Khau Coc Cha Pass

The mountain would not allow a straight road here, so the road learned to bend.

Khau Cốc Chà Pass is about 2.5 kilometers long, but it never runs straight. It clings to the slope of Cốc Chà mountain and winds through 14 hairpin bends. Those bends make 15 tiers of road, stacked one above another like giant steps. From far away, the road looks like a thin ribbon of silk thrown across the mountainside. That is why people often call it the pass of 15 tiers.

The pass lies in Nà Đoỏng hamlet, part of Xuân Trường commune. This is the Bảo Lạc area of Cao Bằng. The road is National Highway 4A, about 17 kilometers from Bảo Lạc town. An inventory of historic sites in Cao Bằng province, published in 2024, lists the pass as a scenic landscape. It describes the landscape as majestic and records it as still in its original state.

According to a Cao Bằng tourism handbook, local people say that under French rule this was only a footpath. It was about 40 centimeters wide, steep, clinging to an earthen mountainside, and very slippery.

The best place to see the whole pass is the summit of Pác Thốc. A Cao Bằng newspaper describes the view from there. All the bends of the road can be seen, along with part of the Đồng Mu valley below. In that valley, the center of Xuân Trường lies like a small island among ranges of mountains. A footpath of about one kilometer leads up to the summit.

The picture most often shown of Khau Cốc Chà is the spiral of bends on the cliff wall. That picture is clearest not from the road itself but from a point level with it, or a little higher. This is why Pác Thốc matters.

Many ethnic communities live in the Bảo Lạc area, among them the Dao and the Hmong. The Tày and the Nùng live here too. So the pass is a working road as much as a landscape, one that ties daily life together. The vehicles that cross it every day carry sightseers, but also goods, farm produce, and families going up to market and home again.

The Cao Bằng newspaper often suggests the ripening season of the rice, from late September to November, as the best time to look down on the valley. Winter fog veils the pass, and also makes it much harder to drive.

Stand on the summit of Pác Thốc in the late afternoon and look down at the pass winding below. The bends come slowly into view as the light slants across the slope. Below, the Đồng Mu valley shrinks to a field the size of a palm, ringed by mountains that stand like walls. And the road, thin as a white thread, runs across all of it. People found a way through here long before any map existed.