The Beholder's Eye 2

Hang Mua

Lisa Pete and I visited this beautiful cave and cliff area, I cycled and they rode their rented motorbike.

It's a beautiful place, a spot where the King's daughters would do celebratory dances in the caves when their dad returned from successful military campaigns. Hang Mua means "dancing cave."

The grounds at the bottom are all manicured and fengshuied.

Pete and Lisa, with Lisa trying to shrug off some sort of bug. Could've been one of those hangover viruses. I'm glad I drank slowly and stuck to beer the night before. Lisa wasn't well actually, and struggled as we climbed, she also gets asthma. They both left after we visited the caves.

Spare horses

Journeying King

The tiger cave

Up we went. Along with the six million other tourists.

The views got better and better as we climbed.

Adjoining lower peak

Yeah it was pretty high, up 500 steps. And pretty spectacular.

The crow has landed

Looking back

Many young tourists love to hire traditional local clobber and take selfies in various instappropriate spots. There was a large costume hire shop down below.

Even the oldies get into it, but in their own clothes.

Ponds in front of the larger cave entrance

The cave was actually like a large tunnel through the karst, carved by an ancient river over countless milennia.

Out the other side

Vẫn Long Wetlands Nature Reserve

Lisa really needed to rest, and I rode out alone, to an absolutely amazingly beautiful wetlands reserve.

I stopped for phố on the way. These guys served it up in a steel pot, so hot in fact that the broth was boiling away and disappearing before my very eyes, and I had to shove the phở (flat rice noodles) in quicksmart, to stop it bubbling away to nothing.

No need to tell you how delicious it was.

And, of course, not only did I singe my tongue, but I also burnt the inside of my arm on the pot, which was large, and remained so radiatingly hot that the soup inside was still dangerously hot, right to the last mouthful.

Other diners (all Vietnamese) were cooking their small pieces of goat in there, which is a local delicacy.

Gorgeous views on the way. As usual.

The Van Long Wetlands Reserve is one of those ecological good news stories that are painfully rare these days.

The reserve was set up after a German primatologist, Tilo Nadler, visited the area to study the rare Delacour langur, a critically endangered monkey, which is endemic to this area.

When Tilo first visited in 1993 it was estimated there were only about 50 individuals left. A combination of poaching and loss of habitat was driving the plummeting population numbers, and Tilo realised straight away that unless action was taken the species would soon become fully extinct.

So he negotiated with local communities and the Vietnamese government to set up the reserve, and since it was established in 2001 the population of the langurs is estimated to have quadrupled.

Not bad huh.

There's about 200 there now, out of a global population of between 250 - 275 individuals. The others live in areas nearby.

And who said that one person can't make a difference?

Of course the wetlands are also a major breeding and hangout zone for hundreds of bird species, as well as for mammals like leopards, Tibetan bears, chamois, and macaques. As such it has been globally recognised as a Ramsar convention wetlands site, meaning it's globally significant ecologically.

It's the largest protected wetlands area in the whole of the Red River delta, which covers a huge area in the north of Vietnam.

And all that's before I even get into how incredibly beautiful the place is to visit on a little homemade bamboo boat.

A flock of storks. I didn't see any carrying babies, maybe it's not the season.

Sheer magnificence

My cute old boat rower and I were absolutely enthralled to watch a whole pile of the rare langurs as they slowly travelled across the cliff faces, and swung around in the trees. It was a truly a mind blowingly special and memorable experience for me, to see my fellow prime mates doing their own thing in their own hood.

I couldn't stop smiling and feeling so absolutely privileged to watch these families.

The place was so stunning

We paddled into an underwater cave.

The waterways were really narrow in spots, my beautiful toothless non-English speaking boatman had to struggle paddling through the floating plant matter at times.

Lone goat

Some trees were really flocked up

The views, as we finally made our way through more open waterways, were completely drop dead gorgeous.

And speaking of death, if I drop dead now, I've seen all I ever need to see.

From now on, everything in my life is a bonus.

What I saw today was so overwhelmingly moving and incredible that I feel like my life is now complete.

Experiences and places like these put my whole cosmic pinprick of a life fully into perspective.

Such a hugely and significant existential realisation has totally left me speechless.

What can I possibly do after all that?

Well, then I was forced to cycle the 25km back home right into this magnificent sunset, an unshakeable smile stretching from ear to ear, with my eyes sparkling and my teeth gleaming in the brilliant light.

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Go to Part 3