Things to do
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Dark Cave
A zip line runs four hundred metres across the Chay River to the entrance, which sets the tone: the visit is done wet, by headlamp, wading and swimming. A passage narrows to a chamber of thick grey mud deep enough to float in, with a cold rinse afterwards. Kayaks cover the return. The circuit takes around three hours from the zip line platform.
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Hang En
Swiftlets nest in a chamber wide enough to hold a village street, with three entrances and a ceiling well over a hundred metres up. Trips are two days: a forest walk and river crossings to Ban Doong hamlet, then a night camped on a sand beach inside, beside a green pool. Bookings go through licensed operators and the trek closes in flood season.
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Paradise Cave
Found by a local resident in 2005 and surveyed by British cavers, the passage runs thirty-one kilometres into the hillside, of which a lit wooden boardwalk covers the first kilometre. Chambers reach seventy metres overhead. A climb of several hundred steps from the car park comes first, and the air inside holds near eighteen degrees, which is a shock after the walk up.
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Phong Nha Cave
Wooden boats leave the jetty in the village and motor upstream on the Son River before cutting their engines at a low arch and rowing into the mountain. The visitor route covers the first fifteen hundred metres of a cave that runs far deeper, past lit formations and a sandbank where passengers walk back to the water. The round trip from the boat station takes about two hours.
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Park
Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park
Limestone here has been forming since the Palaeozoic, some four hundred million years, which makes it the oldest karst massif of its scale in Asia. UNESCO listed the park in 2003 for that geology and again in 2015 for its forest and wildlife. Surveyors have mapped over two hundred kilometres of passage. The listed area now continues across the Lao border.
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Other
Son Doong Cave
Ho Khanh, a local man, came on the entrance in 1991, lost it, and relocated it only in 2008; a British survey the following year measured the biggest cave passage known. Two collapsed skylights let jungle grow underground. Access is a four-day expedition run by one licensed operator, on a capped number of permits, and the route closes when the rains arrive.
