Ban Gioc Falls

Few sights are wider, louder and whiter than anything a visitor has seen before. Bản Giốc Falls is one of them.

It is a national scenic site of Cao Bằng, ranked in 1998. The falls lie in Đàm Thủy commune, about 90 to 92 kilometers east of Cao Bằng city, in the area of the border between Vietnam and China. Looking at the falls means looking at one of the best-known border landscapes in Southeast Asia.

According to the province's inventory of heritage sites, the falls are about 35 meters high and about 300 meters wide, and they come in three tiers. A mass of water falls from the height of a 15-story building, spreads wider than a stadium, breaks into thousands of white ribbons over steps of rock, and lands on the surface of the Quây Sơn River below. That is Bản Giốc.

The main fall has three tiers and lies right in the border area, while a smaller fall lies within Vietnam. The water behind all of it is the Quây Sơn, a river that winds through green rice fields and then plunges suddenly from a height of more than 30 meters.

The scene changes clearly with the season. In the rainy season, from July to September, the falls are fiercer, and the water can turn slightly cloudy with soil from upstream. In the dry season, from October to April, the water is clearer. The falls may be smaller, but every tier of rock shows. Many people come from September to November, when the rice around the falls ripens to gold. The photographs it gives are very much the falls' own.

On the Quây Sơn, boats or rafts carry people close to the falls. Seen from the water, looking up, the feeling is completely different from the bank. Spray drifts in the air, the sound of falling water echoes across the whole valley, and the sky behind the falls is a deep blue. Some say it is the moment they truly understand why people travel so far to come here.

Bản Giốc lies within the larger setting of the Non Nước Cao Bằng UNESCO Global Geopark. A UNESCO Global Geopark is an area with landscapes of international geological importance, managed for protection, education and sustainable development. UNESCO describes the Non Nước Cao Bằng region as limestone and tropical karst terrain, formed over hundreds of millions of years, with caves, underground rivers, surface rivers and waterfalls. Bản Giốc is one of the places where geology, geography and geological time come together to make a landscape of global value.

Ngườm Ngao Cave lies about 4 kilometers from the falls. Also nearby are Phật Tích Trúc Lâm Bản Giốc Pagoda and the stone village of Khuổi Ky. The Cao Bằng tourism handbook presents them all as one cluster with the falls.

Bản Giốc is a rare kind of waterfall in the world, because it joins large scale, a border landscape and a karst base hundreds of millions of years old. Standing before it, many people feel very small, in the best sense of those words.