My Agritourism Village

Pheaktra was a student who studied at a college in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He was a rural fork living in a small village in Kampot province where most people grew a variety of pepper. The pepper was well known for its exceptional flavor and taste. Tourists traveling past there usually stopped to see and buy the pepper from his village. Pheaktra’s parents were also farmers who grew pepper to make a living. In Phnom Penh, Pheaktra put a lot of effort into learning because he wanted to find a good job and to improve his family’s condition.

One day at school, he joined a workshop about agriculture and tourism. After the workshop, he came up with an idea which was to change his village to not only a place to grow pepper, but also a place to become farm tourism where all tourists come to learn about agriculture related to pepper plantation. Moreover, he wanted to promote local products. Thus, he decided to suspend his study for an academic year to live up to his idea.

The following week, he went to his village to tell the village’s chief about his project and asked everyone for a meeting. He made a speech in front of his villager about his project. He said, “Rural farms will become an attractive tourism destination because visitors want to get away from the hustle of the city and connect with nature as well as to have a leisure time.” He further said, “They want to get away from the stress in their lives. They perhaps wanted to learn and meet real people occupied with an agrarian way of life.” After the speech, his village chief and him arranged a program such as homestays and camping sites to allow tourists for overnight accommodation. The program would provide any fee recreation such as an ox cart ride for tourists to go sightseeing in the village. Moreover, tourists could go trekking along the village and could even learn how to cook Khmer traditional foods. They, the program creators, also had demonstrations to show tourists about pepper harvest and to display the local traditional crafts like silk weaving, krama, and so on. Additionally, during special holidays such as national festivals, they would create any events like Khmer traditional dance or games to show Khmer culture to those tourists.

After that, Pheaktra created one community associated with the village’s chief in order to train local people about hospitality and foreign language to communicate with foreigners. There were many villagers joined this community. Pheaktra also asked for help from his friends, students majoring in tourism at Phnom Penh, to advertise his village through a travel agency. Pheaktra and his villagers were preparing well to welcome all tourists for the next month.

After a month, no one came to visit his village. Pheaktra had hoped that his project was going to work well but everything turned out to be different. There was still no a tourist coming to visit his village in the following month. However, he still kept advertising. It had been two months already since Pheaktra was on suspension for his academics because of doing the project. Villagers seemed to be disappointed that they did not see any travelers as Pheaktra had planned in the past few months. For Pheaktra, he was not disappointed, yet he still followed his passion. He even spent more money on advertising through a travel agency and social media. Two months passed, he seemed to be a bit exhausted from promoting his project, but he did not give up.

In the third month, there was a group of Khmer tourists coming to visit his place. He was excited and he believed that his hard work started to pay off. The tourists were so relaxed and happy about the atmosphere in the village. Form that day on, both domestic and international tourists started to visit his place. Farmers in his village started to increase their income since many people there were being employed in various projects. Low-educated women could make a living by teaching foreigners how to cook local food. People in his village started to create something new in the village to attract more tourists.

Finally, Pheaktra’s project worked and changed the people’s lives in his village to be better. The family farm was not for growing food anymore but it was for the new revenue from the farm tourism which also known as “agritourism”.