave itself. It was raining nearly the whole time! I’m gonna skim over the part where nearly all of us discovered leeches attached to our socks or pants. 

We did get provided with a lovely lunch once we got to the cave’s entrance.

Then, we got fitted with harnesses and safety equipment, and that’s when I started to get nervous. 

We had to climb about 350 of steep, muddy, rocky ground to get to the actual cave entrance. 

Once we got into the main chamber of the cave, it was quite nice - we could still see daylight, happy days. That didn’t last long. We soon lost all light bar our head torches. We proceeded to climb, crawl, hike and descend through ladders in the cave. There were many moments when I could not see any kind of ground and had no idea where I was climbing up or down to. For someone who is scared of heights, this took a lot of willpower.

The longest ladder we climbed down (into complete darkness), was 60m long!

At one point, we climbed / slid down a portion of the cave, through this small hole - we couldn’t see what was underneath it or on the other side. It was very unnerving. By that point I’d adopted a ‘follow the person in front of me’ attitude and just hoped for the best.  

Altogether, this involved about 5km of caving! 

It was somehow amazing that such a cave has been discovered, explored and that all this caving infrastructure built though. 

At the end of this, there was a 5m jump into the water and a 500m swim to exit the cave! Probably one of the s surest things I’ve ever done! 

Then, it was just a measly 7km hike back to our van - no biggie! 

What a day - it was exhilarating, unnerving and completely terrifying at points, but an amazing experience! Happy wedding anniversary Michael! 

That evening was New Year’s Eve - being that we had just done a strenuous cave hike and that it was still raining, we had a ‘family dinner’ at our home stay. The owner was a beautiful woman who organised dinner every night for any guest who wanted to join, it created a great atmosphere!

She also bought a cake for New Year’s Eve!

We just sat around, eating and playing cards with some other guests until midnight - then off to bed!

We actually decided to leave Phong Nha a day early - we loved our homestay and the area, but it was just raining so much. We had a lot of wet clothes that we couldn’t get to dry and just needed a few dry days to sort ourselves out.

It was a great stop in central Vietnam - highly recommended for adventure lovers!