Vietnam floating market struggles to stay above water

A vendor prepares vegetables that she sold to a resident of a house boat in a canal off the Song Hau river in the floating Cai Rang market in Can Tho, a small city of the Mekong Delta.-AFP

Can Tho (Vietnam) (AFP) - Fixing weighing scales used to be good business on Vietnam's floating Cai Rang market, but the last repairman on the river now makes just a few dollars a month as modernity pushes traders to land.

Surrounded by dusty old scales on his cluttered houseboat, Nguyen Van Ut says vendors are giving up their boats for better lives on terra firma where supermarkets draw the traders who once thronged the waterway.