Paradise Cave in Phong Nha Ke Bang National Park

After we left Halong Bay, we hopped on the train in Hanoi to take an overnighter on the Reunification express.

A sleeper berth cost us $32 each.

It was pretty basic, but there's something to be said for travelling 312 miles while you sleep, it saves time and money!

Dong Hoi is the closest train stop to the Phong Nha Ke Bang National Park. We are staying at a place called Farmstay. We got here early in the morning and the Farmstay had a guy waiting to pick us up who randomly stopped and bought us corn from a roadside stand (it was 7:30am.)

Almost immediately, we took off to see Paradise Cave.

Helmut and i agree It was the most amazing thing we've ever seen. 

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These pictures don't even do it justice. It just has to be seen in person to really understand how incredible it is!

The cave was discovered by a local man in 2005 and the first 5km were explored by explorers from British Cave Research Association. The whole 31 km was explored and publicly announced by the British cave explorers. This cave is longer than Phong Nha Cave which had been considered the longest cave in this national park. The height can reach to 100 m and 150m wide. The British cave explorers were impressed by the beautiful and spectacular stalactites and stalagmites inside this cave and they named it Thiên Đường Cave(Paradise Cave). It's only been open to the public since september of 2010.

The picture above helps to show the size of the stalagmites and stalactites. You can see Helmut's sillouette in the bottom right of the picture. This was actually one of the smaller ones!

Paradise Cave was relatively easy to get to. We rented a motorbike in town for $9 for the day and drove for about an hour through the jungle to get there.

We almost broke down halfway there, but got the bike working again and ventured on. Did i mention it was raining?

When we finally got to the entrance to the park, we had to walk about a half mile to the foot of a mountain. Then we had to walk up a steep zigzag path for maybe a quarter mile to get to the entrance to the cave. All this was paved though so it wasn't too hard.

 On the way in we saw this sign:

"Drunk and mental illness people are not allowed to visit site" 

Only in Vietnam!

Tomorrow is the real challenge. We will be hiking all day to get to Tu lan cave. This will be a more serious adventure that will entail swimming across a river and such so i may not be able to post many photos.