Tu Lan Caving

Monday 19th to Wednesday 21st Jan

A three day trip to set up and familiarise ourselves with the new offering from Oxalis, a four day 'Expedition' to some of the caves in the Tu Lan area, this tour is to include an abseil which we had to assess and equip. Our first day combined the first two days of the tour, while our second and third days were exactly as the third and fourth days respectively.

Cow Fishing

The Tu Lan caves are a drive of about an hour and a half away from Phong Nha, so after breakfast at Khanh's we were picked up for the drive to the Oxalis centre at Tan Hoa where we collected the kit required for the trip, including hammocks and lifejackets.

The Start of the Walk from Tan Hoa

Once packed we set off along the valley through muddy fields, after about twenty minutes we were at the end of the valley where the river split before sinking in two places into seperate caves, we crossed the river and climbed up the hill a short way to find Secret Cave, a short fossil cave which would take us into the next valley. This is called Hung Ton and we walked along this to Hung Ton Cave where we had lunch and set up camp before walking up a hill and down into the next valley, Tu Lan, we then passed Hang Ken (where the tour would camp for the first night and explore Hang Ken) before entering Tu Lan Dry Cave where we abseiled into Tu Lan Wet Cave and swam out to the entrance, an impressive swim. Then it was through Hang Kim (if you haven't worked it out yet, Hang is Vietnamese for Cave and Hung means valley) into the Mo Valley which we crossed and then entered Hung Ton Cave for another swim them up a ladder to exit via Hung Ton Dry Cave and down to camp.

River Crossing in Hung La Ken

Our second day started with a slog up a big hill on very slippery paths and down into Hung La Ken where the day two camp would be, another climb into Hung Dung, followed by yet another climb into a valley with no name and short swim through a nameless cave into Hung Nhai which was a very long but easy walk to a beautiful camp near Hang Tien.

View from the Hang Tien Camp

The final day started with a short trip into to Hang Tien which is a massive cave entrance and then some easy but pleasant caving down to a sump. After the caving, it was a simple walk out to the road at Cao Quang for the long bus ride back to Phong Nha, this was via Dong Hoi and through some different scenery.

Hang Tien Entrance

Apologies if this has been difficult to follow, I haven't really got a clue where we went! Hopefully it will make a bit more sense once I've been on a few tours and further blog entries might make things a little clearer.