no cycling

After a more or less longer evening playing cards,  we got up a little bit later than planned,  but got on the road quick. With we, I mean Sinéade from Ireland and me on a motorbike.

Our first stop was Trang An. There we had breakfast as we didn’t find a place on the road,  it was just 6 km. From there we took a rowing boat to explore caves,  lots of caves. Our rower woman gave us paddles and we could paddle too😂 Through the caves we got into different valleys with our boat. We also visited some temples on the way through the valleys.

Yes this is the entrance to a cave,  we all had to put our head down to not hit the roof, just the Vietnamese kid on our boat was amazed with the hands up in the air😂

closer to the entrance

Sadly I was unable to take a good picture inside the cave due to less light,  this is everything I got,  one light.

The caves weren’t that long,  after 100 to 300 meters we always reached an exit.

It was a round trip,  so we never took the same cave again,  we also exited the caves at a different opening than we entered.

Our rower,  really strong,  she was rowing the whole time. we,  the passengers, took lots of breaks.

A boat going into a cave

Arrived at a temple we got off the boat and walked around a little bit

Back at the station where we started. They have enough boats there to ship a whole army😂 The are lots of boats at the other side of the lake (as one can see) and that it continued like that😂

It was a long boat ride,  we arrived for lunch and wanted to visit two more places on our map. On the way to an ancient capital of Vietnam,  we didn’t knew the way and we found a tourist with a Vietnamese friend on their motorbike and they were looking for the third place on our map,  the biggest pagoda of asia or south-east asia (I don’t know, it is big). So we decided to follow them as they could always could ask for the way😁 We decided to visit the ancient capital later.

The pagoda was not the only thing to see there. There were also big statues. To get to the big pagoda we had to walk up some stairs. But the statues were great,  there were different once at different levels. The higher we got the bigger the statues got or the more there were. The second last one was big and on the last level there were 3 of the big once from the level before.

They had a really big bell there

The first impressive statue.

The big pagoda (no we didn’t climb to the top,  I don’t even know if that is possible).

The next big statue.

One hall where the statues are inside

Inside that hall (the biggest one on top), were three big statues like this one.

This is Sinéda with me😀

Returned to the bike we went to the ancient capital. I was not really impressed by it and I didn’t took any pictures. But I don’t say that it wasn’t nice.

For the way back,  Sinéda wanted to ride as I was riding the whole day. So she was riding for the first time in a long time. She was pretty good,  expect sometimes in the curves,  but I am not the easiest one as passenger because of my height and weight😂

Arrived back at Ninh Bình we had dinner and then she took the night bus to get to Dong Hoi to visit Phong Nha caves,  which I did some days ago😂

Tomorrow I will do my final kilometers till Hà Nội😀