Overview
Traveling to Lao Cai without visiting Bac Ha market is a shortcoming. Here, you will enjoy local specialties, visit the dog market, and buy brocade items as souvenirs.
Introduction of Bac Ha market
Bac Ha market in Lao Cai is located in Bac Ha district, Lao Cai province, about 80km from Lao Cai city. As the biggest market in the northwest region, the Bac Ha market is well-known not only to domestic tourists but also to foreign visitors. The world famous magazines have also written a lot about this particular fair.
The fair is held only on Sundays of the week. Previously, the Bac Ha market opened on a gentle hill, but the market was later built on a concrete floor and divided into smaller sales areas, so it partly lost its pristine beauty.
Attractions of Bac Ha market
Unique culture and life
Bac Ha market is a place for selling all highland products, essential items for ethnic people like hoes, shovels, knives, various types of vegetables, fruits, and honey. However, attracting ethnic women and tourists the most is the areas for selling jewelry, skirts, dresses, brocades, and attractive rattan baskets.
In here, you can choose brocade products with dresses of ethnic minority Mong and Dao women in sprawling colors. Foreign tourists often admire the paintings are hand-woven with vivid, harmonious and beautiful motifs, colors.
In the noise of buying and selling, there are voices and singing of the boys like inviting girls to play with them. Tourists coming to Bac Ha, especially foreigners, are very interested in discoveries about the life and customs of the people here.
In the current commercialization trend, Bac Ha is one of the rare places to retain the national identity and unique features of the old markets partly. Coming to Bac Ha, you will not meet the situation of soliciting to buy goods but only the bright faces in colorful national clothes. People come to the market not only to buy and sell but also to be happy with the market and visitors.
Goods of mountains and forests
Brocade items
Like other highland markets in Lao Cai, Bac Ha is always colorful with brocade dresses of ethnic minority women coming to the fair like the "mobile flower garden," appealing to many domestic and foreign tourists, especially those who have passion for photographs.
Cattles
Bac Ha market is also the only fair in the country that has a particular area for trading horses with a total of hundreds of horses each session and a turnover of billions of Vietnam dong.
Besides, visitors can see people selling from dogs, chickens, pigs to buffalos, etc. The area selling dogs is often filled with passersby because, in addition to local people, many guests from far away also go to find pets.
Specialties
From 7.00 am, people arrange goods around the corners of the Bac Ha market. Entering the main entrance, visitors will immediately see the stalls of cakes presented on both sides of the road as well as in the market. All kinds of snacks in Bac Ha market are priced under VND 5,000.
Another popular delicacy of Bac Ha people is sour pho. The eating area of this market also has many stores selling sour pho to customers. A sour bowl of pho is plentiful from meat, pickled vegetables, noodles to herbs, and chili, costing VND 20,000.
There is also a section dedicated to people selling Ban Pho corn wine, which is famous in the northern mountains. This unique wine is distilled from yeast made of forest leaves and cooked with spring water at altitudes over 1200 meters.
Visiting Bac Ha fair market, visitors also enjoy a specialty of "thang co" by the H'Mong people. It is cooked from horse meat with cardamom and forest leaves that guests taste only once but remember forever.
Herbals
The medicinal plants such as panax pseudoginseng, morinda officinalis, and fallopia multiflora, etc. are harvested by local people from all over the region and sold in the market. Visitors can buy to use or give friends and family as gifts.
If you want to learn the local culture and life in Ha Giang, then Bac Ha will be one of the ideal destinations for you. Let’s spend a day and enjoy the fanciful space here.
