Alastair Evans
Selected UK venues from 26 May; US to be announced
Advertisement
“EVERYONE on a bicycle wants to be on a motorbike. Everyone on a motorbike wants to be in a car. And everyone in a car wants to be in a helicopter,” says entrepreneur David English, a wry smile creeping across his face. “So off we go to the future.”
Ten years ago, Phong Nha in Quang Binh province was one of the poorest regions in Vietnam. English arrived during flooding in 2010 and remembers the air of despondency. People fished the rivers and grew a little rice. Hunger was commonplace.
But the arrival of a British caving expedition the previous April had signalled a big change. The team had come to explore a remote cave system, whose entrance had been found by a local man named Ho Khanh in 1990, but that had otherwise been ignored.
Following a 5-kilometre-long fault through limestone, the cavers discovered chambers that are each big enough to hold a skyscraper. In places, the ceilings are 200 metres high. Where the roof has fallen in, sunken forests sport rare tree ferns and other plants.
With its jungles, rivers and waterfalls, is the largest dry cave (dry because it isn’t underwater) in the world. “It doesn’t feel like you’re on planet Earth any more,” says Meredith Harvey, a visitor to the cave.
Now, the local government wants to run a cable car through the site, opening it up to 1000 tourists an hour. Conversations with UNESCO (the cave is in Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003) have won a reprieve until 2030, but no one believes the site will remain untouched forever.
In A Crack in the Mountain, director Alastair Evans tells a story we have heard many times before. It is a “tragedy of the commons”, a term coined in 1968 by biologist Garrett Hardin for situations in which people use a shared resource for their own self-interest, leading to its eventual depletion. Will this happen here?
Certainly. It is hard to imagine a rapidly growing economy writing off its most potentially lucrative wonder so a few wealthy tourists can enjoy its pristine charms.
It isn’t unreasonable to want an adventure, or to make the most of your birthplace. Nor is it, after a lifetime of riding to work on a motorbike, to want your children to afford a car. It is what makes the tragedy of the commons a tragedy.
Of course, you can still watch the documentary for its beauty, and some credit for this goes to Oxalis Adventure, an expeditions and production company founded by Phong Nha-born entrepreneur Nguyen Chau, which has put a lot of money back into the local economy – and made it possible to film the documentary at all.
The production values of the documentary are extraordinarily high and the cave expeditions appear very well managed. One might wish that Nguyen could simply be left alone to tailor the region’s development according to the needs of local people.
But then, that is to forget the ravages of covid-19, which closed down 90 per cent of Phong Nha’s small businesses, not to mention recent floods that brought what little activity remained to a standstill.
This is a film about a wicked problem, sure to despoil a wonderful location, if not today then tomorrow or the day after that. By then, if a way to solve this impossible equation is to be found, it will surely have been inspired by films as intelligent and passionate as this one.
Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on Instagram at @simon_ings
Simon also recommends…
Robert Macfarlane (Penguin)
An excellent 2019 account of subterranean Earth leads readers from Greenland’s ice-blue glaciers to rock art in remote Arctic sea caves.
Kevin Connor
On DVD and Blu-ray
Doug McClure and Susan Penhaligon go exploring in this fine piece of hokum.
