PHONG NHA - HILLS AND CAVES!

29th - 31st July 2015

The journey to Phong Nha is better forgotten. It took 11 hours instead of 6. And we broke down. 

However, we made it there just after midnight, went straight to bed and awoke fresh(ish) and ready for our big adventure. Today we were headed to Hang En, the worlds 3rd largest cave, after Son Doong which was close by but cost $3000 to visit, and a cave in Malaysia. It was a two day trip, we were to spend the night camping in the cave on the 'beach'. We were picked up and taken to Oxalis HQ to be briefed by our jolly tour guides Tong and Tang (yes really).

We learnt about all the dangers we might encounter, which included poison ivy, leaches and snakes. We were told in no uncertain terms "DO NOT PLAY WITH SNAKES" as ones found in the area were likely to be poisonous. All set with our army issue boots, mosquito repellant and hard hats, we headed out into the wild. As it was only for one night, and they carried the tents and food, we hardly had anything with us, which was a real treat compared to the Annapurna trek!

We walked downhill for around one hour, the ground was muddy underfoot, and around us was dense jungle. We had to pinch ourself to believe it was real, it was like entering any movie that involves hiking through a jungle. Apparently the film Predator was actually filmed in the area. The pace was fast and the going was tough. Once we had gone down as much as we could, we were continuously crossing rivers and streams, which meant our feet were constantly wet, which wasn't as bad as you might imagine, it acted like a cooling system for the whole body which we welcomed! I found a brilliant stick to steady myself while walking through the streams which helped a lot. Will said my big green bag cover and bamboo stick made me look like a Teenage Ninja Hero Turtle. He kept saying "Heros in a half shell...Turtle Power!"

Lunch was a picnic in a rustic little village we walked through. 35 people lived there in total and they were all members of one family. This figure had recently gone up by 3, as two of the men in the village had married girls from other villages and they had come to live here, and someone had had a baby. The village had been relocated a few years ago, as a flood had washed away their houses.

After 4 hours of hiking, we came across an open area of land with a makeshift heli-pad that was marked out with sand bags. The guides told us this was used by film crews to bring in their equipment. From here we could see one of the entrances to the cave peering down on us from above the treetops in the distance. It was absolutely colossal and still half an hours walk away.

As we got closer we turned a corner and headed for another, smaller entrance. We were told that the big entrance was too dangerous to enter through, but that we'd get a brilliant view of it from inside the cave. As we entered the much lower entrance, we had to put on our hard hats and really powerful head torches. It got dark very quickly as we made our way deeper into the cave. We stumbled over rocks and rubble, went through a river in the cave and finally climbed upwards to be greeted with the most incredible view. Our camp was already set up inside the huge cave, on the beach next to the bright blue water of the 'swimming pool' and the whole scene was lit by the huge window of the massive entrance we had seen first. It was unlike anything I've seen before - the size of the cave was uncomprehendable. There would be so many incredible climbing routes! We were later told that the locals used to climb to get birds eggs without ropes! We stayed up on the viewing platform for a while taking the whole thing in. Then it was time to scrabble down the rock to reach the beach. We chose our tent, dumped our stuff and were greeted with a lovely cup of tea. We then were taken up to another high up place to get another view of the cave. The torches were brilliant at lighting up the cave walls and ceiling so that we could see the texture and colours of the rock surface properly.

Then it was finally time to go swimming! There were two pools - the bright blue one held water that was always in the cave, it was very very deep, and it was freezing. Will was straight in! The area to the left was actually a river running through the cave, it was much shallower, and it was warm! We took our time swapping between the two, when the cold one got too cold. After drying off, we were all standing around when suddenly a monkey appeared at the mouth of the cave, climbing up and down the vines. We've seen a lot of monkeys on our trip, but never ones that are unused to humans. It was amazing seeing a monkey completely in the wild rather than running around a city or temple.

Dinner was all cooked in the cave over a wood fire. There were several dishes and they all tasted great. It was one of the Canadian guys birthdays so he got given 2 bottles of Dalat red wine to share with the group and his cake was a box of 'choco pies'. One of the porters had also picked him a bunch of flowers along the way which was really sweet. After dinner came the compulsory drinking of rice wine along with the chanting. The rice wine tasted even worse than the Dalat red. We all sat around chatting on the long tables for the evening and the guides gave us a crash course in how caves are formed which was super interesting. It was pitch black in the cave apart from the lights above the table, and as the yawns got more frequent we thought it was probably time for bed. Then we looked at our watch and it was only 8.30! This seemed a little too early (even for us) and so we went exploring for an hour. I got up in the middle of the night to spend a penny, it was so eerie and unreal. 

The next morning after a fine breakfast of banana and chocolate pancakes washed down by a cuppa, we hiked over to another chamber in the cave which has a much much larger entrance. In fact this sight was featured on the front cover of National Geographic and won many photography awards. I've put the famous photo below. You can kind of get a sense of scale when you see humans in the pictures, but seriously, you just gotta go there! After the initial wow at the top, we scrambled down and stood at the bottom. The height is unreal, and there's a tree growing downwards from the roof. A river snakes through and there were waterfalls falling through the rock.

The National Geographic cover:

Our journey back to camp went the low way, basically following the river. On the way we saw 300million year old fossils and huge boulders. We also saw a tree trunk that had been deposited pretty high inside when the cave last flooded a few years back in the rainy season. Many tours don't run through the rainy season due to the huge risk of flooding.

Sadly it was then time to return to civilisation. We hiked back the same way, but this time the sun was out and the rain was held at bay until the last hour. Climbing up the hill at the end was tough, especially in wet boots and thick mud due to the heavy rain the day before. Leaches were clinging on to everyone yuck but there were no snakes to contend with. Once back to the top, we were handed an ice cold beer and were finally able to put on some dry shoes. The cave really was a once in a life time sight.

That evening we met up with everyone who'd been on the trip for a few G&T's (half price at the Easy Tiger Hostel happy hour) and a sing song with the house band.

The next morning we hired a bike to explore a couple more caves. We headed over to Paradise Cave which was truly stunning. Whereas Hang En's wow factor was it's size, Paradise had thousands of incredible formations, ranging from simple stalagmite and tites to colossal formations that reached from floor to ceiling. Some were smooth and bulbous, whereas others were perilously spikey and sharp. There were also a number of formations that had snapped off from the ceiling and were now lying on the cave floor. They were amazing because the lines now ran sideways instead of lengthways but some had been there so long they had new formations growing on top of them, moulding them to the floor, with a sharp contrast in direction of the old and new. The way the cave had been lit and the walkways through it are also worth a special mention as it was brilliantly done. None of this crazy coloured lighting, just white light highlighting the natural beauty.

The final cave was called dark cave and was an altogether different experience to the two before. In this cave you wear swimming costumes and are fitted with a hard hat and light -  like Bob the Builder on holiday. You zip line in, landing in a pile of mud - giving you a hint at what's to come. You then swim through with the group before walking in single file through the cave. It gets frightfully dark and then you're asked to squeeze through a much narrower, muddier crack in the rock. Eventually we reached the headline act - a huge mud pool deep underground. The mud was waist deep, but if you sat back in it, you floated. You could literally sit cross legged, suspended in the mud, with nothing touching the bottom or the sides. It was the strangest feeling! Sadly we couldn't take the camera down there so there's no record it ever happened...

It was quite late by the time we got back. The guesthouse very nicely let us shower before getting the night bus to Hanoi. Over dinner and a final beer we met a girl we'd chatted to in a roof top bar in Phnom Penh, small world eh.