Tag Archives: Đồng Hới

Day 78: Into the caves

no cycling

The view from my room this morning.

This morning I remembered to take a picture of the baguettes they sell here. I had two,  as two are not even enough for me😂 There is some meat,  vegetables and sauces on it, sometimes also an egg.

At 7:45 exactly the van showed up in front of my hotel and picked me up for the tour. I was the first one. We picked up several more people so that the van was full to get to Phong Nha, the village from where one can discover different caves. Over half of the people in the bus were german speaking😂

Arrived in the village we went directly to the first of two caves to visit. The paradise cave. It is the “biggest” dry cave in the world. The quotes are because the word “big” can have many definitions😂 Like the longest, the widest, the highest,  the…  cave in the world. Let’s just say,  it was big and huge and beautiful. A dry cave means,  there is no Water like a river inside. But to get there we had to take electronic golf cars and then walk up 500 meters 😯 (To walk down again inside the cave 😂). As we were early there was nearly nobody inside the cave. The first kilometer is prepared with a walk with fence mad out of wood and everything is lit up by spots. And the end of the walk was how far we were allowed to go. By requesting an adventure tour I could have gone more inside,  but that would have cost more money and more time. Notice that the pictures are not always sharp and clear as the was not so much light and I had to play a little bit with the settings of my camera to get acceptable shutter time, as I don’t have a tripod on me (next time I will take a GorillaPod with me) and I used the fence to place my camera.

After exiting the cave through the same entrance we waited for everybody to come out and returned to the van.

We all had lunch together at a restaurant and I had some nice discussions with 3 germans,  one guy from Sweden and a woman from Japan living in Canada.

After lunch we went to the second cave. The Phong Nha Cave. This one is the “longest”  wet cave of Asia (I think). Again the word “longest” can have many interpretations. A wet cave is a cave with a river,  so we just took a boat and entered the cave with a boat. The boat took us one kilometer inside the cave and let us out there at a beautiful beach inside the cave. From there we walked again till the exit of the cave where the boat waited on us to take us back to the van. Again there was less light which makes a pictures not the greatest. 

The entrance

To show the size of that thing,  here I picture with a woman at the bottom

The exit,  which is the exit from inside😂

Arrived back in Dong Hoi, everybody got brought back to his hotel. I rested a little bit in my room,  went out for a walk and dinner and am now back in my room. I forgot to make a video about the colorful lighted bridge in Đà Nẵng,  so I did one here. It is not so amazing than the one in Đà Nẵng, but it’s still very nice.

After complaining everyday about the weather: Today the weather was nice,  a little bit of blue sky between lots of clouds and only a little bit of rain in the afternoon☺️ Hopefully it will stay like this till I am in Hà Nội. It will probably take me 4 to 5 days to get there,  depending on how fit I feel and so how far I can go oer day. This will be the only thing I will do the next few days, cycling, cycling, cycling. ☺️

Day 77: Đồng Hới

Distance: 67,00 km Time: 3:43 Total distance: 3930 km

As yesterday morning, I was not motivated to get up, so I got up again late. Outside it was still raining. Not much but still enough to have to wear a rain coat. After all,  my cloth don’t dry during the night as it is not that warm anymore,  so I just wear not completely dry cloth. The temperatures are still okay to do it and as soon as I start moving,  it gets warmer inside the raincoat.

I was out of energy. I did an early break and drank a coffee. 

Sadly after the break I was still without energy. So I had an early lunch at 11. After that one it was a little bit better. Also the rain had stopped and I could take of the raincoat. But the wind stayed. I even took out my camera to take some pictures😀 (the picture at the break was taken with my smart phone)

Because I was cycling so slow I arrived not that early in Đồng Hới at around 14 o’clock. After some searching I found a hotel to stay in and I put out all my wet stuff to dry.

As I want to visit Phong Nha and Paradise cave tomorrow, I tried to join a guided tour for that. I walked through Đồng Hới  to find some agencies offering that. I just found one place on the internet,  so I just went there. Now I have a tour which visits the two caves and picks me up in the morning 😊

On the road now appear always the signs with Hà Nội written on it and the distance. I find it nice because it is like a countdown to my final destination 😀