Nonsense Hour: Beyond Imagine of Humans, SCM, & More

The brochures describe Paradise Cave as "beyond imagine of humans" and "utmost beautiful in world." So when we booked a day trip to the cave, we knew precisely what to expect.

Paradise Cave was 4 hours by car, followed by a hike of a couple hundred meters to get to the mouth of the cave. During the ride and the walk up, our "guide" told us that Paradise Cave was discovered 5 years ago by Vietnamese farmers. He told us this fact at least 4 times because it appears this was the only piece of information that he had. It should be noted, however, that this "guide" had spectacular hair, which made up for his cluelessness.

The cave was truly spectacular. The brochures confused and intrigued but they did not lie. It was gigantic - we walked through the 1st kilometer, and it is more than 30 km long - and there were many interesting looking pointy things going upwards and some pointy things going downwards. The guide was unable to explain what those things were, but he had reasons to believe they were formed by water. Notably, he had really good hair. Did we mention that Alina believes that he could easily be a hair model?

The trip to Paradise Cave ended at around 4 and we stopped in Dong Hoi, where we waited for the night train to Hanoi. We didn't expect much from Dong Hoi but our 6 hour layover turned out to be pretty awesome.
It took us over an hour to walk to downtown Dong Hoi and the heat was brutal (please see blog post entry 8, section 5, paragraph 6 ("Cheap is better than Free")). The tour guide only mentioned 3 historical sights and we covered those in 15 minutes and got worried about how to kill the rest of those 5 hours. It was at this point that things started looking up.

We found a sidewalk cafe and ordered coffee with milk. Instead of the traditional delicious Vietnamese coffee with sweetened condensed milk (SCM) already mixed in, they brought us black coffee and an entire can of SCM. We stayed for a while, sipping our coffee and eating SCM by the spoonfool. A long while. Alina actually finished a book and then we held a book club meeting (see book club tab in menu above).

Our sugar high motivated us to walk another hour to the beach which turned out to be beautiful! We watched a beautiful sunset on the beach. Well, we were on the beach, and the sun set, but not above the water. Alina was extremely surprised that this was even possible.

We had dinner at an outdoor seafood restaurant next to the beach and started walking back to the station when we heard spectacular techno music. We were magnetically attracted to the source of the music. We partied for 30 minutes and made it back to the train station in time.

The night train to Hanoi was surprisingly comfortable and timely. Stay tuned for updates about our adventures in the North.

Alina and Jeremy,
Putting the Sense in Nonsense

PS: we have updated our travel map, and it is now very super cool. Check it out in the side-bar on the right hand side!