Constructing Community-Based Tourism

On Wednesday I visited Chay Lap Village, the location of our pilot community-based tourism project. A lot of progress has been made since I was last involved last summer. A CBT Village Management Board has been set up and they have been busy. As with everything in Vietnam, there have been many bureaucratic hurdles to get past, but now the focus is on constructing the homestay buildings and training the local people.

One household was chosen for the pilot. We'll start small and develop more as everyone learns. Two traditionally styled wooden houses are being built on the family's property. They chose an excellent location, pretty far off the road (nobody gunning their motorbike engines at 5am), in the shadow of beautiful green mountains and surrounded by the family's gardens and fruit tree groves. The houses will be fairly traditional but with added luxuries like private modern western bathrooms. No communal outhouses for our guests!

After I checked out the construction I went over to the Chay Lap Community House to sit in on some guide training. GTZ, a German NGO, is working with the National Park to construct an Eco-Trail by a cold spring in the Park. This is the project that Greg is designing. The guides are being trained now as construction on the trail continues. 10 guides are National Park employees and 10 are villagers from Chay Lap with no previous guiding experience. They are all going through the training together which has led to bored Park employees and overwhelmed villagers. But as the training goes on the villagers are improving dramatically as they begin to gain confidence.

The rest of my week was spent in the office creating content for the brochure and designing biking, kayaking, and trekking tour options. Geg and Evi ran into a couple from new Zealand that had been stranded in Phong Nha Town by their taxi driver, so they rescued them and brought them back to Dong Hoi. I spent two nights drinking and feasting with Greg, Evi, the NZ couple, and Sebastian (a French-German intern at GTZ) at the Sun Spa resort and on the beach. The NZ couple, Chaddy and Cathy were a lot of fun. Chaddy is a boisterous and jovial retired prize fighter, ranked 4th in the world when he was 26, who now owns a tourist boat chartering outfit in NZ called "Happy Chaddy's," and Cathy is his petite and quietly cheery wife. Greg and Chaddy bonded loudly and strongly over beers (Chaddy's first in years, he's a rum drinker) and announced gleefully that they were "brothers from another mother." Chaddy has a strong affinity for the Maori and performed Moari war songs and dances while telling of his wild youth and equally wild adulthood while Cathy serenely nodded in support for the truth of his tales. When we said our goodbyes, Chaddy left us with a final Maori dance while the taxi driver giggled quietly at the stocky tattooed grey haired tourist beating his fists and hopping from foot to foot while chanting in a deep voice on the steps of the swankiest resort in Quang Binh Province.

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