フエの2日間のPhong Nha-Ke Bang Caveアドベンチャー

As amazing as it was to visit the caves, the tour organization itself was very dodgy. We started out from Hue by an incredibly cramped bus for the 4 hour drive to Phong Nha. Our tour representative (I can't call her our "guide" because she did NO guiding) on the first day was very weak with information. The overnight stay was just OK. On the second day we had a different guide that was markedly better. Overall the tour just seemed to be cobbled together with various people joining and leaving the group. No cohesion.

Two of the best caves in Vietnam!! We had heard about this Phong Nha Cave many times before but never imagined its breathtaking scale. Each cave gives us different feelings, Thien Duong cave gives us a surprise about stalactites, we are impressed by the landscape around Dark cave. We also have a chance doing kayaking and swiming there. The tour guide is very cute, he speaks very good English

our overall experience during the tour was very unpleasant. We have never experienced a tour guide which was as rude as Sang. There were many troubles that we had with Sang which we will now describe. He didn’t want to offer us an alternative program when the Tiang Son Cave was closed. As it was only 3pm, we wanted to have some alternative program on that day because we had nothing else to do that day and we didn’t want to rush too much on the next day. However, Sang was unwilling to offer us any alternative to the cave. Finally, we agreed with potentially enjoying free kayaking once we are at the hotel because Sang told us that our farm stay offers free kayaking as it is located next to a river. However, when we arrived at the hotel, we found out that it is not at a river and doesn’t offer kayaking. Our tour guide pressured the farm stay to show him our room and looked for us in the private property of the farm stay. This is very creepy and made us feel very unsafe with him to be honest. The next day, he didn’t even say good morning when he picked us up from the hotel. He didn’t talk to us the entire day and we always had to ask him where we are going next because he would tell us. He didn’t give us any information about the caves (he even told us to "consult Google" if we wanted more information) and told us we should have done kayaking yesterday because now we don’t have time anymore and he will not offer us kayaking. In the end, we were lucky that the dark cave offered kayaking but that was coincidence and not Sang's achievement (he didn’t know that kayaking was possible there. Instead, our hosts at the farm stay told us about it). Sang rushed us at every destination and stopped our kayaking early (he screamed over the entire river that we have to stop kayaking NOW). When we went to the toilet for 1 min, he was angry that “he looked for us everywhere” even though he told us that we could go to the bathroom. During lunch he asked if we are ready before we even got all of our food. We have never experienced something as rude before and we are very disappointed by this experience. Furthermore, he didn’t know anything about the caves and the national park and even gave us wrong information about the caves (e.g. he told us that the stalactites are made of volcano stone even though we later found out that they are out of lime stone). In the end, he didn’t even drop us off at the hotel because apparently the street is to small for the car (it’s a 2 way road). He didn’t say goodbye but just left us on the street. We have never in our life had such a bad experience with a tour guide and we would like to have some kind of reimbursement for that. 1) Booking an expensive tour with a tour guide is not worth the money if the tour guide has no knowledge to share. 2) Such a rude behaviour is not how participants of a booked tour should be treated. The tour guide also secretly took pictures of us. And the tour provider was very unresponsive, i.e. he never answered calls or texts

The overall experience was amazing. We went to four different caves in the Phong Nha National park, which we can highly recommend, had (mostly) very good meals and an amazing Homestay accomodation for the overnight stay. We were the first and in the beginning the only people in the paradise cave (loved it). We did the Tour in February, when it was quite cold and cloudy, which makes the dark cave experience not that great since it’s super cold. So it would be better to do it when its warmer. Also we wouldn’t recommend the lunch you get there on the second day. In comparison to our first lunch it was really nothing special. The only thing that we would complain about is, that in the beginning the Guide didn‘t know what tour we booked and asked in which Hotel we‘re staying. Fortunately the confusion got cleared up pretty quickly and everything went smothly from this point on.