A British explorer who joined the British team which first explored Son Doong Cave – the world’s current largest – in central Vietnam back in the early 1990s urged in an article posted on a New Zealand newswire last week against the construction of a cable car system through the cave. >> Son Doong: hard choice between mass tourism and sustainable development Andy McKenzie’s article – “Preserving Son Doong, ‘the biggest cave in the world’” – was published on www.stuff.co.nz on Monday last week. Son Doong is a part of UNESCO-recognized Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, located in Quang Binh Province. The man precluded his article by saying that he has been lucky enough to explore new caves in New Zealand, Australia, Tasmania, Peru, China and Europe, but the time he spent with the Vietnam Caves Project back in the early 1990s was the most exciting. The Son Doong grotto was stumbled upon in 1991 by Ho Khanh, a Vietnamese, but it only became well-known after a group of scientists from the British Cave Research Association, led by Howard and Deb Limbert, explored it in 2009. McKenzie took part in his second expedition with the British team to Son Doong in 2007, when they discovered more caverns, including Tang Abyss. “Tang Abyss became my life’s focus until 2010 when we finally got to return to and descend its impressively wide, sunshine-lit, 255m deep vertical entrance pitch,” he wrote in the article. McKenzie is not only held in awe by Son…
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