Vietnam is home to the world's largest cave. Hang Son Doong is so unique that it has its own wildlife and ecosystem. Just one of its many chambers is 660 feet high and 490 feet wide. If you still can't comprehend that, imagine a cave so immense that it has its own microclimate with jungles, a river, and even beaches that you have to go cave exploring through miles of darkness before skylights in the ceilings shine light on the enclosed, hidden beauty around you.
Amazingly, a cave so huge was not even discovered until 1991 and very few expeditions have been launched to try to map it. Photographer Ryan Deboodt, however, became enchanted by Hang Son Doong and decided to film it from a perspective no one has seen before - from the air using a camera mounted on a drone.
On Deboodt's third expedition into the cave, he shot over 10 hours of footage of the cave, which he edited down to an online video of a little over six minutes. Even with the beauty of Deboodt's images, they only manage to convey a small portion of the true extent of Hang Son Doong's majesty.
The unique vegetation and landscape inside the cave give it a Land of the Lost or Jules Verne-esque Journey to the Center of the Earth feel. The ancient, lost world ambience of the area was not lost on cave explorers who have given certain areas of Hang Son Doong names like "Garden of Edam" and "Watch Out for Dinosaurs."
Even the stalagmites in the cave have grown, untouched and unseen for thousands of years, to such gigantic proportions. Many of them are more than 230 feet tall - big enough to hide the Empire State Building inside!
To add to the sense of wonder the place gives, the "skylights" created by limestone cave-ins hundreds of years ago, allow you to look up at the stars at night - truly making a mere human feel small in the midst of such ancient and towering beauty inside the world's largest cave.
"It's incredibly difficult to put into words how amazing Hang Son Doong really is," Deboodt wrote on his blog. "It is truly otherworldly and something that probably can't be experienced anywhere else in the world."
Hang Son Doong from Ryan Deboodt on Vimeo.
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