On our way heading up North, we made a quick stop (2nights) in Dong Hoi to explore Phong Nha Ke Bang National Park after reading all the raves about the Sơn Đoòng Cave, the biggest cave on the planet that had been discovered by a local a few years ago. Since it’s quite exclusive and requires booking very well in advance (one-week all inclusive guided tour, 1,5 years waiting time), we chose to visit Paradise Cave and explore the National Park in Phong Nha instead.

Phong Nha village is about an hour moped-ride from Dong Hoi airport, about 50km away. We could have had ourselves picked up by our hosts, but decided renting a bike would give us mobility and allow us to see more of the regional countryside that is still quite untouched by the outer world. It was worth it. The route was quite straight-forward as there was only 2 turns to make with proper street signes, and the road was fairly well maintained, for Vietnamese standards, with very few potholes. We drove mostly through rice fields with the exceptions of a couple houses and a few cafés along the road. It became real interesting once the first sight of mountainous scenery appreared. Before we knew it, we arrived in Son Trach village, ideally located along the Con River, where we spent our nights. As mentioned before, this part of Vietnam has remained quite untouched by mass tourism so everything is quite basic in this town. It has a few hostels, a couple restaurants, one or two bars, one ATM and that’s about it. There’s no super markets or convinient stores, if you need anything other than shampoos and softdrinks, my bet is you need to go back to Dong Hoi. The simpleness of it all was actually the reason we dicided not to stay longer, but turned out to be the thing we liked the most. The air was very clean, the people were very warm and helpful, and the mountainous scenery around was magnificent. It was also very quiet in general, so quiet that you could hear the cracking of the trees when someone step on them. Mostly, we only heard the birds singing, children playing and dogs barking ;-). It was strange, but spending a couple of days over there really brought us back to basic. And we loved it. It’s not one of our most favorite spots in Vietnam due to the modest quality of the foods and accommodations, but it’s definitely  a place we would come back to explore more.

On our search for a proper bed, we came across “Jungle Boss homestay”, run by Dzung and his (then expecting) wife and their little son. Their “home” is a rice field apart from the main road so it was a little difficult for us to find. But people didn’t invent cell phones for no reason ;-). On one of the nights we had dinner, cooked by his wife, with his family and other homestay guests in their living room (don’t remember how much we paid for it but it wasn’t much). It was fun and the foods were way better than what we had in one of the restaurants in the village. We learnt that Dzung had been helping other locals build up the homestay network for them to have an extra incomes and for tourists to have better, more authentic choices of accommodation. He’s also very active, along with other villagers, in protesting against the government plan of building the cable car network into the Son Doong Cave in order to make it accessible for the mass public, which would destroy its uniqueness and the eco tourism currently built around it. If only people in other parts of Vietnam would also think this way.

We actually booked two nights at “Jungle Boss Homestay” but our confirmation came a little late so we had to move to another homestay for the second night (they had only 3 rooms for rent in total).

In our short stay there, we chose to visit Paradise Cave, one of UNESCO’s Heritage Sites that we could easily access by our bikes (Phong Nha cave requires a boat ride and Hang En cave a two-day hike). The whole cave is 31 km long but only the first few kilometers have been explored. From the parking lot, it’s a short walk and a short hike up to the cave’s entrance. From there, you start to descend into the cave along established staircases which take you, at most, 1 kilometer into the dimly-lit spectacle. After adjusting our eyes, we could really admire the thrilling limestone formation of our mother nature.

On the way back from Paradise Cave we stopped for lunchbreak at Nuoc Moc river stream, in the middle of the jungle surrounded by Karst mountains. It was truly a lovely place where you can take a dip in the crystal clear water, order sticky rice with grilled chicken for lunch, or simply lay on your back and rest.

Other “discovery” in the area.

On our second (long) trip to Vietnam we had again planned to visit a couple of different locations. We started with Can Tho because we love the floating market there on Mekong river and we also wanted to show it to our friend Henrik who had joined us on that trip. We started in the morning leaving Saigon and drove to Gò Công, a small village south of Saigon to visit the grave of our grand parents. They are buried in between rice fields behind their house. We then proceeded towards Can Tho and spend the afternoon and evening strolling through the streets:

 

The next morning we started very early at 5am to go to the floating market, a 45min boat ride. The evening before, we were lucky to meet the same woman who guided us with her boat 3 years ago (time flies…). Even on the crowded market we recognised a few faces of the women selling food and coffee.

Our plan was to take a bus from Saigon to Can Tho, spend a night there and visit the floating market early the next morning, then head to Ha Tien also by bus for another night before taking the speed boat from there to Phu Quoc to spend 5 relaxing days on the beautiful island to complete our first journey in Vietnam together (I then flew back to Frankfurt while P stayed with her family in Saigon alone for 10 more days, the parting war hard I tell you…). Taking a bus in Vietnam however, is very much different from taking one in Europe. Although our bus from Saigon to Can Tho was quite comfortable with air-condition and wifi, the trip was tiresome cause the roads were often quite narrow, crowded and bumpy. A distance of roughly 200km could therefore easily take more than 4 hours.

We didn’t book any hotel in advance so the first thing we did upon arriving in Can Tho was looking for one. We had to search around Ninh Kieu Pier for a while (many hotels were fully booked, some overpriced, others too “simple”) before settling for one of the simple local hostel at the waterfront. Nothing fancy but clean and with a nice view across the Mekong river. We spent the afternoon strolling the streets to do what we like most, trying out street foods. The grilled eggs were fun to eat. The eggs are “injected” with some spices through a needle hole on top and then grilled on charcoal. An interesting new way of preparing eggs, we’d never seen it again anywhere else in Vietnam.

We made a mistake though, like most first-time tourists did. At the hotel foyer we were approached by a lady showing us brochures and albums of tours she was trying to sell. Not wanting to waste any more time looking, we decided to book a private boat tour to the floating market for the next morning. Not that we didn’t expect it but it caught us by surprise as she went directly from talking to us to talking to one of the small boat-ladies waiting across our hotel and paid her haft the price to do the tour for us. Needless to say, we were a little upset and felt sorry for the lady who owned the boat and actually did the hard work herself. Our lesson is: for a city like Can Tho you don’t need to book anything in advance. There are enough hotels/hostels at every price range and category at Ninh Kieu Pier. You can just go in, take a look at the room and agree on the price. Same thing with boat tour to the floating market. Go directly to the harbor and talk to any of the boat-owners waiting around and agree on the price and time to leave. You might end up paying exactly what you would have paid to the middle-man, but at least your money will go directly to those who truly earn it. And that’s exactly what we did 3 years later when coming back here.

Well, the experience was a little put-off but didn’t stop us from enjoying our day. We approached the same boat-lady and offered her a small sum to take us out for a small sunset cruise on the Mekong. She was of course very happy to do just that. She took us to a restaurant on an island across the harbor, which was part of a fruit plantation. Having very delicious fish and chilling on hammocks underneath tropical trees was the perfect end of the day:

The next morning at 5am she was already patiently waiting for us in front of our hotel to take us to the floating market, a 40 minutes boat-ride from Ninh Kieu Pier. We were very glad we took the “private” tour in the small boat, just the two of us. We could stop anywhere we wanted for however long we wanted to take photos, have breakfast, or just siting around and let the atmosphere sink in. (The real tourist boats just bring you there in a crowd of 20+ people in a big boat, let you have a quick look from the distance and then head back to the city to pick up the next crowd – not something we would recommend doing.) Imagine a whole sale market on the water with each boat heavily loaded with one kind of fruit, or vegetable only. Have a look at the beautiful scenery: