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The market deeply shows the typical cultural features of the minorities in remote mountainous areas in Vietnam. Further more, you can enjoy seeing boys and girls in colourful costumes - different colours of the mountains.
Picked up at Laocai Train Station to transfer to Can Cau market. It takes more than 2 hours to get to CanCau - a small market situated in a valley surrounded by mountains.
Three of the market levels are areas for regional products such as brocade, medicinal herbs, vegetables, and others. The remaining two levels are reserved for food and household goods. Customers there can eat minority dishes such as Mien Mien, Thang Co. Near the bottom of the valley is a field where buffaloes are on sale.
Most of the customers at Can Cau are Hmong and Giay people, who follow the Dao habit of having a market-day every Saturday.
Thousands of colorful people appear at the one-hectare market, making an especially beautiful scene in this mountain region. Among them are a few Kinh (Vietnamese) people looking for some regional products, while some foreigners stand and watch; some Hmong women bargain with an ancient Chinese person. Everybody talks quietly.
Dale Swither, a businessman from San Jose came to Can Cau on his tour. He has come here straight from world heritage town, Hoi An. Mr. Swither reveals, “either I have hearing problems, or Vietnam is the country of whispers.”
Mr. Swither said he only heard short and timid English utterances in Hoi An, and could hear nothing at Can Cau.
Hang Thi Gioi, a Hmong woman, woke up at dawn to go to the market. She sold and bought nothing, but simply carried her child and came to the market for leisure. Gioi had spent the whole morning eating Thang Co, and bought some snacks for her child. Come noon, she sat down with her child to people-watch and ate cane-juice.
Not knowing how to speak Kinh (Vietnamese) language, Gioi just stayed and smiled for the visitors’ cameras. The silent market was seemed to awaken with the sound of the cameras. After Gioi left, the market immediately fell silent again.
Suddenly, the sound of a panpipe again woke the market. People soon discovered that the sound came from a cassette player. It was so old that all its labels had faded and it was tied together with string. The cassette player sat in a store among cigarettes, mushroom, tools, and other things.
The store’s owner, a Dao man, seems to be a good businessman. Whenever he has no customers, he turns on the cassette, and then turns it off after drawing them in. The man is quite astute at business. He uses the sound of the Hmong panpipe to attract customers at Can Cau, a market originally created by Hmong and Giay people.
On the slope to Bac Ha town, the buffalo market is also getting busy. Young buffalos with small bells hanging from their necks docilely follow their new masters. The sound of the Panpipes from the Dao man’s store mixes with the buffalo bells and again makes the market quite boisterous.

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