Muong Hum Market meets on every Sunday. This is the busiest day of the mountainous district of Bat Xat – Lao Cai province. The market belongs Bat Xat district, about 44 km from Lao Cai City.
Muong Hum Market is placed under a small valley, beside the clear water springs, and is surrounded by towering mountains and clouds. The weekend market along Muong Hum stream is a place of meeting, exchanging, purchasing and playing of Ha Nhi, Hmong, Chinese, Giay, Red Dao, Dao Tuyen. The scene inside the market is noisy, crowded along with the costumes of Hmong girls and brilliant colorful costumes of the red Dao, Ha Nhi people. All create the market carrying the typical characteristics of the uplands.
Muong Hum is the center of 8 communes in Bat Xat district (Lao Cai). This place is quite separated from the outside by a wide range of mountains surrounding, these craggy mountains create a very naturally solid wall. To get to Muong Hum, visitors must go through the old cardamom forest with ravishing steep passes, and the far distance is the golden rice terraces on the grain season looking beautiful like a sky mirror.
This place still remains vestiges of the old French houses, villas with quietness and dark color reminding a painful past under the old French colonial occupation. Not as famous as Sapa Love Market or Bac Ha market, but Muong Hum is seen as one of the rare fairs preserved almost intact cultural identity of a highland market with distinctive stores like “Thắng cố”, honey, rice cakes, rice wine and also has its own sales area of brocade, silver carving furniture and some products for daily life. Muong Hum fair displays all the nuances of ethnic minorities living in this land. Here, visitors will experience the local life with indigenous people to be surprised, interested and impressed by the own beauty of the market.
Hmong girls wear sexy dresses with the brightly colored wool wigs looking like a flower going and shimmering blooming. In addition to this is beautiful Red Dao outfits. The women dress black indigo clothes dotted pattern on the chest like the butterflies and wear red scarves adding a lot of silver jewelry. Although the Dao ethnic babies are strapped on the mothers’ backs, they are also worn beautiful clothes, hats and scarves making them like little angels.
Beside the stream, horses with various colors of feathers neigh which makes the mountainous painting more lively and it is very rare elsewhere. The suspension bridge or stone bridge spanning the stream always has people go through. Inside the noisy and crowded Muong Hum Market, the tourists can be amazed by the clothing of ethnic girls. Girls and boys in villages go to the market not only to trade but also to learn, to have fun, and to find partners. Therefore, everyone wears beautifully like coming to the festival.
All have created an extremely unique and attractive market for tourists from many places to explore Sapa. Travel to Sapa to visit Muong Hum market in order to experience the exciting features of this fair.
