Patrol and headed to Quang Binh Province for a site visit with one of the Clear Path beneficiaries and to have a meeting with a partner NGO. Quang Binh Province neighbors Quang Tri Province to the North. During wartime, it was the southern most province in north Viet Nam. American forces employed intense aerial bombing on the province in an attempt to thwart the military supply chain known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. For fifteen years, from 1960 to 1975 bombs were dropped on this province nearly every day. My friend, Lanh, who is an interpretor for Mines Advisory Group, grew up in Quang Binh Province. She remembers the daily bombings and how she used to have to go underground when the alert signal was sounded. Lanh still lives in the province and she invited us to join her for a day trip after our work on Saturday.
We went to the Phong Nha caves in Ke Bang National Park. What an experience. This is the first time that I have travelled further north than Le Thuy in Quang Binh. The Caves are included as a World Heritage site. The beginning of the experience at the park was quite familiar. You buy tickets and wander around vendors stalls before climbing aboard a boat to head down the river towards the caves. The ride is about half an hour and the landscape is simply breathtaking. The river is banked by abrupt limestone cliffs cloaked in triple canopy forest and it meanders toward the cave entrance a few clicks from the boat launch.
The mouth of the cave is enormous. The boat pilot smartly guides us through the twists and turns once we are inside. The ceiling is dripping with limestone, making taffy-like streams that drop into the water. It is so cool. The Vietnamese have rigged lights behind some of the more dramatic cave effects and it gives it an almost Disney World like feeling. Hard to imagine that it is real...After the boat tour we dock and head out on foot to the 'dry cave'.
The gals at the foot of the climb claim it is 580 steps to the top but it might as well be Mount Everest with the intense heat and incline of the steps. Terri (my mother in-law) and I feel that we are pretty good specimens of health yet this challenge set before us is a bit humbling to say the least. We climb, take a break, climb, take a break and climb, climb, climb, take a break and finally we are there to a cave entrance which is mercifully cool and dark The trails
carve deep into the mountain, circling down as you move forward. On the climb out of the cave it is clear that we are almost to the entrance because the heat begins to wrap around us. Luckily going down is a bit easier than going up...at least it is easier on the heart.The view of the land below is beautiful with the various shades of green of the rice paddies, corn fields and mountain forests. As I scan the landscape I notice the circular pock marks that are most definitely bomb craters. I ask Lanh and she says that Ho Chi Minh Trail was very close by and that soldiers would use the cave as a hiding and meeting place. She said that the entrance to the cave was damaged a bit but the bombing never managed to close it off completely.
Quang Binh Province remains one of the most heavily bomb-impacted provinces in Vietnam. Thirty years after the war, accidents still occur on a near daily basis.
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