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A Dutchman's Chinese village resort

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-22 13:04

A Dutchman has leased a small village from farmers and turned it into a tourisist resort, complete with water baffaloes.

Everyone told Herbert Bloembergen he was crazy when he tried leasing an entire village in southern China, near the picturesque limestone formations of Guilin. And when he told them about his plan to create a holiday retreat, they thought he was outright nuts.

Herbert Bloembergen at the courtyard of his Open Inn at Chaolong village, Guilin. Courtesy of Herbert Bloembergen.

"In the Chinese mind, one goes from the village to the city, from an old house to a new house - not the other way around," the 45-year-old Dutchman says.

"So who would want to stay in the countryside in an old farmhouse somewhere off the main road?"

The answer is a lot of people.

But at that time, in 2003, the remote cluster of nine farmhouses in Chaolong village, outside of Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region's Yangshuo town, had largely been abandoned, as villagers opted for new abodes along a newly paved road.

Bloembergen says he had to finalize deals with the homeowners of this ghost town, and then repeat this process again and again with their brothers, cousins and increasingly distant relatives.

"I think I only managed to get all these people to agree because they all thought I was crazy," he says.

"They probably just thought, 'we get the rent for buildings we don't use, and we have nothing to lose really'."

Today, Bloembergen's Outside Inn is an acclaimed holiday retreat and a regular feature on the tourist map.

Its annual average occupancy rate is 45 percent, while more than 60 percent of rooms are full during peak season.

He has a range of single rooms (100 yuan - $14.64 - per night), doubles (120-170 yuan) and family rooms for four people (300-350 yuan).

The establishment is always totally booked for national holidays.

While word-of-mouth marketing helped Outside Inn grow its business, the recent purchase of advertising from Google has caused occupancy to surge, management says.

Most guests are moneyed expats, with Chinese accounting for about 5 percent of its business.

Outside Inn largely owes its success to the very location, which caused skeptics to scoff, Bloembergen says.

"I always find that tourists spent too much time in big, often enormous, cities and very little time in the countryside," he says. "I noticed with the Dutch tourists I was taking through China that people wanted to spend more time in the countryside."

The retreat is tucked in a rural tract of land that undulates with cave-pocked karsts scattered among patchworks of shimmering rice paddies. It's a magnificent landscape inhabited by friendly farmers, skittering chickens and plodding water buffaloes.

Chaolong village surrounded by limestone formations. [Erik Nilsson]

Bloembergen discovered Chaolong while working as a guide for a Dutch travel agency, a job he took after quitting his software consultancy position in the Netherlands to start afresh in China in 1999.

When one of his aimless bicycling trips led him to the cluster of farmhouses, he knew it was a special place.

But Bloembergen says it took a while to get people to travel to, and stay in, Chaolong. And SARS had gripped the country at the same time he began the radical tourism concept.

Soon after he began renovating the village, government officials, business people and other VIPs from Yangshuo began flocking to Chaolong to see what the Dutchman was doing with these dilapidated, remote farmhouses.

"Most of them came, saw and left, concluding that this strange foreign idea was never going to work," Bloembergen recalls.

"As one of my Chinese friends then put it: 'Even a beggar knows, you need to be on a busy street to do business'."

But some say nearby Yangshuo - a bastion of backpackers seeking a genuine slice of rural South China after checking out the world famous sights of Guilin - is now stuck in a tourist traffic jam.

The former farming village has swollen to become a bustling tourist town, chockablock with bars, souvenir shops and more than 300 hotels.

As Yangshuo heaves with thousands of tourists and the growing pains they bring, travelers seeking real rustic China are looking to its hinterlands - and so are hoteliers.

Today, establishments emulating the Outside Inn model are popping up in the surrounding countryside and are attracting more guests, Bloembergen says.

The Dutchman says his relationship with the village is "very good" but not without snags.

"Whenever there are issues, about water, waste or anything else, we solve it the best we can as fast as we can," Bloembergen says.

The villagers call him Aka, after the young hero of a folktale about a boy who goes hunting and returns with the biggest animals anyone had ever seen.

Bloembergen goes out of his way to mix with the locals and says the villagers appreciate that he always attends local funerals. Outside Inn employs five local staff and contracts construction and renovation work locally.

"I am a foreigner here, and I have created my own thing in farmhouses that nobody wanted at that time," Bloembergen says.