Cao Bang

One more stop in the cold mountains for us, and that is the town and province of Cao Bang.

The journey here was an adventure in itself. We took the “local bus,” which is just a 20 seat minivan that is also loaded with cargo. No live animals were with us. It’s apparently a possibility. Just lots of sacks of rice, a few other tourists, and a rotating cast of locals that would get picked up and dropped off from village to village. The bus was small, quick driving, and gave us massive motion sickness. We almost crashed rounding on corner too, taking a blind corner too wide, and almost running into a cargo truck.

Once in Cao Bang, things got a lot more chill. We went for dinner with our friend Sofia from the bus, and had some good chats about Argentina with her. We both had plans to explore the province the next day, and had different methods to do it. She wanted to go on her own via motorbike. Cam and I didn’t want to drive ourselves, for fear of an accident. Out only choice was by car, cause it was too cold for any easy riders to bother taking us around for the day.

Linh from our hostel got us all sorted out with a driver, route, and everything else for the day of adventure the night before. We had three really cool stops in mind for the day, and two other throw ins that were along the way.

Let’s start with the throw-ins, as they were the first ones on our journey. The first stop was an incense making village. Incense is used in prayer a lot, especially in the mountains. Small bamboo sticks are coated with water, and then a powder consisting of sawdust, aromatics and other slow burning stuff is smacked onto the sticks. Bundles are left out to dry in the sun after.

Each village in the area has some sort of export specialty, in addition to the agrarian nature of them all. Chickens and buffalo wander the villages in their free time as well.

The second village was a blade smithing village. Old cars and truck scraps are heated, quenched, hammered and shaped in makeshift workshops to create hundreds of knives for different uses. Cooking knives, machete’s butchering, its all there and made by this village. We checked out one such shop, and for the old tools, they have quite a good system for making the knives.

Done with the throw in stops, we were now off to the big three. The first, Ban Goic waterfall, an impressive set of white falls along the border with China.

These were a delight. There’s two sets of falls here, the main massive section that straddles the two countries, and a subset on the Vietnam side that seemingly nobody was paying attention to. There were boat rides that you could take to the base of the falls for a close up and wet view. Cam decided to stay behind, it was still really cold. Instead I hung out with Mao on the boat, a young boy maybe about 8 or so. He offered me his squid chili chips. I accepted.

Being a border river and falls, there were departing boats for both the Vietnamese and Chinese sides. The Chines side tourists outnumbered the Vietnamese around 100 to 1. Each boat was full of tourists, meanwhile mine was just myself, Mao and his parents. Every boat from either side takes the same route though, approaching the falls from Vietnam, and returning through China. Never made landfall in China though. Each side of the falls had a fisherman too, one Vietnamese, the other Chinese.

We were not able to cross into China for the day to check out the falls form the other side. That’s only reserved for Vietnamese and Chinese nationals.

After the falls was another quick stop this time to a hillside temple. We got a view of the falls from above, and the river valley that they were a part of. It was really nice. From the busyness of the falls, there was nobody at the temple.

The second stop in our journey was that of Nguom Ngao cave, for our first land caving experience. Cam was a bit nervous, after having claustrophobic difficulties within the Bolivian mines of Potosi. But this cave was really interesting instead.

Again, we were the only tourists here, and had the whole cave to ourselves. We could inspect all the oddities that a cave provided for ourselves this time. A river ran through the cave. Sometimes we could hear it, other times not. There were calcium pools, stalactites, stalagmites, and everything else that you would expect from a good cave. It was lit externally as well.

One more cool stop for the day, and it was by far the most unique. One of the coolest things we have ever seen.

It started with our car stopping in the trailhead village, and watching another desperately try to escape the muddy road. We collectively decided that it would be better to walk the couple kilometers to the view.

The road was fine to walk though. Lots of construction in the area. It’s clear that this is going to be a new tourism hotspot in the next 5-10 years, and there are campgrounds and hotels being assembled all over. We walked through the somewhat disturbed farming valley , between massive just of limestone mountains, until we crossed over a small pass, and could see in full view, Angel Eye Mountain.

With that, the cold, and the mountains are done for us. But the adventures continue. We’re about to approach one of the largest caves in the world, deep in the Vietnamese jungle. We will see you there.