Caving isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about activities in Vietnam. It is, however, a prime location for it – the area in and around the Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park is riddled with caves. It is also home to the biggest cave in world: Sơn Đoòng. The national park has even made it onto the list of UNESCO world heritage!

Me being a bit of a caving enthusiast and Heather not really feeling like spending lots of time under ground, we compromised on Oxalis’ one day Hang Tien tour. Pricing is quite steep for Vietnamese standards, but not extreme compared to what this would cost back home.

Getting to Hang Tien cave

We (again) had an early start. Pickup at our home stay was arranged for 07:00, and we enjoyed a banana pancake breakfast before that. After picking up the other people on the tour – there were 5 of us in total – our guide Long introduced himself and the schedule for the day during the drive to Oxalis’ headquarters. At the HQ, we got a coffee and a presentation on what to expect, what to do and what not to do.

In case you don’t want to get your own shoes wet, you can switch to a pair provided by Oxalis here. They’re not the most comfortable and the sizing is a bit odd (I’m usually a size 44 and ended up stomping around in a pair of size 46), but they’ll do the job. From the HQ, there’s another ~45 minute drive to the trailhead, which is located just off a road that becomes less and less comfortable to drive as you progress.

Fun fact: some scenes in the 2017 Kong: Skull Island movie were shot in this area, and part of the roads were constructed by the film crew to get around.

From the trailhead, we set off for 4 km of trekking through the jungle. The hike is no walk in the park as you go over very uneven terrain, which was extra slippery because of the recent rain. On certain sections of the trail, we noticed strange marks, as if something big had been dragged along it. These turned out to be due to logging activities, where locals use water buffaloes to drag logs out of the jungle.

As you near the cave, you come into a valley which has increasingly big chunks of rock lying around that you need to negotiate. These are the remains of parts of collapsed roof, and chunks spat out of the cave in times with high water level and strong flow.

Into the cave

At first, you could easily miss the fact that you’re about to walk into a cave, just because the entrance is so big. We only brought our phone cameras, making it very difficult to capture the sheer size of the entry. As you continue into the cave, you walk on a sandy bottom, daylight dwindles, there’s a cool breeze, and you can hear the sound of the small river that runs through parts of the cave.

Following the river further into the cave, the terrain becomes more difficult again, and you need to rely on the torch mounted on your helmet for light, as the daylight is completely gone now, and other than the light from the various head lamps, the cave is pitch black. It’s worth noting that, even though this is a huge cave, it can feel quite cramped, claustrophobic and disorientating because your vision is limited by whatever your headlamp is illuminating.

The first room is absolutely enormous. It looks like it must have been carved out by a huge whirlpool, and it has a big circular cutout in the ceiling which looks kinda neat in pictures if you put a light on it.

Further on, there’s a very nice rimstone dam structure, and an enormous column. The route on this tour takes you through a side passage into another couple of big rooms, and to get there, you need to cross the river. Usually the water level is low enough to cross it on foot, but in our case it was too high and the flow too strong, so we crossed it using what is best described as a zipline.

And back again

After a bit of a squeeze through a slightly narrow passage, you end up in another huge room which opens up to the jungle. There is a lot more cave and jungle to explore here, but on the 1 day tour, this was the point where we started the return journey, which takes you back the same way you came.

Once out of the cave, we took a slight detour to one of the semi-permanent base camp that the Oxalis guys have in the jungle, and got some lunch. Lunch done, we restarted this morning’s 4km hike in the other direction to end up back at the road, where the Oxalis van picked us up and brought us back to their HQ in between the limestone peaks and ricefields. There, we got a free beer and the opportunity to shower, so we were all happy campers on the way back to Phong Nha.

The aftermath

After an intensive day, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner at D-Arts Zone, which does a great bun cha despite not being in Hanoi. After that, we turned in early again, because we had another early start (it was becoming a bit of a theme at this point) the next morning to get to Hue.

To me, the cave tour was the first real highlight of the trip, and I’m very happy we decided to include it in our itinerary. That said, it is pricey compared to other things in Vietnam, Phong Nha is a bit out of most people’s route, the hiking requires you to be fairly fit, and being underground in the dark isn’t for everyone, so I don’t think it’s a must do for everyone visiting Vietnam.