Vang Vieng is an odd little town. It is in an incredible setting, bordered by beautiful limestone karsts and the Nam Song River. Amazing caving, kayaking and trekking opportunities abound. Vang Vieng is also a big backpacker party town, the kind of place where some travelers have hung out for months, partying at the ‘waterpark’ during the day and on Don Khang island at night. There are at least 15 restaurants in town with identical menus, all playing continuous loops of one of three shows: Friends, The Simpsons or The Family Guy.
After three nights in town (and, we admit, too many episodes of The Family Guy), we were ready for something different. We’d read about the Vang Vieng Organic Farm located just north of town. The farm’s website said they were not really set up as a guesthouse, but they did have accommodation and volunteer opportunities available. At home we subscribed to Full Belly Farm’s CSA(Community Supported Agriculture) group, where we pre-paid for a weekly delivery of fresh fruits and vegetables. We enjoyed getting our weekly box filled with beautiful produce and recipes. And it introduced us to many foods we hadn’t tried before, like daikon, rutabagas, and heirloom varieties of squash and tomatoes. We were curious to see what an organic farm in Laos was like.
The farm’s primary crop is mulberry trees, which they use to make many products:
- Tea from the leaves
- Delicious shakes, wine (delicious!!!) and pancakes from the mulberries
- They also use the leaves for silkworm cultivation, and as food for the goats from which they make goat cheese
We stayed in a two-story mud brick house, with unofficial guests – two female kittens we nicknamed “Little Cat” (original, we know) and “Lizard Killer”, so named for her feat of bringing a live lizard back to the house, then playing with it before decapitating the poor creature with a ferocious yowl. She then ate it all, from nose to tail.
Little Cat and Lizard Killer next to our mosquito net
The mud house was open to the elements in places, so there was no keeping the kittens out, not that we would have wanted to – they also ate moths, cockroaches, and other unwelcome guests.
Home, sweet mud brick home!
Shortly after we arrived we met Cam Sing, who was in charge of all things animal. We were immediately recruited to help herd four pigs back into their pens. No easy feat, given the pigs outweighed us by a few hundred pounds. Five of us spent an hour chasing and shaking bamboo sticks at pigs, and we succeeded in getting two into their pens. The other two wandered in the mulberry orchard, and eventually came back when they got hungry.
Later in the evening we got to know Cam Sing better, over a lesson in how to make fresh goat cheese. Cam Sing lives with his wife and 5-year-old daughter in an apartment above the goat house. He is 24, and moved to the farm about a year ago from Vientiane. His typical workday started at 6:30 am and went until at least 9:30 pm. We admired his work ethic – we definitely couldn’t handle that many hours of physical labor.
Cam Sing pouring cultured goat milk into the cheese molds
Wanting to pitch in, Mark and I volunteered to help in the garden. We hand-watered a grove of mulberry trees and weeded/watered an asparagus patch. Sounds benign, but damn, it was hot! We spent two hours outside and drank three liters of water.
"Farmer" Mark watering asparagus
More fun for us, we got to bottle-feed the baby French Pyrenees goats a mixture of soy and goat milk. Since most of the mama goat milk was going to cheese/yogurt/milk production, the kids needed extra human attention.
The only kid I'm feeding anytime soon
It was wonderful to have this chance to relax before our 16.5 hour bus trip to Luang Prabang. More on that later.
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colour me jealous!!