Dense greenery of Tràng An

You’ve seen limestone mountains, now let’s add some caves, ancient temples and more variants of deep dense green that you can shake a chopstick at.

This is Route 1, a boat tour of the Tràng An scenic landscape complex – another Instagram smash hit. Emma led the research fully on this one – she gets a gold star. Once again, we started at the crack of dawn. Once again, we were rewarded.

This was pretty much the only other boat we saw

The tour is completed on a flat-bottomed rowing boat powered by a lady who, given I didn’t see an engine or Michael Phelps strapped to the front, presumably trained with Sir Steven Redgrave. Even going upstream, she really motored 5 of us along. Not bad considering our tour was 3hrs long and I imagine she does it multiple times a day.

Our tour navigated its way through 9 caves. They may look inviting, but some tunnels are 250m+ and feature incredibly low unlit rocky roofs. It’s a rather adventurous game of Limbo. If you lean back, you obstruct the oars of Sir Steven’s former training partner. If you lean to the side, you risk falling out of the boat. If you lean forwards, you may not see the dark rock appear out of the darkness and whack you on the top of the head. Not such an ideal place for probably the tallest couple currently in Vietnam…

This is the 1000yr old Knong Temple. Legend says it was built by the local people to honour a general for defending Le Dynasty from an invading force.