This trip is going to be a whirlwind moving from place! First stop a national park!! i just made it to Hue this evening. i have a tour booked for tomorrow and my open bus ticket arranged for tuesday morning! i think Canada needs to invent something like this, how aazing would it be to travel across canada easy peasy no problems! Basically with an open bus ticket you choose your start location and which stops you want to make until your final destination. All you need to know is when you want to leave! The bus costs me only 35 bucks to get all the way down to Saigon/HCMC.
So after my extremely sad departure from Hanoi I went directly to Phong Nha Ke Bang National Park in central Vietnam and spent 2 nights at a "farmstay." When I landed in central Vietnam the pilot welcomed us all to Dong Hoi with a local temperature of 39C. Take a second and imagine that heat plus a blanket of humidity. Yeah it's tough to breath at times haha.
I planned an amazing tour within the national park where I learned about Victory Road number 2, Vietnam war stats, and visited the largest dry cave in Asia- Paradise Cave. At one point on the tour I was exactly in the centre of Vietnam with the distance to Ho Chi Minh or Hanoi being one and the same- cool hey! I also learned that Victory road 2 was an extremely important supply route during the Vietnam war and was built in a matter of 5 weeks- apparently this was a huge deal! Plus the Americans failed time and time again to block or destroy this route. During the war over 8 million!! tonnes of bombs were dropped with 4million of those landing in southern Vietnam!! another 2-3 in central and northern Vietnam and the rest in Cambodia and Laos. Can you imagine the sheer destruction of that?!?
The highlight of the tour was definitely Paradise Cave. This is the greatest dry cave in Asia. I could not imagine discovering something like this! Imagine walking along and you see a small opening in the side of the karst mountain- lets poke our head in and "Oi Choi Oi" (oh my god in Vietnamese) this place is hollow! The largest cave in the world was just recently discovered in Vietnam with an internal area of 38 million cubic metres!! I can't even picture it! Currently the government, the military and tour companies are battling to negotiate rights to the cave. Once open- maybe in the next year or so depending how all the red tape falls- they will only let 76 people in a year and it will cost 3000USD a head to go. The tour will be 7 days, 3 for trekking in and out and another 4 to explore and stay in the cave. What an adventure that would be!!
Our guide was extremely knowledgeable about the war and the mad system of caves that are in Vietnam that are still left undiscovered- the government isn't going to pay for their exploration. He even showed us a location where scientists now believe there may be an even larger cave that spans from Vietnam into Laos and possibly into Cambodia. There is a water exit location where he pointed this out and apparently during mad rain storms the water will change colour- displaying similar behaviour to other "exit" locations close by and in nearby Laos. The sheer cost to explore this potential cave is huge- our guide said he wanted to get James Cameron in there to check it out! Why not right?! Haha
So there is a tonne of stuff to still be discovered in this gorgeous park and some other amazing sounding tours! This place is on my list for when i return to Vietnam. I definitely could have stayed longer than my 2 days but gotta keep it moving!! (Still missing and thinking of my peeps in Hanoi)
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