Son Doong Cave
— — the world the river kept for itself.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest cave passage on earth, opened only by a hunter sheltering from a storm in 1990. Son Doong runs five kilometres through the limestone of Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng, with chambers tall enough to hold a forty-storey building and two collapsed dolines where jungle has grown up through the roof. The river that carved it still runs the floor. Permits cap visitors at roughly a thousand each year.
Son Doong Cave, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Son Doong lies in Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park in Quảng Bình Province, central Vietnam, near the Laotian border. The main passage runs about five kilometres long, reaches 200 metres in height, and exceeds 150 metres in width, the largest known cave passage by volume. It was located by Hồ Khanh in 1990 and surveyed in 2009 by the British Cave Research Association under Howard and Deb Limbert. The surrounding park was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2003 for its karst geology.
An underground river runs the length of the cave and is the agent that carved it, dissolving the Carboniferous-Permian limestone over an estimated two to five million years. Two collapsed dolines, named Watch Out for Dinosaurs and Garden of Edam, let daylight in and have grown a self-contained jungle on the cave floor, with trees reaching thirty metres toward the openings. The river floods the lower passages during the monsoon, which closes the cave from September through January each year.
Access to Son Doong is tightly controlled. Oxalis Adventure, based in Phong Nha, holds the sole government permit and runs a four-day, three-night expedition with a fixed roster of porters, guides, and a safety team. Group size is capped at ten, and the annual visitor total runs near one thousand. The trek covers about twenty-five kilometres in and out, including a sixty-metre rope descent into the cave mouth. The permitted season opens in February and closes before the monsoon returns.