Five Caves of Ban On

Five caves lie in the hills of Bản Ôn, in what is now Cờ Đỏ ward. The ward belongs to the Mộc Châu area, but the caves are not like its usual sights, and they call for a different frame of mind.

The name Ngũ động means five caves. Local people link the five caves with the five elements: metal, wood, water, fire and earth. Naming by the five elements is not new, but here it is a way of suggesting how varied and complete the system of caves is. Four main caves sit on one hill, and one stands alone on the hill beside it.

The history of Ngũ động Bản Ôn has a page of its own, one that few sights in Vietnam share. The local government of Mộc Châu records that the caves were found during the Vietnam War. Soldiers then managed them and used them for military purposes. In 2006 the army stopped managing them, and local people began to open them to visitors. So a visitor here meets two layers at once, a limestone landscape and a memory of the wartime past, woven together.

In 2022 the Prime Minister signed Decision 296. It placed the area in the plan for the Mộc Châu National Tourist Area, at a scale of 327.6 hectares. The plan calls for a cultural and spiritual tourism area and a resort area tied to the sights. The area also holds land protected as a provincial heritage site, under a 2008 decision of the Sơn La provincial government.

Ngũ động Bản Ôn is still a fairly wild place to visit. The Nhân Dân newspaper once wrote that its ground is more rugged than Hang Dơi in the town, and that it takes lasting stamina to go through the whole system of caves.

Inside the caves, a visitor sees natural limestone stalactites, shaped over thousands of years. The Nhân Dân newspaper described shapes in Ngũ động Bản Ôn that recall terraced fields, a pine tree, pillars and curtains of stalactite. Other shapes suggest a gecko, a camel, a toad, a snail, a guardian lion or a fairy peach. Those names are one journalist's way of seeing and imagining, very lively, and useful for giving visitors a picture of the stone. They are not scientific names, and no managing body has yet ranked them or put up signs for them. Each visitor is left to look and to see the shapes in their own way, and that is the real experience of a cave.

Ngũ động Bản Ôn is meant for those who like discovery: a space not yet fully built up, with stalactites to look at and to imagine over. It is not a mass-market sight at all. Of all the places in Mộc Châu, it is one where a person comes out feeling they have really been somewhere, and not just stood for a photo.