Lower Tuy Loan Gorge - 1st Trip (below)
Return to Tuy Loan Gorge - 3rd Descent (click here to read)
When I first moved to Vietnam, one of the first places I went was an amusement park on top of a nearby mountain. The amusement park was fine, and it was fun to go to because you had to take a cable car to get up to it. And while the park is fun, I was always drawn to what appears just beneath it as you leave the station- a 30' falls cutting into the bedrock, with a dark, foreboding narrows hidden in the jungle above it. Interested, I looked at it on Google Earth for hours, and wondered just what lay in the crack in the earth upstream, and told myself one day I would find out.
Fast forward to January of 2014, when I received an email from a friendly guy from the canyoning community who was living in Laos for a spell helping with a ropes course for a tourist resort, telling me he and his girlfriend would be in my neighborhood soon and was wondering if there was any canyons worth checking out. Eventually, over many emails, plans came together and in time (May of that year) they appeared in Da Nang and we set out to get it done!
Thanks to my scouting, I was able to find a route into our canyon via some logging roads. So, we parked at the amusement park base, with free, covered, safe parking and started hiking. A quick 50 minute hike of about 2 kilometers got us to a road about 30 meters above the river. We dropped down and thrashed through the bush, fighting with banana trees and bamboo and something kinda like bamboo until we hit the water.
UPDATE: On a later return trip we found a new much easier entrance about 100 meters upstream from our original, terrible entrance through the bamboo and bananas. Made it a whole lot more worthwhile!
Thanks to my scouting, I was able to find a route into our canyon via some logging roads. So, we parked at the amusement park base, with free, covered, safe parking and started hiking. A quick 50 minute hike of about 2 kilometers got us to a road about 30 meters above the river. We dropped down and thrashed through the bush, fighting with banana trees and bamboo and something kinda like bamboo until we hit the water.
UPDATE: On a later return trip we found a new much easier entrance about 100 meters upstream from our original, terrible entrance through the bamboo and bananas. Made it a whole lot more worthwhile!
The canyon turned out to be a real gem. We weren't sure of rappels or not, so we brought a 60 m rope, about 100' of webbing, and the basic rack of gear in case we needed to do something. In the end, we were able to downclimb everything. There were numerous pools, and numerous places to jump in. A few small waterfalls to play in, some slides to play on, and lots of fun to be had. I brought a cheap innertube and my kayaking pfd and was happier than a pig in the mud.
The canyon started flat, but soon we got to the first bedrock section, where there was a nice section of pools between drops. We stopped and swam a bit. The canyon flattened back out a bit before dropping into another bedrock section with some more large pools. This one had a bit more gradient to it, including some small falls and cascades we downclimbed just fine. The crux (and also highlight) of the canyon was a beautiful chamber that was guarded by a small cascade above and below, that was separated (also by a cascade) into two huge, deep pools between vertical rock walls, with jungle towering overhead. Below here there was some more small cascades, and then a bypass and jump around the aforementioned waterfall, and we were out!! I'll let the pics do the rest of the talking.
All photos copyright Kit Davidson unless otherwise noted.