Disney World for Real

Dong Hoi is not on the backpacker/tourist trail. The Lonely Planet guidebook said as much and that’s what attracted me to the place. That and the fact that the city was just an hour motorbike away from what the guidebook calls Vietnam’s most spectacular cave system. I hopped on a sleeper bus and it all worked out well enough actually. The sleeper bus meant I had my own tiny little bed thing and wouldn’t be bothered by anyone else and, because I was ill and achy, the tiny sleeper bed wasn’t any less comfortable than a regular bed. I drifted in and out of feverish sleep for the next 6 or 7 hours to Dong Hoi. Then, the bus (full of locals) dropped me and only me off on the side of the road in Dong Hoi at about 11 at night. I was a bit disoriented from being ill and from the dark, so I took a room at the very hotel where the bus dropped me off. That meant I paid what I felt was an exorbant price… $12 for a room for one night! That’s double, even triple what I’ve been paying for the past two months! Oh well.

That night I somehow managed to convey to the receptionist that barely spoke English that I would like to hire a motobike guide to take me to the cave the next morning and that I would then like to get a bus for Hanoi. Everything worked out and at 7:30 the next morning I was back on a motobike in the drizzly, rainy weather. That was smart and I had plenty of time to think as much as I balanced my not-as-achy body on the back of the bike for the hour-ride.

When I got to the my destination it was more splurging. Because it was me, myself and I, I had to pay for an entire boat that is usually shared by up to ten people. But this meant I got the whole boat and guide to myself, so it was worth the ten bucks. When I took off in the boat it was still drizzly and rainy, but that added a beautifully mysterious element to my surroundings. Huge limestone crags were jutting out of bright, neon green rice paddies that seemed to glow in the gray weather. The tops of the crags were shrouded in mist. I was being lazily paddled through what seemed to be a landscape painting that was slowly coming alive around me. I completely forgot about being ill.

New turns brought new surprises and gorgeous views in my personal moving painting. Eventually, we were approaching a huge opening in one of the monstrous limestone crags. The gaping hole opened up to a huge, resonating cavern filled with massive stalactites and stalagmites. It all seemed so unreal. It seemed just like some magical fantasy place created by Disney World. Floating through the magic on a boat, I couldn’t help but to think of Disney’s infamous “It’s a Small World” ride. Except this time, instead of throngs of tourists, it was just me. Instead of corny music, I heard only the soft plish of my guides’ paddles rhythmically dipping into the water and echoing off the cavern walls. Instead of fantasy, it was reality.

My boat drifted through one massive cavern after the next. Each cavern seemed like great, majestic halls for great, majestic kings that must not be of this world. The creative patterns and soda straw tapestries that took hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years even, to create were certainly not of my world. I was in wonderland and it was real. My guides’ beached the boat in a couple places and I was able to get out and just wander around on my own, taking in the stunning and impressive natural art of water and sediment slowly carving new sculptures and weaving new patterns into rock. That’s when I realized… I really was in a moving painting. The cave I was standing in has not just existed for millions of years, but has been alive and growing and reshaping for millions of years. And the unfinished masterpiece was still slowly being formed right before my eyes. Each drip drop of water from the cavern ceiling arching high above was like another stroke of the paintbrush. And there I was, it the midst of it all, enjoying it alone, as if it was a work of art God was creating for my eyes only. How do I even begin to express my joy and gratitude at such a gift?

The entrance fee I paid bought me admission to a second, stunningly massive cave. Though, this cave you explore by foot after a long hike up the side of the huge limestone crag, which continually offered impressive views of the river and valley of rice paddies below. I had a guide for this cave and he told me some of the impressive facts about the cave’s formation. But, honestly, his words just flitted into my head and then vanished into cave’s dark shadows. I was too mesmerized by the cave’s beauty to worry about facts and figures. Sometimes, as a journalist, I think that you can miss the true treasures of a place or an experience, because you’re too worried about logging all the facts, figures and details so you can spit them back out later. Well, this time I wasn’t a journalist. I was a bewildered observer taking in the surrounding, unworldly beauty in shock.

By the time I had my fill of wonder and amazement inside my magical caves, the drizzly and misty gray weather outside had melted away into a blue heaven. The sun was slowly warming the looming crags and green rice paddies. I noticed my fever, aches and chills seemed to have melted away also.

I spent the rest of the day in Dong Hoi just chilling out at a local cafés, trying to catch up on my blogging. Occasionally, I was an amusing attraction for some of the locals: a lone, white, Western women in strictly Vietnamese territory.

Finally, my night bus came and I was en route to Hanoi. But, that was not before being pestered by a local who kept trying to make me his own personal muse. I didn’t comply as well as he might have liked. Why can’t the Vietnamese let me wallow in my own magical bubble? Why do they have to always come trampling in and pop it? A sigh…