Post-Tet holiday, festival season come

The festival season has come. Huong Pagoda in Hanoi, Bai Dinh in Ninh Binh, Ba Chua Kho in Bac Ninh, Vieng Market and Tran Temple in Nam Dinh have opened to thousands of visitors.
The cable car system at the Huong pagoda isn’t working this year’s festival after an incident caused by sudden power cut on February 19, forcing pilgrims to walk.
Tran Van Tuan, a vendor, said he has never seen such a great number of visitors to the Huong pagoda as this year.
At the door of the Huong Tich grotto at 7.30am, the road is packed for over 1km long. Pilgrims can move inch by inch. Inside the grotto, visitors are so densely packed it is hard for them to move.
It is similar at other temples and pagodas after Tet holiday. All pagodas and temples are overloaded by pilgrims, who come to pray for a good new year. The roads to pagodas and temples are stuck for several kilometers .
The festival season is a chance for many people to make money. At the Huong pagoda, the ticket price is announced as 35,000 dong/boat trip but tourists have to pay 2-3 times higher.
At Ba Chua Kho temple, there is a special service: hired prayers. Using this service, pilgrims don’t have to pray, just stand besides the hired prayers and clasp their hands and listen to “professional” prayers read by hired prayers. If they pay then they do not have to carry offerings into the temple.
A local resident said that in the festival season (around 15 days), a hired worker can earn a million dong a day from this service while a votive paper seller can earn 200 million dong ($11,000).