Caves in Phong Nha

Paradise Cave (Thien Duong)

7,469 reviews

Paradise Cave, Thien Duong in Vietnamese, is the cave to pick if you only walk into one, and the easiest spectacular thing in Phong Nha-Ke Bang: a ticketed site with a wooden boardwalk, no guide, no permit and no booking. You buy a 250,000 VND ticket, make your way up from the car park, descend a steep staircase through a surprisingly modest mouth, and then the floor drops away into a chamber so large that the lit path ahead looks like a model railway. The boardwalk runs about a kilometre into the cave, with handrails the whole way, and anyone who can manage stairs can do it.

Phong Nha Cave

2,555 reviews

Phong Nha Cave is the cave the town is named after and the only major one you enter by boat, straight from the middle of town. There is no trek and no transfer: you walk to the boat station on the riverfront, buy a ticket, and board a wooden boat on the Son river for a run of about half an hour downstream to the cave mouth. There the engine is cut and the crew row you into the dark along an underground river, under a ceiling that keeps rising the further in you go. If you want a genuine cave with no fitness requirement at all, this is it.

Son Doong Cave

Son Doong is the largest cave on earth by volume, and the first thing to settle is whether you can actually go. Entry is only possible on a multi-day expedition with Oxalis Adventure, the sole licensed operator, at roughly 79,500,000 VND per person. About a thousand permits are issued a year, the season runs January to August, and departures have been selling out years in advance. If you are planning a trip for this season or next, the honest answer for most people is no, and the later part of this page covers what to book instead. If you are willing to plan years ahead and pay for one of the great expeditions in world travel, read on.

Hang En Cave

Hang En is the third-largest cave on earth and the realistic version of the Son Doong plan: two days and one night with Oxalis Adventure for about 8,800,000 VND, sleeping on a sand beach inside the cave, with availability in the season you are actually travelling rather than years from now. If you arrived at this page after discovering the Son Doong price and waiting list, you are in the right place. Hang En sits on the same river system, is run by the same operator, and delivers the image most people are chasing, a small tent glowing on sand beneath a vast stone roof, for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the wait.

Hang Pygmy

Hang Pygmy is the fourth-largest cave in the world by volume, and it lives in a strange shadow: almost nobody outside the caving world has heard of it, while the cave above it in the rankings carries a waiting list measured in years. Sleeping inside it costs 7,900,000 VND on a two-day trip with Jungle Boss, the licensed operator, for anyone aged 15 or over, and you can usually book it for the season you are already planning. If what you want is to stand in an underground space too large for your light to cross, and then sleep in it, this is the most direct route in Phong Nha.

Kong Collapse

Kong Collapse is the deepest sinkhole in Vietnam, around 450 metres from rim to floor, and descending into it is the hardest trip sold in Phong Nha: a five-day, four-night expedition with Jungle Boss at 35,000,000 VND, minimum age 16, with a medical check required before your booking is confirmed. This page is for two kinds of reader, the one deciding whether to commit to the descent, and the one who wants to see the sinkhole without it, which is possible for roughly a third of the price on a different trip.

Hang Thang, the Victory Cave

Hang Thang, sold in English as Victory Cave, is the newest cave open to visitors in Phong Nha by a margin of years: its discovery was announced on 25 June 2026 and tours started within weeks. It runs roughly 3,000 metres with chambers over 100 metres across, and its signature is a floor scattered with thousands of cave pearls, a formation most caves lose the moment people start walking through them. The way in is a two-day expedition with Jungle Boss at 7,650,000 VND, with a minimum age of just 9, which makes it one of the very few expedition caves a family can do together.

Hung Thoong Cave System

Hung Thoong is a system of four connected caves, and it is the wettest trip sold in Phong Nha: the centrepiece is a swim of roughly one kilometre through the flooded passage of Tron cave, and water shapes almost every hour of the three-day itinerary. That makes the decision simple in both directions. If you are a confident swimmer who wants caves measured in swim time rather than boardwalk length, this is the best trip in the park for you. If you are a nervous swimmer, be honest with yourself and book something else, because there is no dry version of this route and a kilometre of water in the dark is a bad place to discover your limits. It runs as a three-day, two-night expedition with Jungle Boss at 12,000,000 VND, minimum age 16.

Tiger Cave

Tiger Cave is the opening act of a three-cave route through Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, and the trip built around it, the three-day Tiger Cave Series Adventure, is the one to book if you want a genuine caving expedition without the price tag or the vertical rope work of Kong Collapse. Tiger itself runs about 1.6 kilometres. The route continues through Hang Over, the most decorated cave of the three at around 3.2 kilometres, and finishes in Hang Pygmy, ranked among the largest caves in the world by volume. Put the three together and you cover nearly seven kilometres of underground passage over the trip, which is more cave than most people see in a lifetime of holidays.

Hang Tien Cave

Hang Tien is the largest dry cave in the Tu Lan system, and the most useful thing to know about it is where it is not: it is not in the cluster of caves around Phong Nha town. It sits near Tan Hoa, about 70 km to the north-west, in a different valley system with a different licence holder. Oxalis Adventure runs the Tu Lan caves, including this one, while the operators you meet in Phong Nha town work the caves closer to the park core. Treat Hang Tien as its own trip with its own logistics, not as an add-on to a Phong Nha day; the distance alone makes the add-on version a bad idea.

Dark Cave

Dark Cave, Hang Toi, is the closest thing Phong Nha has to an adventure park, and it is the place to choose when you want to get wet, muddy and slightly scared without booking an expedition. It is a ticketed attraction rather than a guided tour: you turn up, pay, get a helmet, headlamp and life jacket, and join the circuit. The full package is 450,000 VND per adult, and limited packages from about 150,000 VND cover the river activities only. No booking, no minimum group, no waiting list.

Tra Ang Cave

Tra Ang is a river cave you enter by swimming: over 600 metres of dark, still water running into the hillside, followed with a headlamp, a life jacket and a fixed rope. It is short, wild and completely unlit, which puts it in a different category from the boardwalk caves, and for many visitors it ends up the most vivid memory of a Phong Nha trip precisely because you are in the water and in the dark rather than watching from a walkway. The catch, and the reason to read on before planning around it, is how you actually get in.