Special fairs in Ha Giang

VietNamNet Bridge – Ha Giang has many fairs and you can visit such fairs every day. Going to fairs is very exciting because fairs are the vivid and sharpest images of the daily lives of people in Ha Giang.

Fairs open from 5 am until 3 – 4 pm. Ethnic minority people from mountain villages flock to the fairs by horses, motorbikes or foot. Some go to the fair with their friends, their family or their husband and children.

Fairs are the most bustling activity of the Ha Giang upland ethnic people every week.

Everyone dresses in the most beautiful clothes and carries everything on his/her pack. They bring to the fair anything from chickens to pigs, from skirts to scarves and sharpening knives or the vegetables that is just freshly picked from the garden in the early morning. They sell their things to buy other things.

The kids have a chance to play together. Some kids help their mothers to sell things or take care of their younger brothers. Infant babies also go to the fair, on their mother’s back.
Among these fairs, some open on fixed days and some are “cho lui.”

The fairs that open on fixed days include Ma Le on every Saturday morning, Yen Minh, Dong Van and Meo Vac on Sunday morning.
There are four “cho lui” – Lung Phin, Sa Phin, Pho Bang and Pho Cao.

“Cho lui” is the fair that opens once a week and the next week the fair will be opened one day earlier. For example, if this week it opens on Sunday, then the following week it will open on Saturday…
It is quite difficult to calculate the opening day of “cho lui” but there is other way for you to define it and this is the way of the local people. These fairs are exactly opened each six days, instead of seven days as other fairs.

At noon, the fair is about to finish when baskets are filled with the essential items and carried back home by horses, followed by a drunk husband and a quiet wife.
The fair is simple like the life of the highland ethnic people in Ha Giang.

Pha Le