Arriving at Thuy Son (Marble Mountain’s Vietnamese name) can be a bit underwhelming to be honest. She is smallish looking but still impressive.
The thing is, you have to run the gauntlet of merchants trying to sell you their wares first. The merchants we were aware of thanks to a tip from a friendly local the night before. Thanks Tam!
Then you have to fight your way through the never-ending line of tour buses. That and their hordes of passengers. They all disembarking in the same spot. This one was a bit of a surprise at 8 AM as we’d read that the tour buses don’t start arriving until the 9 AM mark. Lesson learnt. To be fair, there weren’t as many tourists at that stage as there was by 10 AM. That was when it got real busy.
And before you run off, give it a minute, she gets better…
This way to the elevator
By 8 AM it was already sweltering too and we decided to take the elevator.
Yup, your eyes are not deceiving you. To allow everybody access to of the mountain, they installed two elevators. The stairs from the ground level are tall and super slippery, a tricky combo, even for the seriously fit and able.
The elevator only eliminates the first section of steps, so don’t too excited lol. You have another two thousand or so steps to look forward to from that point on.
It’s a good bum work out or in my case a good excuse to ditch the morning workout for a sleep in lol. The upside is that you don’t have to be super fit. If you haven’t done a day’s exercise in your life, you might be sore the next day but anything over that and you’ll be fine.
Marble Mountain entry fee
There is a cost to using the lift and accessing the mountain. If you choose to use the lift it will cost you VND 15,000 (approx. USD 0.66) one way, per person. Access to Marble Mountain will cost you VND 40,000 (approx. USD 1.75) per person. For the two of us it came to a total of VND 115,000.
The total confused us a bit because there was an extra VND 15,000 that we weren’t sure what it was for. We tried asking about it but the ladies at the register didn’t speak of word of English. Either we were getting duped or the price had gone up since the day before lol. In the end we let it slide as it was a small amount. It was a little annoying not knowing what it was for is all.
Also, there is another cave mouth at the entrance of Marble Mountain. When we tried to go up to it, we couldn’t go in as it’s not included in the ticket we had and we had to pay another entry fee. We opted not to in the end. If you have been and want to give some insight, please drop us a comment. Thank you.
Buying tickets
The ticket office sits to the right of the elevators and down the hill. Don’t go too far down the hill as you’ll have to run another merchant gauntlet lol.
Our first impression was good. The gardens surrounding the foot of the mountain were beautiful. Lots of ponds and lotus blossoms everywhere and plenty of shaded seating. It has a pleasant and welcoming feel to it. It was surprisingly clean too which was a nice change from the norm. But we were not there to see the entrance. We had a whole mountain to go and explore, so, we set off to do that.