Cao Bang. Three syllables that crack like three machete swings in the mist. At the far reaches of a North-Eastern Vietnam carved by the billhook, this province—ravaged by landscape torments—imposes itself with brute force to remind you that the earth has teeth. And what a jaw it is! You aren’t looking at a landscape; you are being digested by one. Open maw, decayed teeth, sharpened canines, monstrous molars. And between these snags, a saliva of stagnant mist, roads that wind lazily, oblivious to the danger of this stone gullet.
With its limestone peaks surging from the soil like bone shards, Cao Bang suffers from a geographical pathology. An open-air geological delirium. A page torn from Salvador Dalí’s sketchbook. Nature here seems to have taken too much liberty. We tip over into the scenography of the absurd. Nothing seems in its place, or rather, everything seems to have grown too fast, in a thrust of mineral fever. Epileptic, Cao Bang dictates an obsessive repetition of limestone protuberances that spray from the earth like hallucinations.
It’s not just the scenery; it’s the atmosphere radiating from it. There is a sort of monumental solitude in Cao Bang. You eventually feel this kind of horizontal vertigo, a sense of being trapped in a labyrinth of stone and mist.
And right then, Cao Bang slips you into the straitjacket.
Just a big waouuuuuuuuuuh !!!!!!