Agro-tourism is something that is particularly interesting for people who grew up in cities. We usually buy our food in stores, and even though we know that it comes from farms, or oceans, or mountains, and other places, we don’t really know how it came to be. Agro-tourism is a way of experiencing first hand, and see with our own eyes, how things are produced, grown and made into food.
There is a farm by the Boon Rawd Brewery in the very far North of Thailand – the province of Chiang Rai – that has now been opened to tourists.
It’s been establishes in 1983, and there’s lots of jujube being grown there. Jujube is a kind of Asian date, and it’s used in many east-Asian traditional medical systems to alleviate stress.
But we personally find the tea farm a lot more interesting – you can visit the tea plantation and chew some fresh tea leaves. This might not sound very tempting, but if you are someone who likes tea, it’s a great experience – fresh tea leaves are bitter at first, but when you chew them a kind of sweet essential oil aroma enfolds inside your mouth, which gives your mouth a very pleasant fresh and “rounded” feeling. Also, it gives you a very calm and relaxed energy boost. Some of our personal tour guides know where wild tea plants grow in Thailand, and when they let clients taste them people often fall in love with it.
There’s a restaurant where you can try different foods which contain tea leaves too.
The tea that’s grown here is Oolong tea, and most of it is made for export to Taiwan. Many people don’t think of Thailand as a tea producing country, but tea cultivation dates back many centuries already. In the mountain ranges of Northern Thailand, you have the ideal climate for growing Oolong tea, and seedlings of some of Taiwans finest tea plants have been brought to these areas and ascendants of Taiwanese tea cultivars are overseeing the farms.