Hanoi (VNA) - Located at a🌸n altitude of more than 1,000 metres above sea level and about 60km Southeast of Lao Cai city, Bac Ha town has a cool climate all year round.

Coming to Bac Ha, people are attracted by the wild beauty, and majestic mountains along with many attractive specialties. After more than two years of being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, this land, also known as the "white plateau" is witnessing a positive recovery in terms of tourism. It aims to become a special tourist area of Lao Cai province.

The convergence of special festivals

Bac Ha horse racing festival is a unique traditional cultural practice that has long become a brand associated with this land. Held in every June, the festival integrates with other local cultural and tourist activities. After being recognised as a national intangible cultural heritage, the horse festival attracts more tourists to Bac Ha. Neither a commercial nor professional race, the festival at Bac Ha features farmers and their pack horses which normally carry maize, rice and stone. Horsemen ride their horses without harnesses and stirrups, just a horse belt, with two iron hooks tied to ropes on either side of the horse’s mouth for control. Not widely known to many tourists as the traditional horse racing festival, the Gau Tao Festival is the biggest festival of the year of the Mong ethnic people in Bac Ha, reflecting their spiritual and material life. The festival comprises two parts. It opens with a worship ceremony in the presence of prestigious shaman and village chiefs and ends with folk cultural activities and folk sports. The Gau Tao Festival is held once a year with a view to thank the Jade Emperor and other deities for blessing them with health, happiness, prosperity, and bumper crops. The festival is an attractive destination for many tourists to visit, explore and learn about the pristine traditional beauty of the people in Bac Ha. It also helps promote the development of the locality’s tourism sector. Other festivals create their own attraction for visitors to Bac Ha such as Xuong Dong (going to the field) festival of the Tay ethnic minority group. It features the Xoe dance, which has been recognised as a national intangible heritage and forest worshiping ceremony of the Mong, Tay, Nung, and Phu La. This year, the Bac Ha White Plateau Festival was held from June 3-11 to stimulate tourism demand. Visitors to the festival can visit historical and cultural relics and experience many unique cultural features and enjoy specialties of this land. It also offers an opportunity for Bac Ha to introduce and promote its tourism potential and unique tourism products such as the horse racing festival, Tam Hoa plum and Bac Ha cuisine. According to the district’s Culture Office, during the nine-day festival, Bac Ha welcomed 63,000 visitors, equivalent to about 12% of the number of visitors to the locality this year. Particularly, it served 45,000 tourists during the final round of the horse racing festival.

Building unique tourism products

Bac Ha has many unique and attractive cultural features that make it a special tourist area of Lao Cai and the northwest region, according to Nguyen Duy Hoa, Secretary of the Bac Ha district Party Committee. He cited Bac Ha cultural market as an example. With the pristine features of the highland cultural market, it was rated by Sri Lanka’s Serendib Magazine as one of the 10 most attractive markets in the Southeast Asia. Hoang A Tuong mansion is also an interesting destination in Bac Ha district. Built in 1914-1921, it is a combination of Asian and European architectural styles, showing the clear East-West cultural interference. Bac Ha also owns hundreds of relics and heritages, including a heritage of humanity such as the Tày people's tug of war ritual, Trung Do village, Bao Nhai commune, four national heritage sites and four historical relic sites. Currently, the district has 85 accommodation establishments, including eight hotels, 29 motels and 296 homestays. Along with many concerted solutions to gradually improve infrastructure and tourism services, the district is developing various types of tourism namely eco-tourism, agriculture, craft, adventure and creative tourism. Some projects are being implemented in Bac Ha such as the housing complex associated with a cultural and tourist village in south of Na Co Lake and the Sin Chai field. According to the Chairman of the Bac Ha district People's Committee Dinh Van Dang, after more than two years of being affected by the pandemic, a series of events will be organized throughout the year to revive the tourism industry. Bac Ha has accelerated the building of 10 groups of unique tourism products associated with the "white plateau" brand. They include the construction of a typical cultural space of the Mong, Dao, Tay ethnic groups towards a unique and sustainable direction, ensuring the interests of the community and indigenous people and contributing to sustainable poverty reduction. The district intends to preserve and promote traditional cultural spaces of ethnic groups in line with the development of local community-based tourism./.