A Vietnamese local and a Briton were awarded a Medal of Labor for discovering caves in the Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park.
Vietnam’s State President Truong Tan Sang awarded the prestigious medal to Briton Howard Limbert and Vietnamese Ho Khanh for helping to uncover a number of caves including the world-famous Son Doon Cave. Limbert was honoured for “exploring, researching and surveying the cave system in Phong Nha-Ke Bang” while Khanh was recognized for “discovering the caves and taking explorers to them.”
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Limbert is the leader of the British exploration team that has worked on the national park since 1990. His group has undergone hundreds of explorations and researches and even hundreds of thousands of photographs of the caves in Phong Nha-Ke Bang, attracting the interest of several big movie companies like BBC, NHK and National Geographic, and news agencies such as AP, AFP and Kyodo.
Khanh on the other hand, was the first man to discover Son Doong Cave in 1991. He is from Bo Trach District in Quang Binh Province. He met Limbert in 2009 when he guided the Briton and his team to find the famed cave.
Son Doong Cave is a solutional cave, which means that it was formed in the soluble rock limestone and is the most common type of cave. It is five times bigger than Phong Nha Cave which used to be the largest in the country. It is even large than the Deer Cave in Malaysia, once named the world’s biggest cave. The biggest chamber of Son Doong is over five kilometres long, 200 metres high and 150 metres wide.
Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park is an UNESCO World Heritage Site located in the territories of Bo Trach and Minh Hoa Districts, about 500 kilometres South of Hanoi.