Trekking the largest cave in the world: Hang Son Doong, Vietnam, Part three

Author Rick Fuller: 

Original Article

There’s really nothing like a cold-water plunge at the end of a long and strenuous day to facilitate great sleep, and the underlying knowledge that I was hundreds of meters underground inside the largest cave on Earth fortunately did nothing to encourage insomnia. In fact, the only thing truly interfering with a legendary sleep on this night was the poking of elbows and fingers from Tracy every time that I started to snore, something I don’t do often but is irrefutable evidence of the depth and quality of my sleep, all of which carried, apparently, no weight in her decision-making process when she decided to throw said elbows and fingers. I woke at 5am to the muted light of doline one filtering through the tent, and the soft stirring of the porter crew already awakening to begin their laborious day. Dozing on and off for another hour, I finally crawled out of the tent at 6am to join our guides at the charcoal fire, after grabbing a delicious mug of the pour-over coffee.

Relaxing around the fire with Tha and Hieu in the early mornings is a wonderful way to start the day, the absence of cell phone service and internet and the typical morning routine of rushing to access both not remotely missed. It felt like this was the way that a vacation should truly be. White-sand beaches and umbrella-adorned fruity cocktails may be wonderful for some, but I’ll take ancient mineralization and calcite formations with mugs of steamy coffee and a true disconnect from the outside world any day of the week.

Breakfast was served at 7:30 sharp, a Vietnamese take on pancakes with honey, bananas, and chocolate sauce, missing only maple syrup. While undeniably delicious as served, for a traditionalist like myself, the absence of Canada’s national libation was an unforgivable oversight. Luckily, the pancakes themselves were delicious and the wide selection of fruits and noodle soups with beef and chicken compensated almost sufficiently.

Today was to be our only “dry feet” day of the trek, and because of the lack of water crossings, I’d done my best to dry my boots the night before, tipping over a chair and hanging them upside down on the legs next to the smoldering fire. I’d also brought along fresh insoles, and, with the donning of new socks, although the boots were still damp, my feet felt relatively dry when I slipped them on. A welcome change, even though it felt like as long as one could avoid jungle rot, wet feet every day wasn’t as bad as I’d anticipated.

We lined up and departed camp at 9:15am, leaving the porter crew behind to pack up the camp and follow us to doline two, our next camping spot. We marched straight toward the doline, which, in both pictures and in person did not seem too far away. This deception would quickly become apparent though, as our trek to reach the top of the collapsed cave became an arduous scramble through massive boulders with sharp edges and mossy, slippery sides where water dripped and sunlight occasionally found contact. The trail is marked with faint red splashes, which Tha insisted was blood from previous tour groups. This trail, absent in any sort of further marking or foot path, winds under, around, and sometimes through the boulder field, oftentimes seeming to trudge straight into a house-sized boulder only for a crack to open up requiring us to contort our bodies and slip under the leaning rock. In two spots, ladders were placed helping us descend to the narrow passageways.

Our path now follows this meandering and lazy river, at times trekking along its banks, at others wading directly through the waters that range from knee to waist deep. Towering limestone cliffs surround us on all sides, their craggy tops disappearing into swirling mists high above while the merciless Vietnamese sun is kept temporarily at bay by the shrouds of precipitation. Tha regales us with tales of leading tours during the sweltering summer months when temperatures often soar past 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The thought sends a shudder through me as I tip my hat into the creek, letting the refreshing waters cool my head, providing temporary respite from the already balmy low 80s heat. The lush jungle closes in around us as we press forward, while the ever-present humidity amplifies the sweat that trickles down our brows. There is a wild, primordial beauty to this rugged landscape that rejuvenates us, and we can feel the call of Hang Son Doong, its dark and mysterious entry passages awaiting our arrival.

After thirty minutes of sweating and scrambling through the limb-scraping passages, we finally reached the base of the doline, just under the rim, a mountain of stone still remaining to climb, but the massive rockfall field successfully traversed. We rested here for a few minutes while the remainder of the group caught up, and then we moved up another fifty yards to where a nearly perfect tunnel had been water-bored straight through the rock wall. A very cool natural feature of course requires a photo shoot, and two safety assistants climbed into the tunnel and to the far side in order to backlight it so we could take turns doing our best poses ala James Bond. I was reticent to join in on the fun until Damien and Jeremy shamed me, whereupon I chose the Vitruvian Man pose which turned out to be pretty stupid cool, just as expected.

An hour of this photoshoot allowed the porter team to slide past us, which is probably the true purpose, as they needed to get ahead of us to set up our next camp so that it would be magically ready upon our arrival. The first-class operation run by Oxalis requires that guests not have to look behind the curtain to see the wizardry, and they truly put on an amazing performance that would make a magician proud.

The collapse of this doline is in two distinct parts, and we resumed the trek by marching under a bridge of the originally existing cave arch. Here, we stopped again for the attachment of belt harnesses for an upcoming tricky part. The belts strapped around our waist and attached to them are two carabiners which allows us to click into the rock-wall mounted rope. Not as safe or secure as a true five-point harness, this belt harness is meant merely to prevent disaster in the form of an unlikely fall. In fact, as we traversed the knife edge that ran along the top of a forty-meter slope that probably approached 80 degrees of pitch, I couldn’t help but think that we had several times already traversed more dangerous spots without any aids of any kind. In the blackness below, the river could be heard, a distance-muted roaring of rushing water, however, there were ledges that would likely catch any falling hiker before they achieved splash-down far away in the stygian blackness.

I traversed the knife edge easily, and, as Hieu removed my safety belt on the other side, I asked him why they felt the need to attach us to this section that didn’t seem all that dangerous, comparatively speaking. His answer was a rather wry response that, with its candidness, betrayed the underlying truth. A fall in this spot would likely result in serious injury or death, much like many other spots, however, the difference here was that retrieval of the body, should it tumble to the rushing river below, would be nearly impossible, and probably result in significant danger to the body-retrieval team. The river here is unexplored, and the likelihood that the body would hang up somewhere in the unknown depths to never again be found was high. I made the decision to keep this knowledge to myself, but was nonetheless glad to get an answer to the mystery of why to harness trekkers through this fun patch.

Safely across, we resumed our climb, moving upward toward the light, the sun now streaming through the mist of the verdant jungle that lined the rim of the doline. Finally atop the massive rockfall and in the heart of doline one, we marveled at the formations and plant growth. This doline is named, “Watch Out For Dinosaurs,” an homage to the first exploration by the British caving team when one of the members was inspired by the previously never-before-seen by human eyes landscape to call out that warning to another member who had moved off by himself to explore the landscape. It wasn’t difficult to imagine oneself thrust through time to another world where dinosaurs very well might have survived their extinction through a micro-ecosystem exactly like this. The fact that dinosaurs only predated this cave by a few hundred million years isn’t relevant enough to stop the dreaming and runaway imagination inspired by the magnificent setting in which we’re immersed.

Perched on a rock along the trail are a couple of very heavy, rusted metal fragments, which Tha tells us are bomb-fragments found near the walls of the doline. In awe, we pick up the pieces and examine them, trying to imagine how they possibly could have found their way into the bottom of an untouched cave skylight in the deep depths of a jungle that would never have had target value. There are no identifying marks on the bomb pieces to aid in the hypothesizing, but the prevailing theory is that the fragments are from a bomb that strayed from its target (as many, many did over the years), exploding somewhere far above on the rim, the lush jungle quickly growing back over the evidence while these couple of chunks of shrapnel swished into the basket of the cave skylight.

Further into the doline is a natural formation named the “wedding cake” where we engaged in yet another photo shoot with Tha photographing from above as we took turns posing. After our photos, we were guided back to a lookout spot from where we could see our camp from the previous night, the tiny dots of our sleeping platforms just barely visible, finally giving us the sense of depth and distance that is just so constantly deceptive in this monstrosity of a cave.

Descending out of the doline, we reentered the cave proper and made our way to a nice flat spot where one of our chefs had laid out tarps and was preparing a light lunch of fried rice, veggies, hard-boiled eggs, and fruits. A toilet was set up here, the only spot to go for the day, a reminder to find a good balance in the amount of water we consumed. We spent an hour here, enjoying the flat and open area while we ate, explored, and took enough pictures and videos to cause construction to start on a new server farm somewhere near Saigon.

We finally resumed our trek with Tha leading as usual as we walked through an easy section that allowed us to focus on the terrain and the magnificent cave features instead of on our feet. As the light from doline one began to fade behind us, the light from doline two appeared in front of us, and as we approached it, our group split up with six of us choosing to climb to the top of a very high mineral flow while the remaining four stayed on the lower path that circled the base of the flow. From the top of the calcite formation, we sat and watched as our other group members reached the base of doline two and began climbing the winding path up toward the skylight. At a predetermined spot, Tha radioed down to the accompanying safety assistants and the group stopped and all turned their headlamps in our direction, creating a very cool photo opportunity with the massive doline a backdrop to the shining lights of the hikers traversing its side.

The six of us then carefully climbed down from our perches on a very steep and strangely dangerous feeling slope with very narrow ledges for walking with rather long falls awaiting a slip. Luckily, this was an easy spot from which to retrieve a body, so safety harnesses were unnecessary. On the way down, Hieu mentioned that the six of us who chose to climb to the top of this mountain were the same six who chose to trek to the swimming hole the night before, an interesting observation that he indicated was consistent with most treks.

Reconnecting with the trail, we retrieved our packs that we’d dropped and then made our way to the doline slopes and began the long, steep climb. This doline is named “Garden of Edam,” an intentional gaff this time in keeping with the unintentional “Hand of Dog” from earlier in the cave. This doline actually has a jungle growing in it, and as we made our way up the steep slopes, we marveled at the natural terracing that had formed looking so uniform and perfect as to almost seem manmade. Ferns grow on the terraces, each of them turned upward toward the doline opening as if in silent and perpetual worship of the sun god that gives them life, an almost eerie stasis that felt like marching through a roomful of mannequins all staring reverently at a fixed point.

The trail itself here is narrow and marked with ribbons, encouraging us to minimize our footprint on this virgin jungle that has only recently seen a human. Tha informed us to keep an eye open for monkeys which sometimes make their way down the vertical cliffs via the occasional hanging vine to reach the banana trees which pepper the hidden jungle, and he says he once spotted a flying fox down there, but we see nothing of note during our traverse.