VIETNAM | Solo Backpacking | Ep2: Hoi An to Phong Nha

I'm currently spending six weeks solo backpacking through Vietnam. You can't help but immediately fall in love with this place. Cheers! Starting in Saigon, I'm travelling by bus, train, boat, plane and bike, finishing up at Ha Giang in the very north. It'll be interesting to see what it's actually like, see if it's worth the day out or whether it's just a picture, so let's go find out. Cheers! So now it sounds like we're going to a rave. You go around a corner and it opens up. It's like, whoa! This is so impressive. So we're at the start of the Hai Van Pass. If we're going to get these views for the next hour, it's going to be sick. It's like something from a different world, like a different planet. It's unreal. My trip began two weeks ago, spending a few nights checking out the various tourist highlights around Ho Chi Minh City. Then, I made my way up to the beautiful town of Da Lat, before hiring out a bike and riding through to Central Highlands with Danny, who I made friends with at the hostel. As soon as Danny speaks Vietnamese, they're like, wow! They love it. Does that look Mexican? Arriving in Nha Trang, I didn't think much of the town, so I head up to Quy Nhon, but I was unfortunately a bit under the weather, so I rested up so that I could properly enjoy the next leg of my trip. I got up at 5 in the morning to get the bus from Quy Nhon up to Hoi An. So it's 8.45 in the morning, just at a stop on the bus journey, and there's a wedding going on, and they're blasting music out like it's a rave. It's a five-hour journey up to Hoi An, and I'll be meeting up with Danny, plus Emmanuel, who I met in Saigon, and although our schedules hadn't aligned during the day, we'd been meeting up for beers at most of the stops on my trip so far. Alright, I've made it to Hoi An. Feeling better now, refreshed. The cold's nearly gone, so I'm doing good. Emmanuel's been in the wars, falling off his bike. Danny's just getting stalked, as always. But yeah, we're going to have a little explore around the town. It's supposed to be a really, really beautiful town. We're looking forward to this. Hello. It's like I'm back in Morocco, where they just jump on you and stuff. The most touristy photo ever. Wow. It is beautiful here. Hoi An used to be a major port city before the trade moved up to the nearby town of Da Nang at the start of the 19th century. The old town preserves its incredible melting pot history with the colourful French colonial buildings, Chinese temples, and the iconic Japanese-covered bridge. Hoi An's centre became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, with its primary business now being tourism. OK, this is officially the most pretty town in Vietnam. It is. Absolutely wins. It is busy and touristy, but you can't help but immediately fall in love with this place. It's got such a nice charm to it. It's so beautiful, and I can't wait to see it at night as well when all these lanterns are lit up. Let's try this. We're spending the afternoon exploring the town, stopping at this little cafe to relax. What have you ordered? Egg coffee. Egg coffee, yes. Dirt? It is weird. OK, now it is. Ah, OK. That's better now. Yep, that's better. I don't drink coffee, but I do like egg, so 50-50 chance I like this. No. It's the coffee. It's the coffee I don't like. These colourful buildings and the balconies randomly remind me of New Orleans. Yeah. Hello. Howdy. It's five o'clock somewhere. So last year I travelled around quite a few countries that are predominantly Muslim, so it's nice to be able to just walk around with a beer. Cheers, guys. Cheers. We're just at the fish market, so you've got to watch what you're standing in, but they had this huge party on, apparently for Chinese New Year. All the men and women were all drinking together, it wasn't segregated, but yeah, a fun little random thing to find. Which one are you going for? What size? Faux metal jacket. Boom. Danny bought the faux metal jacket singlet, and I was like, I want one too. So I was going to get that, but then I also saw Yoda. Yay. Going to have to get that too. Yoda. You may want to get one sized up though, it will probably shrink a little bit. How much for two? 40,000. 40. Okay, yeah, deal. So yeah, if you want some badass T-shirts in Hoi An, come to this shop. Very nice shop. Very nice. Cheers. My new T-shirt. Damn. It's been a fun afternoon exploring Hoi An. Bought two singlets, two T-shirts, and two beers so far. But yeah, I love this town. These giant model boats just made me think of the Vietnam Top Gear special. I'm not riding with one of them on my bike though. We're only, we're like a two minute walk from the Japanese bridge, but just sort of back away from the main street, and then, you know, there's still T-shirt shops over there, but there's like a little local joint in the corner that we just walk past. Again, once again, the blessing of having Danny with you so he can just translate and order stuff for you. Emmanuel just sits there. He doesn't do anything. You're a good guy, Emmanuel. Don't you worry. Cheers, bro. I'm gonna get a watermelon shirt later. I'm gonna buy you a watermelon shirt later. Oh dear. As long as it's not the banana one, it's fine. What if you want this? Banh cuon. Okay, what is it? It's like a rice noodle thing. It's specialized. And I ordered a bunch of random other stuff. It is what? Vegetables with some kind of meat. I'm not planning to eat with this at all, but it tastes like egg. It's nice. Good? So we've literally gone from one extreme to the other today. We were eating at this local Vietnamese place, just tucked away around the corner from the busy crowds, and now we've come to Shamrock Irish Pub. Cheers. It's nice to have a proper, cool, full pint. Amazing music playing. This guy's got an awesome guitar. I can just sit here and watch the sunset with all these lanterns lighting up. Well, it's nighttime. Lanterns are on, and it's just so beautiful here. I think it's just only the first day, but already my favorite place in Vietnam. Pretty, man. Real pretty. Yeah, man. These lanterns were introduced by the Chinese immigrants at the end of the 16th century when Hoi An was a bustling commercial port exchanging goods with merchant ships from Asia and Europe. Other than their practical uses, the lanterns were a way for the Chinese to pay homage to their motherland. They're made from bamboo and silk, and as silk had become one of Hoi An's top commodities, the lanterns grew in popularity. And so, the rest of the community began to hang lanterns as well for decoration, and also in the hope of bringing good luck and a sense of coziness to the town. There's a really nice vibe to the town, actually. Like, it's busy, but it still feels calm, and it still feels chilled out. So you could easily spend all evening just wandering around the streets, just soaking it all in. So we've come to the night market by the river to get some food. We've got tons of different food on offer. Street food in Asia is just the best. I mean, it's probably not the cheapest one we'll get because we're in a very touristy spot. It's just freshly cooked meat when you're feeling a bit peckish. Hits the spot. Absolutely hits the spot. Sitting down on the small seats. It's very spicy. I put too much on my banh mi. Banana pancake with Nutella. Voila! Banana pancake! This is my private room in the hostel. It's only like, what, £13? I don't know, $16, $17 a night for a private room. And they've got so much on at this hostel. Like, it's really well organized. They'll have lots of free, different day activities. They'll also help you book all the activities you want to pay for, onward transport. They've got parties every night. Tell everyone your name. My name? Eric. Anything you want, Eric's your man. You got it? So this morning, I'm going to do this basketball experience. Miles, who I met in Nha Trang, he recommended it. So it should be a good laugh. It only takes like an hour and a half, including the journey there and back and stuff. Okay! I've had some in character now. So I think we're going to have a little ride around, maybe do a bit of fishing, a bit of paddling ourselves. So I think we're about to have a go at fishing. Some crab fishing? We're going to get a little rod each, see what we can get. Here, crabby crabby. Better put the bait right by it, and they all just ran back inside. Crab fishing failed so far. Three crabs now. So we've done our fishing. We've spun around a bit, but now it sounds like we're going to a rave. It's only like 11am, but we're getting the party started here. Yeah. It's crazy. I didn't want to do the spinning thing on the boat, because any kind of ride that just spins around like that just makes me want to throw up, you know. I love a good roller coaster, but spinning stuff, no. How do you feel? It was nice. How do you feel? Good. Not feeling sick? No, no, no. Where are you from? Taiwan. Where are you from? UK. Oh, UK. Welcome to Taiwan. That was good, clean fun. Nice and relaxing to ride around. Thank you very much. Okay. After a fun morning with the basket boat experience, I head back into town and hide out a bicycle from the hostel to go explore one of the nearby villages. All right, so I got myself a bicycle for the afternoon. Elite e-basket at the front. Feels very weird. After having, you know, been on a motorbike and a scooter a lot this trip, being on a bike, like a normal bicycle, it's like, what do you mean I have to pedal? So, yeah, I don't think I need to, but I'm going to go explore Kam Kim Island just across the bridge from the main bit of town. Yeah, you normally do it on a tour with a hostel or whatever, but I'm just going to explore it myself and see what I find. So maybe it would have been good to have a guide just explain what I'm seeing, because it's like, ah, yep, it's a village. It's where people live. It's beautiful. Not much else to say about it, though. Basically, I'm just getting away from this sort of busy part of town and have a little ride around. It's funny, though, because, like, I love Hawaii to death, but there's obviously plenty of tourists there, but, like, anywhere in the world, you just go a tiny bit further, and it's just normal people going about their lives, you know? Yeah, it's worth doing. If you're in Hawaii, just come to Kam Kim, have a cycle round, see the more day-to-day kind of rural life. You'll find little, beautiful little spots like this. Back in town, Danny and I had signed up for an evening street food tour with the hostel. And the first stop on a street food tour is a restaurant. So, um... Oh, nice. You get this stuff to put on the rice paper. You have to massage it. No happy ending, just massage. Massaging it, massaging it. Fork, stick. See? Perfect. This is, like, the worst roll ever. Most Vietnamese people would be ashamed of my rolling skills, but... As you can see, it looks perfect. Mmm, I like it. Good? It's really good, actually. Despite my ---- rolling. All right, second effort. A lot better, a lot better. Everyone at the table is very impressed. We're doing a street food tour organized by the hostel. And basically, it's a really good way, if you've come backpacking to Vietnam and you want to try the local food but don't really know how to go about doing it, signing up for a tour like this is a really good idea. I've been fortunate on this trip to sort of try a lot of local food with the help of Danny, but other people, you might not know what to order, what means what. So this kind of thing is really helpful. But anyway, today, we're going to head to Da Nang, go up the Ba Na Hills to the Golden Bridge, which is sort of a place that's kind of exploded on Instagram the last couple of years. So it'll be interesting to see what it's actually like and see if it's worth the day out, worth the cost of the ticket going up there, or whether it's just a picture. So let's go find out. Hiring out a scooter from the hostel, it was just over an hour's ride to the Ba Na Hills. This place feels like a theme park and it's because it is a theme park. It doesn't feel like we're in Vietnam, it's all modern and brand new and it's kind of strange. Starbucks. What is this doing here? True taste of Vietnam. Starbucks. We're literally just riding through fields with real water buffaloes and then we paid money to come to a place where they have fake ones. This is so weird. So it's 750,000 for a ticket, which is like 30 US dollars, which in normal life is nothing. In Vietnamese life, that feels like a fuckload of money. Yeah, it does. And we just beat a massive tour group, so we got it to ourselves. Here we go. The cable car ride is 5.8 kilometers long and holds the record for the longest non-stop single track cable car in the world. Towering high above the lush green forest below, it climbs up to a height of nearly 1,500 meters above sea level. Ever since I was like a two year old kid going on family holidays in Switzerland, I've just absolutely loved cable cars. So going on this was something pretty special. Take done. It's like we're walking inside Instagram. I just got here. It's pretty impressive, actually. I mean, I might call it cynical Instagram jokes, but it's really cool when you're here. The concept of the bridge was to have two giant god-like hands bursting out from the hills. Made from fiberglass, these hands support a golden thread of a bridge to guide people through nature as they walk above the treetops. And the legend of its construction dates all the way back to 2017. It's a little travel hack. You can queue for the platform or just stand on the flower bed right beside it. All right, so now what do we do? Time to go home. Just go back. The giant Buddha is over there. Giant Buddha? Yeah, it's all right. Giant Buddha, let's go. I still haven't quite figured this place out. It's like walking around a theme park without any rides. It's with the pigs. The Monkey King is very popular in Asian cooking. Sounds like the Superman. Monkey King. I watched the show when I was a kid. So the plan is we get in a cable car to another part of the park where there might actually be a ride. Yeah, I know. It's pretty exciting. There we go. So there's a lot of construction going on down here. Maybe they'll build rides or more pigs. I don't know. That's like quite a spooky shot. Yeah. Can't see the line. That's the only thing to do. There's always a line. It's Europe. Yeah, it's Europe. I think all of Europe is exactly like this as well. It's kind of like they wanted to do their own Harry Potter world but couldn't get the rights so they just made it slightly different. So I think the thing to understand about the Barnard Hills is Barnard Hills isn't aimed at Western tourists. It's for Asian tourists really because there'll be plenty of Asian tourists there who may have never been to Europe or may never even get to go to Europe. I don't know. So for them it's like a cool fairytale fake version of Europe. But for us Western tourists, I've come to Vietnam to see Vietnam not to see a fake version of Europe. So you're spending the whole time wandering around going what the hell is this place? What am I doing here? I mean I admire it as a piece of construction like the cable car is incredible and the whole huge fairytale village they've built on top of the mountain but it's just not actually that much to do there. It's like mostly overpriced restaurants and cafes. So it didn't take too long before we got the cable car back down. So you know like I said the cable car ride was epic. It was beautiful and going over that rainforest especially on the route down over the waterfalls just looked incredible so that was good. Wow. And the Golden Bridge is impressive but there's so much better things you can do with your time and money whilst you're here. So you know personally I'd skip it. It was our last day in Hoi An before we hit the road again so we decided just to have a chill day on the beach. Yeah I've really enjoyed Hoi An really enjoyed it. I mean it's such a beautiful town and there's so much to do but we've also had just so many fun evenings here as well like at the hostel bar there's a really great crowd and they've got something on every night. I mean we even went to a neon party one night which was a bit of a throwback to sort of backpacking Thailand when I was younger. Although I much preferred the dive bar in town because I had like a live band and a pool table and that was much more my scene. But yeah we had some really good times some heavy heavy nights but some really good times. And now we're heading on to the town of Hue and to get there we're going to be biking along the Hai Van Pass which was made popular in the Top Gear Vietnam Special and so now in Vietnam it just gets referred to as the Top Gear Challenge that's how they try and sell it to everyone. So you pay your money and hire out a bike and drive it one way and they'll take it back for you. And so that's what we're going to be doing today. One of the nice things is you can hire out a bike you don't have to bring it back and they transport your bag for you so you don't have to haul your ---- on your bike which is great except I left my GoPro in that bag so it's going to be very hard to film this motorcycle challenge as we go. So basically what that means is we're going to film our own version of Top Gear but with lower production values evoking less casual racism. So first stop's going to be the Marble Mountains so let's hit the road. Hit the road. The Marble Mountains are a cluster of 5 marble and limestone hills that are about a half hour drive from Hoi An. Danny and I were joined by Chris from the UK we met on the beach yesterday and we're going to explore what's called the Water Mountain as each mountain is named after the 5 elements. I say we follow the signs to this cave and we'll probably check things out on the way. The entrance is just so cool. It's so pretty around here and they've carved it all out of the mountain which is really impressive. I think you're further up. Yeah. I'll probably just take my backpack off. Yeah, get skinny. Well, we made it to the top and it's one hell of a view. So Hoi An's back that way. Amazing view all around. What's up in the world? These rocks are so slippy. Another huge cave right here. There are several Buddhist and Hindu grottoes within the Marble Mountains. The sanctuaries feature statues as well as relief depictions of religious scenes carved out of the marble. So you think you're in the main bit of the cave and then you go around a corner and it opens up. It's like, whoa. This is so impressive. You've got the light rays coming through. Beaming down on the top. Climbing up to the highest peak now. Very, very steep stairs. Made it to the top of the highest peak. That was hard work. This has been awesome but we've got to make a move and get on with our top gear challenge. Those hills over there, that's actually where we're going to be driving around. Alright, so we're at the start of the Hai Van Pass. It's the road here. This is what we're going to be driving above. You can see the train going down there as well. Just gorgeous beaches. This road kind of weaves along beside the coast. Man, it is so, so beautiful. We're literally just at the start of it and if we're going to get these views for the next hour it's going to be sick. I just made another quick stop all along the road. You've got all these little cafes you can stop at with viewpoints. Selling drinks, even beer, which you obviously don't want to drink. But yeah, the views are just incredible. It's such a nice drive winding along here. See why it's a popular route. We've just come over the hill and so, the way is kind of that way but the views are just insane. We're basically stopping every two minutes just to take a day and have a look, take some pictures. That's what we're riding towards down there and why it's just sort of around the corner. I like it, Danny. I love it. It's beautiful. Man, I mean, people said the Hai Van Pass was good but yeah, definitely has to be spectacular. Alright, let's go. After we'd finished the pass, we still had about an hour and a half's worth of riding to reach Hue. Alright, I've made it to Hue. I've got a couple of nights here in Hue. I think I'm just going to keep it simple and decide for some like a little city tour and then another tour to the DMZ. So just keep it simple and have someone else show me around rather than do it myself. I'm feeling a bit lazy after that long drive. But yeah, awesome day of riding. A bit tired but I'm just going to settle in and enjoy Hue for a couple of days. Just coming to town to get some much needed food and Emmanuel's back. Hello. I'm back. It's a pleasure to see you. The city tour I'd sign up for was going to take us to the main sites of Hue including the Citadel as well as some of the tombs of the old emperors. I was being lazy and just signed up for the city tour rather than do it myself and it's already turned into a bit of a clusterfuck. The day tour doesn't include the entrance fees for any of the sites we're visiting which is fine except a lot of other people in the group weren't told this when they booked the tour which led to a lot of arguments kicking off from the word go. And it's one of those tours where you arrive and you're like I've made a mistake but I'm going to make the most of it. Hopefully it's all uphill from here. The first stop was a 19th century citadel. Hue was the imperial capital of Vietnam during the Nguyen dynasty from 1802 to 1945. And within the citadel is the imperial city where the emperor lived and worked. Basically the city was built to protect the religious and political activities of the region and so yeah the emperor's house here and obviously a lot of the place got damaged during the Vietnam war or the American war as they call it here. Kind of reminds me of the Forbidden City in Beijing there's just a lot less people. Next up we went on a quick dragon boat river cruise dropping us off at the pagoda of the Celestial Lady. Alright so this pagoda is the oldest pagoda in the city and it's built in 1601 and they've got these five monuments around it for the five elements and one of them's got the second largest bell in Vietnam. After we had lunch we drove out of town to visit the royal tombs of three different emperors. There were a total of 13 emperors during the Nguyen dynasty and these monuments were often designed and built whilst they were alive in preparation for their death. Now we are visiting the number two emperor Minh Mang he had 500 wives and 142 children busy man very busy. I wonder if he actually had names for all the kids or knew all their names. Oh yeah the whole site is 15 hectares big and no one actually knows where he's buried in the grounds it was kept a secret. So even though he had 500 wives only the first one becomes queen the rest are just notches on the belt if you like. Right tomb number two this afternoon I think this is for the 12th emperor the 12th emperor out of the 13. So this is the emperor's tomb here but apparently this ceiling guy painted it painted it with his feet had scaffolding set up and painted it with his feet I don't know why. So I asked how come they painted the ceiling with his feet and he's like because it's very difficult so he just wanted to put that extra bit of effort in and just show off basically. So this last tomb we come to is from the 4th emperor and because we come right at the end of the day it's actually really peaceful there's not many people about and the sun's setting so the light's really good so yeah it's pretty pretty beautiful. But basically for this last tomb I kind of just walked away from the group just wanted to be right by myself because it's so quiet here right now it's nice to have a bit of a long time. I think they spent three years building this tomb and it's 15 hectares same as the first one we went to. But yeah this guy only had I think it was like 103 wives but no children so they adopted and one of these places is the resting place for his wife his first wife who becomes the queen. But these places are just magnificent. I wasn't sure what to expect when they said we're going to go see some tombs today I thought it might just be a tomb in a building but these huge grounds that they've built are just beautiful just magnificent. yeah really glad I made the effort to come here even if the tour's been a bit iffy it's still awesome to come out here and see all this stuff. So today doing a tour of the old DMZ the demilitarized zone and then I'm going to be dropped off in a town near there and put in a bus to go to Phong Nha. One thing we're missing right now is our bus for the day the bus showed up and it broke down so I'm just waiting around until they get that sorted. It was about a three hour drive to our first main stop the Khe San combat base which was a major US Marines outpost during the Vietnam War. So I'm in Khe San which was it was sort of like a cork in a bottle to stop the flow of the Viet Cong coming in the Ho Chi Minh Trail from Laos into South Vietnam. These helicopters are absolutely huge. I got a shot down plane here and this place just got battered to death by bombs and artillery from both sides and the US Marines described being here as just hell on earth so it's kind of strange being here in a place where so much death and destruction happened so I'll just be walking around as a tourist taking pictures but it's fascinating to see nonetheless. Leaving Khe San we drove back down the way we came towards the coast. We then turned north towards the Ben Hai River which ran through the demilitarized zone but we didn't actually stop at this memorial site for the DMZ on this DMZ tour because of reasons but we made our way to this afternoon's main attraction of the Vinh Moc Tunnels. Now the Cu Chi Tunnels I visited in the south were part of a massive network that would often be underneath the villages but here at Vinh Moc they moved the entire village underground. This was to avoid the intense bombing from the US and for six years the villagers lived underground in a tunnel system that had three different levels going down to 24 meters deep. Today we are going to visit the second and third floor of this tunnel system. It's got so, so deep. It's incredible. Yeah, mate. So when they dug out these tunnels obviously they had to get rid of all the mud and the clay so what they'd do is wait for night time and then just put it in the sea and get it washed away so they wouldn't even include traces above ground for the Americans to see when they flew over. They were using this room for meetings for big operations for weddings even for the children like kindergarten before the baby was born inside. This is the one that wasn't discovered didn't get flooded didn't collapse and we got no one dying inside. 575 people in big towns were living for six years but no one died so that's what made it special. But you know the people who were fighting at that time they just wanted to live in peace at all they didn't care about communism and capitalism. After the tour I was dropped off at the town of Dong Ha so that I could get the bus up to Fong Ya where I'll be spending the next three nights. So I just finished up the DMZ tour um seeing the Khe San was cool that was interesting and the tunnels was interesting but the whole day was about 85-90% driving and if you did it self-driving it might have been alright but we had a whole tour group crammed up like sardines in one of those minivans for hours on end and then we only had a short time at each place to see a couple of things so whether it's worth it for the day I'm not so sure but now we're in Dong Ha at one of these bus rest stop places waiting for the bus to pick us up to get to Fong Ya so I think the bus should be here in about an hour there should be two hours to Fong Ya but literally have no idea so it could be here half an hour could be here all night I have no idea what's going on here but that's the way it goes sometimes you see the nice thing about Southeast Asia is they sell beer everywhere temples, tombs you name it so if you've got some time to kill just grab one cheers mate alright the bus is here it's only 20 minutes later than it's supposed to be so it's actually not too bad all settled in ready to go I think it's only two hours but the bus well welcome to Fong Ya my first day here I'm just giving myself a chill day I'm not actually doing anything I'm just sitting by the pool relaxing and recharging my batteries literally for my cameras and figuratively for myself I mean there's so many things that I want to do in Fong Ya but I'm kind of having to resist that temptation because the trip's been pretty full on and if I don't give myself a couple days just to relax take it easy I run the risk of burning myself out but I had my last beer with Danny because he's going to move on and finish off his bike trip and we had such a good laugh together over the last two to three weeks and I was actually just really lucky to be able to travel with him but you know everyone's doing similar routes here but on different schedules like Emmanuel's one stop ahead of me so I'll meet up with him in Hanoi but I'm sure I'll make plenty of new friends in the meantime before then but then tomorrow I've signed up for a trip to go to Paradise Cave and Dark Cave because that's what this region's famous for is exploring caves so I can't wait to do that tomorrow and it should be awesome Fong Ya is actually home to the largest cave in the world the Song Dong Cave but less than 1,000 people are allowed to trek into it per year and it costs you 3,000 dollars to do so so I'll happily settle for the two I'm seeing today First up we made a quick stop at the Fong Ya Botanic Garden to check out the waterfalls Beautiful Then we headed to Paradise Cave which was discovered in 2005 by the same local man who found the Song Dong Cave OK we're now climbing up to Paradise Cave 500 steps up I think When you go in it's this walk down and then it's this huge little cavern just opens up in front of you and it just takes your breath away So not to state the obvious but this place is huge I've never been in a cave like this There are plenty of caves but this is another level and they've lit it all up so you can just really appreciate the scale of it So this cave Paradise Cave goes on for 31 kilometres We can only go in for 1 kilometre and then after that I don't think it's lit up anymore you have to do like a special adventure tour to go further in but only like another few k It's just a thing that just keeps going and going and going and it's like it's like something from a different world like a different planet it's unreal The caves of Fong Nha National Park are roughly 350 million years old The rock formations coming down from the ceiling are called stalactites whilst the corresponding formations rising from the ground are stalagmites Basically because it's limestone as the water drips through it has sand in it and basically you know when you're a kid on the beach and you're formless and you've got like wet sand and you just form these weird shapes out of it it's basically like that but over the course of millions of years and you end up with these giant sculptures Alright I've reached the end of the line here 1 kilometre in I'm going to go on a special tour to go further down there but wow Swans Swans I hope the video can do it justice this is just incredible isn't it? Just insane I want you a bit further away from the crowd all you can hear is just dripping water and that's it it's so quiet It's very hard to find words to describe things like that other than wow it's amazing you just kind of see it for yourself and experience the scale of it See that was really fun really really fun I loved that Next up we were heading to the dark cave this one's going to be a bit more active as we'll be zip lining swimming kayaking and crawling into basically a mud bath but before we got started we were treated to an absolute feast of a lunch and then you roll it you dip it with tomato soup and dip on the chicken pork you eat together with lemon sauce it's more delicious I think this will be really good fun this will be really really good fun Done Alright we've got to swim to the cave now get on with it Get going Basically we're approaching the dark cave and I don't want to be crude but it looks like a giant vagina Take it from the expert Going to the dark cave The TRU line is 20 miles ahead of us Watch for that We have arrived at the mud Welcome to the mud spa It's one way to get into the spa You can drink this After you After you Maria Just walking along and fell in a pothole Made it out of the cave That was a lot of fun But now we're going to take a big kayak back across Bye bye Well we finished up now at the dark cave That was so much fun The mud bath was great It was a really cool experience And then there's rope swings and zip lines you can do which obviously I didn't do I just went for a swim in the water and then a guy started shouting at me for not wearing a life jacket I was like dude I can swim But today has been a really really fun day One of the best days of the trip so far I wish I could have spent more time in Fonya Because there's loads more here that I'd want to do But I've got to keep moving because everything's about to shut down for a few days for the Tet Lunar New Year's celebrations Happy New Year Sign up for this little guided bike tour That's your This is my I wasn't driving I was just like Clearly Okay Shows how easily you can arrive at a place not knowing anyone and within a couple of hours you've got a whole group of friends to spend the day with So yeah it's like ten dollars Ten dollars to buy 36 beers I'm getting a bus today up to Hajiang to do the Hajiang loop and this is the thing that everyone raves about And I'll be at different ends of the trip than what I planned but it's the right ends of the trip for what I want and how I'm feeling right now