We arrived in Phong Nha on a night bus after about nine hours, reaching the town late, in the dark, with no sense of the landscape that we had arrived in. We simply found our room and rested, unaware of what was waiting for us in the morning. When we opened the shutters, we were met with a landscape that took our breath away. In front of us, rising out of the earth, was the body of the dragon, physically undeniable. Great shafts of rock pushed sharply into the sky like the ar