Day 4 - Paradise Cave & Phong Nga Cave

An early morning wake up this morning, 3:30am to get ready for our trip to Paradise Cave a several hour trip to get there and then several hours to come back, so it's going to be a very long day. We got to reception of the hotel at about 4:15am and picked up our takeaway breakfasts so we had something to eat on our bus ride to the caves and hopped on the bus, About 10 minutes later Mike gets a message on his phone and says, oh, I think we may be on the wrong bus... Thankfully he had a good read of the message and turns out we were on the right bus after all.

The bus ride at first was pretty boring from a view side of things as there wasn't much to see at 4:30 in the morning, but eventually as the sun started coming up the views on offer were pretty nice in spots, lots a rice fields to look at.

After 3 and a bit hours we stopped for a break, where Mike, Gill, James and I all had something to eat before getting back onto the bus for the last stretch to Paradise Cave.

Paradise Cave is famous for maintaining a steady temperature year round, between 20 and 22 degrees. Stepping inside from the 31 degrees outside felt like walking into natural air conditioning. The cave itself is considered the largest dry cave in Asia, stretching 31.4 km in length. Its width varies from 30 to 150 meters, and its ceilings rise to an astonishing 60 to 72 meters in some sections.

We only ended up walking 1km of the cave which is lit and has a wooden board walk, the rest requires headlamps and proper caving gear. The cave was discovered in 2005 by a local guy who was going hunting, he felt a cool breeze coming from a narrow crack in the limestone. He decided to investigate further and his discovery eventually led extensive exploration. Paradise Caves was eventually opened to tourists in 2010, since then more and more caves continue to be discovered every year, just last year (2024) alone explorers mapped 22 more caves in the Phong Nha Ke Bang National Park.

It's hard to get the scale of just how big it is from the photos, but if you zoom in on some of the photos you will potentially see people in them which may give you some kind of scale.

After the Paradise Cave exploration we made our way to get lunch in Phong Nha, before making out way up the river to Phong Nha Cave. As we were getting onto the river boat the rain started to bucket down pretty hard, interesting thing I've noticed with the rain here is it comes down pretty quick and hard, but it never seems to stick around for too long. We arrived at the Phong Nha Cave by water where the boat shut off the engine and from that point on they used oars to control it, there are a few reasons for this, the first, pollution from the boat engine being trapped in the cave, secondly as the level of the water can change they don't want to ruin the boat engine by running over some rocks, and thirdly the noise, apparently the stalagmites and stalactites can be affected by the noise. We went a kilometre up the river once inside the cave before the boat turned around and took us back the way we came, landing inside the cave where we all got off the boat and roamed the inside of the cave. At one of the spots in the cave our guide Jessica told us to look up at a spot and see if we could make out on a shadow an man's face, I spotted it right away, she didn't seem to believe me so I had to describe what I saw.

The Caves were used back in the Vietcong war as a safe space during bombings from the US, as well as being used as a hospital. Back in 1994 they opened the caves to the public so tourists could visit.

After we exited the cave we caught the boat back down the river before getting back on the bus for the several hour bus trip back to Hue. Upon arriving we went back to our rooms for about 10 minutes before we headed upstairs to get a meal. Gill ordered spring rolls and fries, where the rest of us ordered steak and fries, we all ordered them medium rare. Gill's meal was pretty good and a good amount of fries, our meals however, while they tasted fine were all over cooked to a well done and the fries were less that what you would get in a small size of fries from McDonald's. From there it was off to bed as we have had a very long day, on the plus side, we get to sleep in a little tomorrow.