The girl turned her foreign land into an ecological garden, guests slept in huts and caught fish to eat.

The arduous journey

After 6 years of selling clothes at the market, Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan (born in 1999, O Mon, Can Tho) decided to change direction, leaving behind urban life to return to her hometown to do farming on a 1,500m2 plot of land left by her grandmother.

Ngan shared that she had longed to live in the middle of nature, grow vegetables and raise fish. When her grandmother passed away, her mother left her a piece of land. Returning to her hometown, Ngan started a job that she only had a little experience with from helping her parents harvest.

Young girl dreamed of gardening since childhood

The beginning was full of challenges when vegetables grew and died, fruit trees withered, making Ngan tired and discouraged at times.

“At first, my parents didn’t understand why their young daughter chose to return to the countryside to work in the garden, so they didn’t support me much. But then, seeing how hard I worked, my father started to help me, from preparing the land, choosing seeds to planting techniques,” Ngan said.

Initially, Ngan only intended to garden to make videos to post on YouTube and TikTok to introduce her hometown and Western cuisine. But then, she came up with the idea of combining it with eco-tourism, both to promote her image and create an experience destination for tourists.

Ngan’s garden grows many seasonal vegetables and fruit trees such as jackfruit, mango, durian, star fruit, guava, etc. Every day, she and her father take care of the garden together, only hiring extra people to weed the land. The water source is pumped from the big river through a tank system that her father helped build.

The garden is like a miniature ecosystem.

Work takes up all her time, Ngan takes advantage of the early morning and cool afternoon to weed and water plants; at noon and in the afternoon she delivers fruit to people, and in the evening she continues filming videos. There were times when just filming a video about the garden and gardening life took Ngan 2 days.

Being alone, she had to run here and there, looking for suitable spaces to take pictures. Therefore, she only accepted 1-2 groups of guests per week to ensure the most attentive service.

Ngan's garden grows a variety of plants.

"Sometimes I only have time to visit the garden to see which plants are dead, which are wilted, which are infested with worms, and that's all I have. If it weren't for my dad's help, I probably wouldn't be able to do what I do now," Ngan said.

Dream of doing "quality" eco-tourism

From simple videos about life in the West, Ngan's TikTok channel has gradually been welcomed by the online community. Since then, many domestic and foreign tourists have come to the small garden more than 20km from the center of Can Tho to experience it.

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Garden view from above

Here, guests can pick vegetables, catch fish in the ditch, and cook with a wood stove in a rustic thatched hut in the middle of the garden. “I want to create a familiar feeling like returning to the old West, like reliving memories at my grandparents’ and parents’ house,” Ngan confided.

To serve customers, Ngan has to invest a lot of effort: digging ditches to raise fish, building huts, drawing clean water, building a stone kitchen, creating a natural living space. Therefore, the cost of the experience is quite high, but in return, customers are all satisfied.

“They like privacy, like real experiences, not industrial tourism,” Ngan shared.

What makes 9X happiest is that guests feel happy and excited about their new travel experience. Everyone is excited to catch fish, pick vegetables in the garden, and then sit down together to cook.

Garden with a variety of fruit trees and vegetables

The biggest difficulty is that Ngan has to "take on" everything: being the owner, tour guide, and waitress. There are times when she is exhausted, but she has never thought of stopping: "Once you have worked hard to build it, you have to do it to the end."

Although the clean vegetable output is only enough to serve family and guests, some people still love to order, Ngan still enthusiastically sends them as gifts.

In the future, she hopes to cooperate with friends to expand the clean, pesticide-free vegetable garden, contributing to promoting her hometown's agricultural products.

Ngan hopes that when more people know about this model, not only her garden but also the agricultural products of the people in the area will be welcomed.

“I want to do truly quality eco-tourism, so that visitors not only experience but also understand and love the West more,” the young girl said about her future dream.

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