We woke early this morning excited for our day of trekking through the Tu Lan cave system. The air is filled with drizzle, the temperature around 60 degrees F. We ate our bowls of pho quickly as our guide was picking us up around 6:30 AM. Our ride out to the caves took about three hours.
The landscape here in Central Vietnam is an array of stunning mountains blanketed in palm trees and other jungle vegetation. It looks totally impassable due to the thickness of the vegetation and verticle slope of the mountains reaching into the clouds.
As we drove through the farming village onto the guide company's quaint office, our guide educated us on the farming community. One interesting tidbit is that people here have two houses: one with a concrete foundation and a second with steel drums lashed to the underside. During the rainy season, this valley has flooded as high as a telephone pole.
Once at the guide's office, we received our briefing. This consisted of getting fitted in our canvas, camouflage, Cambodian army boots...
reviewing the wall map showing our 9 Km route, and meeting our porter Tam. The breakdown was around 8.5 Km of trekking and 0.5 Km of caves
Once we completed the briefing, our guide, "Ken", pointed to the far off mountains and gave us an idea of where we were going.
In order to get to the mountains, we first hiked across the valley floor. This area consists of the locals farming ground. An area sprinkled with buffalo, workers in knee high rubber boots and ponchos, trees whose leaves are used for photocopy paper and a few other soothing visuals.
As we approached the base of the mountain we were met with our first challenge of the day...a river crossing.
Our group of four waded into the chilly, rushing stream to adjust to the cold water. We then traversed at an angle downstream so we were not fighting the water's force as much.
As we exited safely on the other side, our canvas boots and long pants drained heavily onto the muddy soil.
We walked a bit further to start our trek into the mountain. The word "hike" is too light for what we are going to experience today. The first cave on our list was the "Rat Cave", about an hour away. The term comes from the villagers ability to do a shortcut or Rat Run through the cave, instead of trekking three hours around the mountain.
The trek to the Rat Cave was rather challenging. It's a very narrow, muddy, steep, winding, rocky tramp through conditions we have never witnessed. At times, the path was spanned by a single, saturated 2'x12" over a previously impassable section. The drop below would be fatal. This was sketchy! We were constantly using our three and four points to navigate the slippery slopes.
For what seemed like an eternity of trekking up the mountainside, we appeared at the cave opening. Wow! The Rat Cave opening dwarfed us, we took the cave in, processed it.
Ken lead us down into the cave, an opening you could fly a small plane into. The site contains stalagmites, stalactites, cave pearls, plenty of spiders and bats zipping about.
The 250 meter long black hole ended with us appearing onto the otherside of the steep mountainside. Think Jurassic Park.
Our next leg was another hour and a half of descending down the same type of conditions we navigated up on the other side of the mountain. This time we were headed to another base camp to eat lunch. We were ready to eat, just get through this and we are all good. We trekked on the maze of switchbacks until our streamside camp appeared.
Our porters had cooked up pork by a campfire.
The Vietnamese coffee never tasted so good. The camp was on the sand where the stream was once a raging river. The tree branches were collected to prop up the tarps to cover us from the rain. We had conversation with Ken, Tam and a few other porters over the campfire. A metal cannister filled with water boiled as it laid on a grille made of rebar. This is truly getting away from it all.
After lunch, Ken pointed us to our next destination, the Hung Ton Cave. This cave is about 800 meters in length. This cave includes a 200 meter swim at the beginning. We donned our cold and saturated life vests and helmets with head lamps. The water was around 60 degrees. At home, this would require a three millimeter wetsuit. We breaststroked our way into and through the first quarter of the cave. Bats flew within inches of our faces, our headlamps flashed quickly from water to walls to ceiling to each other. Truly exhilarating! Once out of the water, we took our life preservers off and continued on into the pitch black hole. Our head lamps were our only source of light. Inside the cave we experienced similar features to the Rat Cave with one exception - this one had a 400 million year old fossil embedded into a wall about ten feet high. A snail looking shell about two inches wide. Fascinating! Our exit out of this cave was via a 40' steel ladder. As you placed your hand on the lowest rung, a 6" spider.was clinging to the neighboring rock within millimeters of our left hand. The climb required a rope to be tied around us.
The exit of the cave is jawdropping as you are high above the valley floor with the river in sight. This was going to be our final leg back to the guide company's base camp. The hot showers await us. However, we had to navigate down the slippery mountainside to get back to safe ground.
This time down seemed to be a bit easier as we have gotten more familiar with the conditions. The trek back turned into a hike and then a leisurely walk, we were still in awe of our surroundings.
The feeling of escaping off into a remote part of the world was part of our conversation. We are stoked to have shared it together
For some unknown reason, these were the only socks Margarite had brought to wear after the hike.
