As a nice little middle point between Hue and Hanoi, we spent two nights in Ninh Binh, where there are these huge limestone mountains typical of northern vietnam. It is such a different landscape than anything we’ve seen so far on this trip! These jagged land masses just pop up out of the rice fields out of nowhere. You can’t build on the steep sides, and the only thing you’ll see climb them are the wild mountain goats that roam about the region (and are featured in many local dishes).
Main thing to do here is take a paddle boat ride down the riverways with a local person who paddle the oars with their feet. There were two options for waterways to go down, Tam Coc and Trang An. We chose Tam Coc. We scootered out there and parked where the tours start, paid the fee and got gestured onto one of the boats at the waters edge. Leaving the starting point was already really beautiful and it just kept getting more and more lovely. It was so serene, and surprisingly not that busy. I guess because of the coronavirus scare again… but we aren’t complaining.
It was about 1.5 hour ride down the waterway, passing rice fields and field workers, mountain goats, and steep rock formations and going through a few caves on the way. It was so majestic. Check out the videos here:
The next place we explored was Hang Mua, a cave hidden in the side of the cliffs, with creepy silence except the occasional drip of cold water from stalagtites to the damp floor.
But the real draw here is the view from the 600+ steps up! We could see this from the river. Once we made it to the top, we had such a great aerial view of the waterways we were just on.
Also on this day, we went out to the Bich Dong Pagoda, a Buddhist 3-tiered temple built into the caves of the mountain. The guy doing the job of parking attendant wanted to charge us for entrance 50,000 each!! That’s like 2€ /2$! But we knew entrance is free and we only pay for him to “watch” our scooter… so he didn’t dupe us! Ha! But he duped many, as we saw on our way out…
On another day, we went to the Bai Dinh Buddhist complex. This is a massive complex of Buddhist temples, a bell tower and a 100tonne bronze statue of Buddha at the top.
Here is a video I took from the inside of the bell tower looking out over some of the complex. Click through for more vids/pics!
Inside, along the hallways towards the top, there were hundreds of Buddha’s in these little crevices in the wall and a bunch of stone statues of monks.
Cud phuong park was the last stop on our list in Ninh Binh. It’s a national park and inside are ancient trees, a super old cave where remains of humans from 7,500 years ago were found, and a primate rescue center. We had to wear masks for this part. Only place we’ve been forced to wear masks so far. Makes sense. We don’t want the rare, endangered native vietnamese primates to catch a cold from us.
7500 year old human remains were found in this cave! You can’t see from the picture, but it goes back really far. So far that we had no light from outside and the flashlight from both our phones wasn’t enough. We could hear nothing but the creepy silence. We turned back by fear of getting lost in the many canals or being eaten by a cave monster.
Ninh Binh was so cool!! So excited to share the next two cities in Vietnam! Stay tuned.
Stories of Exploration and Travel 
I love it! The river and the mountains and the temples!!! Good job getting up all those stairs
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