The Phong Nha Cave

Adventurous domestic and international visitors are drawn to Quang Binh province’s ‘Kingdom of Caves’, a complex of over 300 caves, found in the Phong Nha – Ke Bang National Park, which was recognised as a World Natural Heritage Site by the UNESCO on July 05, 2003.

With a variety of habitats combined with the area’s climate the park has an incredible wealth of biodiversity and according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Phong Nha – Ke Bang is one of the world’s 238 most important ecological regions.

After a one hour row boat ride down the Son River, visitors come to the most well-known cave, Phong Nha. with its riverine access this cave is 7,729 metres long Just 1km down from Phong Nha is the mouth of Tien Son, another of the 150 caves that Vietnamese agencies and the British Cave Research Association (BCRA) have surveyed over the past 15 years.

Tien Son is 980 metres in length and like Phong Nha, this cave features spectacular stalactites and stalagmites, said to resemble different folklore characters.. . According to British cave scientists, Tien Son cave was created tens of millions of years ago when a water current holed a limestone mountain in Ke Bang. . Although Phong Nha and Tien Son caves are located next to each other, there are no linking grottos between them.

The Thien Duong Cave

Thien Duong (paradise) cave is named so because of the astounding beauty of its stalactites and stalagmites which have been growing since it was formed 400 million years ago. This cave is a monster, stretching 31.4 kilometres long, making it the longest cave in Asia, and reaching 60 metres high.

While the Phong Nha Cave can be accessed by boat via an underground river visitors to Thien Duong Cave, must climb 500 stone steps, said to be one hundred years old, to reach the mouth of the cave.

The management board has recently launched a new tour for adventure lovers allowing them to explore up to 7km in the cave. Exploring this far in means the traveler gets to discover underground streams beneath the stalagmite floor;, skylights of sublime natural light splashing colour onto the stone walls and lakes shaped by large flat slabs of stalagmites.

In 2009, a group of researchers from the British Royal Cave Association visited Phong Nha Ke Bang and discovered Son Doong Cave. Before Son Doong was publicised the Deer Cave in Gunnung Mulu National Park, Malaysia, with a height of 100 meters, width of 90 meters and length of 2 kilometers, was considered the world’s largest cave. However Son Doong Cave, with a height of 150 meters, width of 200 meters and length of at least 6.5km, now sits at the top spot.

The Son Doong Cave

After recognised as ‘The World’s Biggest Cave’ by National Geographic – a well-known magazine of the US, Son Doong has become more and more famous and attracts many respected magazines and media agencies in the world, such as BBC, CNN, AP and AFP or Australia’s News magazine. With its size, The cave is said to have enough space to accommodate 40-storey high skyscrapers and 100-feet tall trees.

The Son Doong Cave has been accessible to tourists from August last year, thanks to tour programmes organised by Oxalis Adventure Tours, the only authorised tour company organising trips there. Already, bookings are completely full until 2016. .Aiming to preserve Son Doong Cave's pristine beauty, each tour, worth US$ 3,000 per visitor, has only eight travelers along with 22 assistants.

Nature has bestowed a diversity of natural landscapes on Quang Binh with plains, mountains, lakes and caves. The province is concentrating on developing key tourist features of the province in the near future, such as cave tourism, cultural-historical tourism and ecological tourism.

Source: Nhandan Online