Let's start with the good.

Phong Nha is a awesome park that has some of the largest caves on the planet hidden underneath it. It has an great hostel called Easy Tiger that has good live music and there are a few nice restaurants on the main drag. The town is nestled in a little canyon surrounded by shear cliffs and karsts on one side and river on the other.

Amusingly, Phong Nha has been finding a new biggest cave every couple years for the last 8 years, and now hosts the largest known cave on the planet. One of the ex-biggest caves, Paradise cave, has been rigged and lit by the park service and anyone can visit, no guide needed. It goes back over 7km, I think (The biggest goes back something like 35km). When we dropped by, it was nothing short of awesome, and our photos will do it little justice.

We also rode to a trail for Gio Waterfall and some monkey spotting. Success.

Despite the thin mist and light rain that I'm almost use to by now, our motor bike ride was gorgeous. We rode through farm land, over canyon bridges, amongst huge karsts and through cow herds.

What an awesome place.

Now, the bad, the worst accommodation I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing…

Remember that we were showing up to the national park sick with body ache and a cold. We were aiming for a private room and a days rest with pho and tea. The night we arrive, we quickly find a room, but we are next to a bar with karaoke and rest doesn't come easily. To boot, the next morning we are greeted to hammers and saws.

Fair enough, this is the life of travel, so we hiked down the road and found a place away from the noise. Unfortunately, we end up finding the worst accommodation cesspool in the history of accommodations.

The pain comes on slow. We show up and they take us to a room in the back corner of the hotel. It has one window that opens to a brick wall with a pile of trash beneath it. All good though, the bed looks clean and it's quiet. A place to recover.

But then we smelled cigarettes, and then we found cigarettes, and then the kids started yelling and stomping and crying, and then the hammers started, then the saws, and then we switched rooms and the staff are jaded and apathetic to our condition, and then Christmas music, then toddlers music, all at full volume, then random children were barging into our room and doors slamming…As it drew cold, I went down to ask for real blankets (apparently not included) and recieved nothing but glances from the staff/family as they ate dinner in the other room. I looked around and found both of our passports sitting out in the open, not in a safe, ready to be stolen, so I stole them back.

Eventually it dies down just in time for bed and we think our awful hard spring beds were the end of it… How wrong we were….

…I woke up at 3am covered in hives. HIVES. When was the last time these sheets were washed? I slipped into my silk liner for protection, and try to go back to sleep, but just to add insult to injury, at 4am, I'm greeted to Christmas carols on full blast from a loud speaker downstairs. (Who listens to Chistm- it doesn't matter.) We luckily didn't catch anything permanent from that cesspool, but Danielle came out with 40 bed bug bites and turned into an itchy mess for the next two days. Hammers, trash, bed bugs, hives, Christmas carols… I hope that place burns to the ground. I hate that hotel with passion.

Fin.

Phong Nha was still awesome and I still recommend it, just be careful where you stay.

See you in Hanoi!

Grant and Danielle

P.S. As a reminder, our full res photos are in Dropbox. Find the link through either of our Facebooks.

The post Phong Nha – The Highs and Lows appeared first on Quarter Life Excursion.

First up was Nha Trang. We had 7 hours between bus rides so we walked to an ancient, 600 year old Cham temple. The temple was interesting, but slightly belittled by the six gift shops on the temple grounds and it's location in the middle of a city with high rises well above its little hill.

The charm of Nha Trang came from a friendly local Easy Rider tour guide who sparked a conversation with us at a cofee shop. After the standard topics, he let us in on his view of the government, the facade of success put in front of tourists, the corruption keeping shops in and out of business and people in and out of jobs. Despite fractured English, this guy was a wealth of information from a local perspective. Thank you, [name removed].

After snagging a copy of East of Eden by Steinbeck from a mobile bookstore (shoutout to Aaron), we were off to Hoi An.

Hoi An is probably the quaintest city I've ever seen. Boats are wooden and colourful, storefronts are paneled and old fashion, and the streets are small with bright lanterns. Despite a continuous drizzle, the walk around the small town was refreshing and delicious as we snacked on fresh donuts and ate a local favorite called Cao Lau. Apparently it can only be made here because it requires a special noodle to be cooked in a water that can only come from a specific local well. I don't care if any of that matters, because it was legit. So good.

Since it was raining, we kept to indoor activities: cafes, Bahn Mi Queen, chicken rice, 10¢ beers, blind massages, and shop tours. All good and sometimes interesting.

After two days stuck indoors, however, I wanted to explode with all the stored energy I possessed. My god, I would hate to be an indoor cat. Once we got to Hue, we found things that guaranteed at least 8 miles of walking / day.

First we went to the Imperial City. A citadel built in 1804-ish. The outer layer of the wall surrounds half the current city. Within that is an old, ancient fortified castle, and within the citadel is the forbidden purple city. The old emperor's fort came complete with 5 temples, a lake, a garden, and a separate area for housing his mother and wife.

That night we had a nice meal on the river front and hung out with the family running our homestay. Southern Vietnamese say Northern Vietnamese people are colder and less friendly. I guess we aren't far enough north yet.

The next day, we ventured through the country by motor bike, in the rain to an old temple, a gorgeous cemetery, and two dramatically large emporer tombs. From one story, it seemed as though the emperors during the 1800s were simply French puppets, so they had time to build these awesome tombs and live there as a quick get away from politics. After seeing them, I'd like to go back for a get away too.

We started coming down with a bad cold at this point so we limped on the bus to Phong Nha that night and loaded ourselves with Advil, vitamin C, and B12, hoping for greener pastures. First time I've been home sick so far. There's nothing like a warm bed and not having to worry about travel when you're sick.

See you in Phong Nha for caves and hikes.

Cheers,

Grant and Danielle

P.S. How to get over a cold in 24 hours: Advil, Vit C, B12, copious amounts of super spicy pho, and even more hot, ginger-lime tea.

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We stayed in a bungalow that came equipped with its own frog to nab all of the bugs…score! We were told there was a ceremony going on at the monkey temple down the street so we decided to check it out. No monkeys were seen, but we did meet some nice locals that ushered us into the festival, almost involuntarily, and they gave us a strange, slimy white (fruit?) dish that was sweet and not unpleasant. We communicated via gestures and figured out the festival was honoring Buddha, we think.

We wandered on at this point and found a series of rickety stairs and ladder combination that led up the shear cliff of a mountain. We had to see what was at the top. After seven different levels, we climbed up to the mouth of a cave, and as the sun was setting at this point, bats were chattering and flying around the opening. It was a great find. Two feral dogs escorted us back to our bungalows as we wandered back through the jungle.

The next day we decided to trek into the jungle on the Tan Sawan waterfall hike. The first few km were along a service road. Then, it was jungle trail for the rest of the trek. We were weaving around a trail that loosely followed the river. Up and down we went for miles. Every so often, there was a beach access point or waterfall that we could hike to from the main trail. There was some gorgeous landscape to see. On one such beach, I was eating lunch and noticed blood coming through my pant leg. Crap, what was that from? I lifted my pants up and two fat leeches were happily sucking away at me. I yelled at Grant to come over and pry it off me while simultaneously trying to flick off another one that was cruising up my shoe. I thought leeches lived in water, what the hell was this? My California creature knowledge didn't cover this possibility. We got them off, did a quick body check, and got the hell out of there. Later, we decided to tuck our pants into our socks to ward off any others. Good luck to the tourists we saw with sandals and shorts on.

The views were worth the 10 or so leech bites we gathered. We heard birds and insects chattering away the whole time we were there. At one point we came across a flock of hornbills that were noisily following one another. It was an awesome hike. At the end of the day Grants phone read 14 miles total, and all our clothes were soaked in sweat. On top of all of this, and probably the most important part (Grant typing now), we found a Packer fan! What a spectacular day!

The following day we were off to the other entrance of the Khao Sok national park at Chiao Lan reservoir.

We woke up early and headed out to Chiao Lan. The long tail ride from the main pier out to our floating bungalow was amazing. Sheer faces of limestone and sandstone shot out of the reservoir at random. We drove by many islands made of rock and dense jungle vegetation.

The area was dammed in the 1980s and is now referred to as the largest ecological disaster in Thailand's history. The reservoir filled up with 6 months. Because it filled up so quickly, a large number of animals were displaced or trapped on islands. A conservationist attempted to save the trapped animals, but the combination of stress and limited resources in the relocation areas caused the majority to die. He ended up killing himself due to the failure of this project.

Regardless, it was a beautiful area. About 20 minutes into our boat ride it started POURING. We were soaked within a minute or so. I looked back at our longboat driver who was under a protective canopy and he laughed and waved at our situation. “Good luck!” he yelled. Another crew member walked up and collected all our valuables to put into a dry bag he had on hand. “No rain until today!” he said while laughing. I'm glad someone was amused. Soaking wet and cold (the first time in two weeks!) we arrived at our bungalows. The lake water was warmer than the air at this point so we hung our clothes, changed into bathing suits and hopped in the water.

After, we did a short jungle trek with multiple river crossings (up to my neck!). Our guide Guy (or “chicken”, as some tourists call him) was a very pleasant Thai man who did this trek daily. He knew all about the surrounding land and stopped a few times to scope out noises only he could hear. We were led to a cave that was incredible. There we saw spiders as big as our hands and tons of bats. My favorite memory of the giant cave spider was watching one prance away after we knocked the stick he was on. It was out of a cartoon, and any fear I had at the time slipped away.

We then cruised back to our bungalow for some beer drinking and lake floating for the rest of the evening.

The next day we explored for gibbons and dusky langurs (a type of monkey with a long tail). The trick to spotting them is to look for abnormal branch rustling amongst the trees. We ended up seeing many of both species.

After all of this, it was time to depart. The long tail boat ride out was gorgeous, and dry thankfully. We made it back to our bus, and when we were back in town celebrated the trip with two large coconut shakes.

Danielle and Grant

PS : We posted a link to our Dropbox folder with all the higher quality photos on Facebook. The photos are added in culsters and tagged with a dated folder. Feel free to go through these if you'd like to see better photos.

The post Khao Sok – Gibbons, Lizards, and Leeches, oh my! appeared first on Quarter Life Excursion.

With this in mind, we made Ko Samui our shortest trip. Our one day there we hoped to see Big Budda, Grandfather and Grandmother rocks, the mummified monk, and Fishermans Village (all free), but it was raining and every taxi was out to make a profit that day, so we caught a movie (Hunger Games) at a surprisingly super nice theater and planned for the next adventure.

My favorite part of the trip, and I’m not being sarcastic, was a Loatian pork dish from a side street restaurant. It reminded me of carnitas with onion and cilantro.

After this, we catch a bus at 530am to Khao Lak with dreams of hiking, swimming, and cheaper food in our future.

Until next time,

Grant and Danielle

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