Ngườm Ngao Cave: a hundred-million-year masterpiece - Vietnam Today

Hidden beneath the limestone mountains of Cao Bang, Ngum Ngau Cave is a 400-million-year-old geological wonder. Discovered in 1921 and opened to tourism in 1996, its relatively late discovery helped to preserve much of its pristine beauty. Today the cave features both a traditional sightseeing route and a new adventure route. Stretching 2,144 meters, the new adventure route takes visitors deeper into the beauty of Ngum Ngau Cave, attracting more and more travelers. Equipped with protective clothing, specialized footwear, and headlamps, visitors climb over rocky ledges and wade through shallow water, making for an unforgettable adventure. The route covers around 900 meters of the cave. The adventure route leads visitors deeper into its untouched interior, where they can experience the cave's natural beauty. Stepping into this cave is like entering in a different world. It's very interesting to know that nature was able to carve out these intricate shapes over a million years. And also when you enter here, you realize that the air is much cooler than outside. When I enter this place, I feel like I'm surrounded by a million years of nature's hard work. It's a wonderful place to visit, you know, and Cao Bang keeps surprising me. The new route offers a longer, more immersive journey, featuring active stalactites and stalagmites with dripping water, as well as more diverse and colorful rock formations. Beyond its spectacular rock formations, some limestone formations resemble coral, inviting visitors to discover the story of an ancient sea that once covered this region. Formed from ancient marine sediments, the limestone preserves geological evidence of Cao Bang's marine past, dating back around 400 million years. Cao Bang was an area sinking in the ocean. All the marine animals, when they died, they remained on the left in the bottom, and it became the limestone. When the water dropped, inside there also still contained calcium carbonate, and it dropped to the floor. Calcium carbonate continued to grow and stack a lot of layers. So that's why you can see it looks very, very cold. By opening a new adventure route, while keeping the cave largely untouched, Cao Bang is giving visitors the chance to experience both its natural beauty and the fascinating geological story behind it.