Lonely Planet’s description of Ninh Binh was so depressing that we almost decided to skip it. Luckily we heard a lot praise about the place from other travellers and changed our mind.

Our bus arrived on Tam Coc town at 4.30 AM, and it was still completely dark. Our homestay was not in the town itself, but six kilometres away. We decided to walk there as soon as there was some light. Our route lied accross the rice paddies, muddy trails and a little village. On the map it looked like there was no way to our homestay, which was showed in the middle of nowhere, and we almost lost our hope. But in the end, we found the place, it indeed was behind the hill in the middle of the fields. 

We had breakfast at our homestay and went biking to look for a place called Mua cave that was nearby. We actually didn’t find the cave but we found stairs heading up to a hill to a lookout where you could see almost the whole area.

In the afternoon we just rode around the village and fields looking for and finding cool landscapes. 

On the second day we woke up earlyish and went see the area’s biggest sight – Trang An grottoes. It is a really popular destination among locals, but there were only few westeners. However, that might change soon, since the new King Kong movie was filmed there and that might bring more tourists. 

There we took a little boat with one British girl. Our rower was a small Vietnamese lady with strong arms and legs which she used rowing us for three hours around through grottoes and to different temples. The views were amazing and luckily there were not as many people as we feared. Most of the time it felt that we were just by ourselfs cruising along the river.