Cai Rang Floating Market

When I planned to come to Vietnam, I made a list of things I wanted to do. Floating market was at the top. Between scanning the Lonely Planet and TripAdvisor, I stumbled across Cai Rang, the largest river market in the Mekong Delta. Can Tho, the. City it’s located in has a good location in relativity to the rest of my itinerary so I started looking for bus tickets. I was disappointed when we arrived in Can Tho and I heard the market would be effected by Tet. (Read all about Tet in the post below) Mom and I decided to skip the market, much to my dismay, because we figured it wouldn’t be worth it. But later, I just kept thinking about the market and saying how I wished how we had gone. I mean, this was our last chance to see anything like this! Eventually we went back on our decision and planned to set our alarms for early the next morning.

Sunrise over the river

Cai Rang officially opens at 4:30 am and winds down at 8. It was totally reasonable to squeeze in getting there and back before our noon bus out of town. We woke up at 4 am, and a half hour walk in the dark later we were down at the river. For 20$ (A bit more than we had hoped to pay) we hired a boat. From our location on the river it was a 25+ minute ride to the market. It was still dark when we pushed off the dock, but the large boats at the market were bathed in yellow morning light by the time they came into view. Everything was wholesale, so we could only really watch the happenings. Vendors would dangle a sample of their wares on a tall stick so you could see what they were selling. Boats doubled as houses so along side pineapples and vegetables laundry was drying in the morning breeze.
We could definitely see that the market was smaller than usual. Maybe twenty vendors were there, a fraction of the normal number.

For breakfast, we clipped onto a Pho boat. Pho is a Vietnamese breakfast dish, a pork or beef broth with a bit of meat, noodles and greens. The man selling it served multiple customers at once from where he sat, with all the individual crafts tossed high by the choppy river swells. It was pretty impressive, and the soup was good too.

Floating Kitchen

Vendors on the water

On the long ride back to our dock I could barely keep my eyes open. We had been up so early! Yes the market was a bit smaller than usual but we still got to see an iconic aspect of Vietnamese culture.