Upon waking after a 10 hour sleep our colds had improved and we were a lot more with it. Our hotel host was super nice and let us have a late breakfast and only charged us half the price for bicycle hire. We were actually really glad to have stayed another night as we would have missed the beauty that is The Lying Dragon Mountain (hung mua caves).
We parked up at the bottom and climbed 400 steep steps to the top of the mountain. Once there we had an amazing view of the rice paddies, pagodas, boats.. all this on a cloudy day! I imagine it’s 10x better in the sun. After copious amounts of ‘profile pic worthy’ photos we came down and cycled back.
The time had come to get on the dreaded sleeper bus but overall it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. We were one of the last to get on so it took a lot of shoving to get our backpacks in the storage and then the only free beds were up top at the front. The driver was slightly erratic but in all fairness the roads just aren’t that smooth and there was definitely a pot hole, a swerve, or a horn honk every 5 minutes. Although deep sleep was impossible, snoozing for a few minutes at a time was and somehow the 7 hours passed. As there wasn’t much room on the bed I kicked my trainers off by accident and my cookies had crumbled and spilled everywhere (now known as the cookie crisis). We arrived into Phong Nha at 4am and went straight to bed at the hostel.
