Tu Lan four day caving expedition, my first of the year

Rat Cave, lunch spot

For various reasons we are both really busy working until at least the end of March so we are not going to have any real time away from Phong Nha until April at the earliest. Mostly this is due to the upcoming Vietnam caving expedition which is running from early March until mid April.

Gibbon Cave

Meanwhile I am filling in my time off by making a real attempt to master basic Vietnamese. Sounds simple right? After all, Vietnamese words only consist of one syllable. Not so, there are 22 initial consonants, 11 vowels (most of which sound similar) and a choice of either 8 final consonants (one of which is not an initial consonant!) or 2 final vowels (so a word can finish with three vowels in a row). Add to that 6 different tones, which means the same word can be said six different ways with six different meanings, and that's assuming you get the vowel sounds correct in the first place!

Moth

The Tu Lan four day caving expedition is a new route for this year, initially there was due to be a practice abseil down a waterfall on the second day (see earlier blog entry) but this has now been scrapped as it has been decided it's too dangerous and the day is long enough without an hour spent abseiling.

La Ken campsite

On day one there are two short dry caves (Rat Cave and Gibbon Cave) plus some jungle walking to get to a riverside camp at Hung (Hung means valley) Dung.

View of Hang Ken from the Tu Lan campsite, note the boats

Day two is a long trekking day, it took my tour (in good weather conditions) six hours to complete. There is just one short cave of about 100m, but plenty of hills to walk up and down, before the group arrives at another lovely riverside camp in the La Ken valley.

Hang Tu Lan, the dry bit

The third day starts off as another jungle walk over a few hills to arrive at the third and final campsite which is in Hung Tu Lan another idyllic riverside location, the best on the tour. We arrive in time for an early lunch before visiting two caves, first Hang Tu Lan and then Hang Ken.

New bridge at the Tu Lan campsite

Hang Tu Lan starts off as a beautiful dry cave, then there is the abseil into water and a boat ride out. It should then be possible to sail along the river to the camp but we didn't do this on our tour. Maybe next time? The final cave of the day is Hang Ken, visible from the campsite this is a 200m swim to a turning around point where it is possible to leave the water for a few pictures before the swim out. As it was cold, we used the boats although some brave customers opted to swim out.

Hang Kim, the dry bit

The final day sees the tour swimming through Hang Kim (about 450m of swimming in total), then a short swim through Hang Hung Ton before a final dry cave (Secret Cave) and the walk back to the Oxalis centre at Tan Hoa. Made slightly more interesting on this tour as the film crew of Titan were on location, not that we saw anything but minibuses and trucks.

Tan Hoa valley with film crew wagons