AN GIANG – Thousands of people and tourists attend the floating water season festival typical of the Western river region with folk games, resounding in a rural corner of Chau Phu district.
For the first time organizing the festival, Chau Phu chose a flood discharge field, along Provincial Road 945. On both sides of the road are vast fields of water, about one meter deep.
Chau Phu district, An Giang province, located on the right bank of Hau river, about 200 km from Ho Chi Minh City. The district has a population of nearly 250,000 people, mainly living on agriculture. The fields here are quite fertile due to alluvial deposits.
The festival takes place for two days with competition activities to decorate floating rafts with familiar items such as banana stems and bamboo; Arranging flowers and birds with coconut leaves on the afternoon of October 27.
The flood season is a characteristic of the West. Water helps clean the fields, build up silt, eliminate weeds, rats… Water also brings back products such as fish, crabs, eels, snakes, water lilies, and sesban flowers. The floating season usually starts from July to October of the lunar calendar, which is August to November of the solar calendar.
On the morning of October 28, the opening ceremony was a canoe race with one person swimming by hand and one person using a bamboo pole to support the canoe, a distance of one kilometer. The racing format is typical of the flood season, when people use canoes to move and catch fish and shrimp on flood fields.
Amateur canoeists are fishermen who regularly catch specialties in the flood season in the fields. They swim and swim to compete with other communal boats.
The audience cheered on floating rafts, then took the opportunity to bathe and play together.
Duck catching game. The organizers prepared 50 birds, each time releasing 10 birds with 30 participants. The folk game received a lot of laughter and cheers from viewers.
Players show off their trophies after duck chasing.
The bamboo bridge game is rubbed with beef fat on the bamboo body to increase difficulty. The winner is rewarded with a small gift from the organizers.
Participating in most of the games, Ms. Mai, Thanh My Tay commune, won three ducks in the duck catching game. “One child cooks porridge, one child serves as bait for her husband to drink, and the other child I give to my mother,” she said.
Wishing the festival to continue every year, Western women share the festival to help people of any age have a day of fun and introduce the beauty of their hometown to tourists from near and far.
The audience continuously cheered for the players.
Mr. Nguyen Van Be Tam – Vice Chairman of Chau Phu District People’s Committee – said that in recent years, with three rice crops, the upstream water has come late and is low, causing the image of the floating season to no longer be the same as before.
According to him, during floods, even though rice cannot be grown, during the flood season, people take advantage of catching fish and shrimp in the fields, which is a beloved and typical image of the Western homeland.
“We want to promote the image of the West through the flood season festival while promoting the movement of sports training and improving people’s health,” Mr. Tam said.
Ms. Nguyen Thai Ngoc, 61 years old, living in Chau Doc city invited her neighbor to wear the traditional Ba Ba shirt and come to the festival early in the morning. She said she was very excited about the festival’s activities because they were close and attracted the participation of a large number of people.
“We feel like we are reliving our childhood memories of going to the fields during flood season and playing with our friends,” Ms. Ngoc said.
Photo,Video: Internet (Vinlove.net)