Woman abandons city career to turn 6 hectares of family forest into $380,000-a-year business

After a string of failed ventures, Ngo Huynh Trang went home and put all her money into turning 6 hectares of family forest into an eco-tourism site on the edge of a UNESCO biosphere reserve.

Trang, 44, began building Ca Mau Eco a little over three years ago on just over six hectares of family land in Da Bac Commune, Ca Mau, which is Vietnam's southernmost province.

The plot holds melaleuca forest and open water, and sits on the road to Da Bac and Song Doc.

It runs up against U Minh Ha National Park, one of three core zones of the Mui Ca Mau World Biosphere Reserve that UNESCO recognized in 2009.

She left most of the land under melaleuca, set the buildings into the existing landscape and kept concrete to a minimum.

Visitors paddle sampans, fish, make folk cakes and wear ao ba ba, the traditional southern blouse, for activities in the water.

They also hear the tall tales of Bac Ba Phi, the U Minh farmer whose deadpan stories about the forest's abundance became southern folklore.

There are performances on the river and don ca tai tu, the southern chamber music UNESCO added to its intangible heritage list in 2013.

"I want visitors who come here to have more than a place to enjoy themselves, to be able to feel the space, the way of life and the cultural traits tied to this river country," she said.

Da Bac is her mother's home village.

Ngo Huynh Trang tends to each item at Ca Mau Eco tourism site. Photo by VnExpress/Chuc Ly

Trang graduated in business administration in 2007 and stayed in Ho Chi Minh City to work in the field. In 2012 she quit her job as head of administration and human resources at a large company.

She wanted a child, and she wanted to raise that child near family in a calmer place than the city.

Back in Ca Mau, she built rental rooms and borrowed from a bank to farm crocodiles. She studied the techniques closely and traveled abroad to learn the trade. The breeding stock however ran into problems and crocodile prices fell, and the operation lost money steadily.

At one point the animals died en masse, a loss she puts at around VND1 billion ($38,000). She gave up on crocodiles and went back to the rental rooms and to raising her child.

Unaccustomed to sitting still, she later spent about two years at a garment company in Ca Mau. She later resigned as the workload grew and she found herself missing her child's preschool years.

She still wanted a business that could draw on what her home region already had. While caring for her child, she began thinking seriously about the family's six hectares.

Her first plan was to lease the land, with preference for anyone who wanted to run tourism on it.

Showing the plot one day, she met a prospective tenant with the same idea, and the two began discussing a partnership. Her savings and further bank loans went into the project, more than VND10 billion by her account.

With no experience in tourism, she learned as she built. She worked out how to lay out and construct each component, and enrolled in a cooking course to prepare for feeding guests. She handled much of the detail herself, from the sampans and thatched huts down to the planting. A full-service design firm would have cost more than she wanted to spend and come with ideas she did not want, so she built piece by piece and kept the concept hers.

Her partner pulled his money out while the site was still being finished. Most of her capital was already in the ground with much of the work incomplete, and she drew on family funds to keep going.

Ca Mau Eco tourism site in Da Bac Commune, Ca Mau Province. Photo by An Minh

About six months in, with the site roughly 80% complete, she opened to visitors and kept building around them. Early guests responded well, she says, and she put more money in.

She has since worked with tour operators and neighbors to build experiences tied to local life, including harvesting wild honey, checking fish traps, foraging and walking the melaleuca forest.

Ca Mau Eco charges no admission and no parking fee, and does not require visitors to buy meals.

"I want to create a tourism site that families without much money can still come to on a weekend," she said.

Deciding the history of U Minh Ha mattered as much as its scenery, she later built a forest village about 200 m long. It is a run of thatched huts and set pieces recreating life in the forest during the war. The model draws on the Vo Doi forest village inside the national park nearby, one of a network of settlements built into the melaleuca between 1958 and 1960. Camouflaged stilt houses there served as homes, storehouses, a clinic, a school and weapons and food depots.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism ranked the Vo Doi site a national historical relic on June 20, 2018. To keep her version close to the record, she went through local historical material, sat with veteran revolutionaries, consulted specialists and talked to people who had lived at Vo Doi. She chose the details so that younger visitors could picture how people ate, worked and held on under the canopy.

Three years in, Trang says the site draws several thousand visitors a month, two to three times that over holidays. She puts annual revenue at about VND10 billion ($380,000), with a margin of around 30%.

She counts the site as still short in places, and says tourism cannot run on the founding idea alone but has to be watched, changed and relearned.

Her next plan is a country market run by local residents, selling field fish, wild greens and whatever else they grow or gather. She expects it to put money in her neighbors' pockets and let visitors meet Ca Mau life directly.

What matters is not avoiding failure but knowing what you want after each one, she says. Anyone in tourism has to read the market, their own limits and what visitors actually want, and refresh the product without chasing every trend.