After some perfect sunny days on Cat Ba Island, we he headed to Central Vietnam to go to Phong Nha National Park, home of the biggest cave in the world (Hang Soon) and many other impressive cave systems. A really surprising fact is that all these caves were only discovered recently when British cave explorers teamed up with local people in the 1990ies and discovered the biggest cave in the world - Hang Soon. Many other caves were discovered in the past few years, many of them opened to the public only in 2014/2015.
So after a bus ride, ferry ride, another bus ride and transfer to a sleeper bus (not one of our nicest experience; we assume to work for a bus company in Vietnam you need to bring extremely rude and reckless behaviour, especially towards Western people!) we arrived at 4:15am in Phong Nha. It was raining a bit, not too much an we were happy to arrive at our accomodation and hear that we could use some dorm beds for free until our room was available later on.
After a good nap, we had breakfast and checked out what to do. As it was already a bit late the friendly manager of the hostel advised us to visit the close by Phong Nha cave first and take a scooter the next day to see the other caves on our list: Paradise Cave and Dark Cave, a cave where you swim through oozing mud that is supposed to feel like chocolate pudding.
While we went to see the Phong Nha cave the weather was constantly changing and we had heavy rain followed by dry and humid periods until the next shower came down.
To get to the Phong Nha cave, we had to take a boat to the entrance, then however, we had to get off as the water level in the cave was too high due toe continuous rain. We could walk through the first part of the cave with impressingly high stalagmites and stalactites. A nice start, but we were looking forward to the more adventurous caves the next day.
In the evening we went to THE famous Bamboo Cafe just next door with good food, reasonable prices, a chiled atmosphere and relaxed people. We even met the owner, a very friendly and clever guy of our age who played the guitar for us and talking a lot about tourism in his village.
The next day, we got up early to start our journey. It had been raining heavily during the entire night, our room had a leak and Alex backpack was getting wet and above all we heard that due to the weather all caves were closed. Great! So yet another "wasted" day. We decided to spend some time researching on how we best cross the border to Laos and decide later during the day if we want to leave the next morning or if we stay another night in case the rain stops. At around 1:30pm we decided we were hungry and should go for lunch to Bamboo Cafe. In the meantime, the strees were slightly flooded (below the ankle), but the manager had already evacuated all stuff from the ground floor to the first floor, expecting a flood. We went next door to grab a bite, but the owner had already sent home all his staff in view of what was coming. So we got a bottle of water and headed back to our place at round 2:30pm. By then the water was at ankle level and we still did not worry too much.
Not even half an hour later, a man was riding a buffalo in the streets, probably getting his herd out of the village and the water level got higher and higher. At some point Alex was very brave, decided to put on his swim suit and go down to help the local people evacuate their houses and shops when the water was already reaching the waist. It was good to see that many tourists were helping out the locals, but of course you always have some idiots around who party, drink beer, play frisbee or float up and down the flood in rubber tubes. Found that really respectless towards the local people who are about to lose everything while others are "enjoying" themselves.
The water was of course really disgusting with rubbish floating around as well as all sorts of animals swimming in it: worms, leeches, rats and even snakes. A Dutch guy from our hostel got biten by a snake helping a family to take their stuff out of the house.
By the time Alex came back the reception was already flooded up to the calves. As we could not get no food anywhere around town anymore, we all teamed up and brought our supplies together. The cute manager opened the hostel's fridge for everyone and the Dutch couple, two learned cooks, took all of it to prepare a nice dinner for all of us. Before the kitchen on the ground floor got completely flooded - and it was impossible to remove the gas stove and bring it up - two guys and Alex went down to boil all the left eggs for the next morming so we have at least something to eat. Meanwhile they got company from a biggie rat that smelled the food and swam in. Together they somehow managed to lock the rat in another room and then decided it was time to leave the ground floor. We had set up a dining room in our old leaking room (we had changed meanwhile) and the manager had organized a bottle of wodka. Given the situation, we had an almost cozy dinner and the atmosphere was pretty relaxed.
The water level, however, kept rising and rising and by 8pm (remember at 2pm still around ankle level) the water had risen to around 2 - 2,5m. The street was completely flooded, the reception was a meter under water and there was no electricity. To be honest, seeing he water level rise that quickly was pretty frightening for Moni. 6 hours - 2m, what would happen overnight if the rain did not stop? It was a pretty sleepless night as the heavy rain did not stop until around 6am and even though we were pretty sure the water had already reached the first floor of our hotel, it had not yet (but was just below).
The rain stopped in the morning and the water slowly started to go down. Given the level, however, it was clear that it would take a minimum of 2 days without any rain to go down again completely. When we got up the Dutch couple recommended us to call our embassies for advise and help as their own embassy was super helpful. Looks, however, we both live in countries where the embassies abroad are really useless in case of emergencies, especially on weekends. While the French embassy at least took Alex' name and details to know who and where he was, the Austrian embassy just said "Oh yeah, there are massive floodings in the area" - Thanks I can see that myself! - "Stay where you are and call us if you need help" - This is why I am calling you right now! - "Well, we can actually not do anything for you. Good luck" - Well, thanks a lot for nothing!
What a waste of battery and money compared to what other embassies were doing for their citizens: giving regular updates on weather forecasts, asking for updates multiple times a day, offering to send food supplies, organizing and paying a boat out of the flooded area, ...
When some of us were up already, the owner of Bamboo Café 2 doors down the road came out on his roof to check the situation. When he saw us he asked us if we had something to eat, so we told him about our boiled eggs. He immediately went to cook a big pot of instant noodles for us and we all climbed from our hotel to the roof of the empty house next door and walked over the roof gable to get our breakfast.
It was really incredible to see how the local people - who were by far the most affected by this flood - were still kind, helpful and caring for us tourists. At this point a big thank you to Huyen, the manager of Linh's Homestay and Hai, the owner of Bamboo Cafe who shared food and water supplies without hestitation.
Later on that morning, Huyen was approaching us and telling us that she could organize a boat for us that would bring us to the road nearby which was not flooded and from there we could take a taxi onwards to Dong Hoi which was not flooded yet.
At the end we decided to go for this option as it would have probably taken us days until the water level was down and buses could come in again and as well we were sure that the rain would start again.
Together with the 2 Dutch and a Kiwi girl, we grabbed our stuff as the boat was here already and checked out how to best get our luggage and ourselves into the boat without getting wet. The main entrance was a no go as the water was still quite high so the boat went around the building. We climbed again on the neighbour's roof, carefully walked down to the edge and hopped into the boat from there.
The boat ride through the village was quite shocking. Houses and shops were halfway under water, furniture was floating around, people were sitting and living on the roofs,... We felt a bit bad as we could simply leave that place while the locals had to stay and clean up all this mess. It will take weeks if not months until everything is back to normal in Phong Nha.
Once we reached the streets, there were some other tourists already around and some private cars offering a ride. We grabbed a jeep for the 1h journey to Dong Hoi and given that we were 5 of us sharing the costs the prices were pretty much reasonable.
Once in Dong Hoi, we went to the train station to get a train to the south - we were told Hue was flooded as well, but Da Nang and Hoi An should be fine.
There were no trains running due to the continuous rain and as we saw saw some busses on the road, we asked our driver to bring us to the bus station. On the way we realized that some areas of Dong Hoi were as well slightly flooded already and heavy rain set in again. Whilst driving on a partially flooded road, our driver ruined his precious jeep as water got into the engine... He had to call a friend who towed us to a nearby garage where we waited for a while. As the reparation of the jeep did not seem to be finished soon, we asked the driver's friend to bring us back to the town's bus stop. There we were informed that no busses to the south are running at the moment. Back at the train station we were a bit clueless what to do. Considering the heavy rain, we wanted to leave as soon as possible to avoid getting trapped in the next flood in Dong Hoi.
While the Dutch were trying to negotiate for a reasonable taxi fare to Da Nang and Alex and me were thinking whether or not we might share the cab with them (still a bunch of money if you travel on a budget), the lady from the train station approached us and asked us if we still wanted to go to Da Nang as they have a train leaving NOW.
We quickly bought a ticket for what was supposed to be a 6h ride and got on a train. It was a real ghost train as we were pretty much the only ones together with the crew and 4 other people. Approximately 15km from Dong Hoi station the train stopped and stood still for about 3h. We already feared the train would turn around and go back to Dong Hoi, but at some point we were moving to the right direction again.
After all, it took us 11 hours to arrive in Da Nang and it was 1am at night. We just went to the closest hostel, got a bed and went to sleep.
The next morning, we both decided that we did not want to stay in Da Nang, but move on to Hoi An - an ancient port town we only heard good things of - and settle there for a few days. While we are used to negiotiating taxi prices very hard in Asia it was a new experience for us to also negotiate the public bus price. We had asked at the hostel how much we can expect to pay for the local bus and were told around 30.000VND (~1,5€). We hopped on and the driver's assistant came and asked for 65.000VND... Per person!
He even came with a printed paper - probably for all the poor naive tourists - "officially" saying 65.000 p.p. We simply refused to pay this and he made a sign we should get off the bus then. As we did not move he came back again, claiming it was 30.000 per person and we also have to pay 30.000 for each of our bags. We once again refused and he lowered his price to 40.000. We refused again claiming that our luggage does not take a seat and finally he gave in and took 30.000 per person and nothing more. At least a tiny little tourist-rip-off-battle won ;).
Hoi An is a reallly lovely place to stay, but we will let you know in the next article what we did around there.
After this for us shocking and sad experience of flooded Phong Nha, we hope you are all doing fine. Let us know your news as well.
Cheers,
Alex & Moni
By
koalartw