A karst mountain town near the China border — Bản Giốc waterfall, a cave hideout of Hồ Chí Minh, and the Tày people's bamboo stilt villages
Cao Bằng Province in Vietnam's far north is another karst landscape of extraordinary beauty — and significantly less visited than Ha Giang despite comparable scenery. The province's two headline attractions are Bản Giốc (Detian) Waterfall, which straddles the China-Vietnam border and is one of Southeast Asia's largest waterfalls (300m wide, 30m tall), and Pác Bó Cave, where Hồ Chí Minh hid in 1941 after decades of exile, named the stream Karl Marx Stream and the mountain Lenin Mountain, and wrote the first draft of what would become the Democratic Republic of Vietnam's founding documents. The…
Cao Bằng was one of the first bases of the Việt Minh revolutionary movement — the 1941 period at Pác Bó was when Hồ Chí Minh returned to Vietnam after 30 years abroad and began organising armed resistance to both Japanese occupation and French colonialism. The province borders Guangxi (China), and the historical Chinese cultural and political influence in the region is visible in the architecture of the old town quarter, the Tày and Nùng languages (related to Zhuang), and trade patterns.