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. 

Halong Bay

Helmut and i are just back from our 3 day/2 night tour of Halong Bay. This was definitely one of the highlights of our trip so far. 

Halong Bay is crawling with outfits that will take you out to see this Unesco World Heritage site,

 but after a TON of research, we decided to go with Indochina-Junk company.

The reason for this is because it's the only company that goes further out into Bai Tu Long Bay as well. 

Our boat

It was a bit more expensive, but completely worth it and was a once in a lifetime thing that we will never forget.

Indochina-Junks have a fleet of boats ranging from 1 cabin to something like 22 cabins. 

We were on a boat with 4 cabins called the Prince 3 which was great! It was very intimate and while there weren't as many cruise-shippy activities like Karaoke and early morning tai chi, it was better because we aren't keen on doing those things and hanging out with a ton of tourists anyway. 

Halong bay is about 930 sq miles and contains about 2000 islands which are small limestone karsts that jut out of the water.

The scenery was breathtaking. 

The view from our cabin room was amazing and waking up to this every morning made the tour worth every penny.

It rained for a fair amount of the time we were there but it was light rain mostly and we went kayaking anyway.

We would occasionally come across fishermen who lived on these small boats and pretty much did nothing but fish all day.

The ones in the smaller boats would row with their feet to free their hands for casting nets.

The boat crew was amazing! 

The food was to die for 

and on the last day, the chef carved a bunch of amazing sculptures out of fruits and vegetables.

This was a sculpture of our boat!

Helmut and i are not the type to go on organized tours (unless it's absolutely necessary), but this is really the only way you can see this place. 

There are cheaper companies to go with but none of those venture out as far as Indochina-junk does. There were very few boats out where we were...all of them from the same company.

Bai Tu Long Bay at Dusk.

 This in contrast to the other tours that stayed in the main part of Halong bay with 100's of other boats. 

Overall, we had a great time and both felt that this experience was worth the money. But towards the end, they took us to this fishing village and a pearl farm that was just as touristy as it comes. 

They shuttled us to a row boat 

And they rowed us to see these "authentic floating fisherman houses"

We got off the boat for a short while and walked around and saw a little school and a fish farm. There were items you could buy but no one was interested.

Then we got back on the boat and rowed around a bit more. We ended up at a pearl farm where they showed us the process of cultivating pearls. At the end we were dumped off into a store where one could buy pearl jewelry.

Even after we came ashore, the touristy stuff didn't end! The van on the way back stopped at the Yen Duc village water puppet show that was super cheesy and lame.

evidently the tour companiy needed as many "authentically cultural" activities as possible to justify the steep price they charge. Thankfully it was only about 15 minutes.

If the rest of the tour hadn't been super outstanding, i would be inclined to call Halong bay a tourist trap. But the kayaking and stunning scenery made up for this blatant attempt to separate tourists from their money.