Son Doong Cave on Smithsonian’s list of new places to see in 21st century

Thursday, 27/08/2015 - 03:48 AM (GMT+7)

A shaft of sunlight hits a section of the cave, called Watch Out for Dinosaurs, daily around noon. (Ryan Deboodt)

NDO - The world’s largest known cave, Son Doong in Quang Binh province, has been named one of the great new places to see in the 21st century by the US Smithsonian Institution magazine.

Located in UNESCO heritage site Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, the cavern has ceilings high enough to accommodate the Washington Monument, writes Jamie Malanowski. He adds that the cave’s widest expanses could fit a pair of Boeing 747s side by side and that the cave is more than five miles (8 kilometres) long - about five times longer than its nearest competitor for the world’s longest, Deer Cave in Malaysia. Malanowski writes that inside the cave, “a shimmering blue river runs through” and the most spectacular sight is a jungle that “flourishes under shafts of sunlight in stretches where the ceiling fell in long ago.” The entrance to the cave was discovered by a local man named Ho Khanh in 1991 but was soon lost; it was not until 2009 that he found it again after being recruited by a team of British cavers. Other sights on the list include the CERN Laboratory in Switzerland, the Cayman Trench in the Caribbean Sea, the Mendenhall Ice Caves in Alaska and Cuba’s capital city Havana.