Maria's travelling buddy and best friend Carol has been to Hua Hin before. When she visited, she went to see Phraya Nakhon cave. It's about an hour outside the city, housed in their national park. We set off today to see it. We hired a taxi driver who took us directly to the park. As we left the car he was laughing about how tough the walk is and told us he'd done it once before but would never do it again! Lovely!
We took a long tail boat to the other side of the beach and began our adventure there. The climb was quite steep at 460m, we slowly tackled the steps, trying not to look ahead at the incline! It took about forty minutes to reach the entrance to the cave, then we began the descent to reach the entrance.
I can't explain what awaited us! You climb through this narrow passage and emerge in the centre of a gigantic open top cave. Mia walked in first and by the time I caught up to her she was overcome by tears. Neither of us could speak. It is by far the most amazing thing we've seen since leaving for our travels. The light shines into the cave at an angle and hits this beautifully ornate Buddhist shrine which sits in the centre of the huge space. The cave stretched high into the sky, decorated with vegetation and tangled in vines.
We all walked in separate directions and the four of us wandered around the space in awe.
We spent about an hour there and just as we left, a huge tour of Japanese school kids entered the cave, obnoxious and loud, like most teenagers. We were grateful we had the cave to ourselves for that brief time and go to experience it as it should be.
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