Hey everybody. Usually I’m sitting behind a desk in my office in Bangkok talking to you about some immigration or other legal issue. Today, given the holiday season, I’m in Phetchabun province at our farm, the family farm. Phetchabun is located, if you threw a dart into the central part of Thailand, you’d hit Phetchabun.
It’s right in the central part of the country. It’s known as the vegetable basket of of Thailand. And we’re just relaxing up here for the New Year holiday. So I wanted to talk a little bit about living in the provinces. And it’s, I think, a lot different than living in Bangkok or Hua Hin or Phuket or other areas with lots of expat communities.
We’re in the middle of farm country. And our village. It’s actually called Ban Phot or the Village of Corn. So I wanted to show you a little bit around the family farm and talk to you about the benefits of living in a province like Petchaboon. And some of the challenges for us expats that come up here.
Frankly, most of us come up here because we have Thai families and typically Thai spouses. So that’s a good thing. It’s a great way to enter the community. My wife’s grandfather was and grandmother were pretty prolific apparently. So everybody in our village are aunties, uncles, cousins, and so on. And it’s great to be surrounded by family.
But I think the principal benefit of being up in the provinces is the pace of life. Everything’s just slower up here. The air is cleaner. I got D, the weather is lovely. It’s about 70 degrees right now, this winter season. And, um, your heart rate just comes down from your time in Bangkok, or if you’re in a more crowded expat community and folks here just live in the moment, as Americans or Brits or other Western countries, we tend to do a lot of planning and strategizing and we’re entrepreneurial and here folks truly live.
In the moment and live for today. If I asked my family and I’ve learned not to do this anymore, what are we doing tomorrow? I’m frequently told we’ll figure it out tomorrow, right? So it’s living for today. I think another benefit of being up here is just how incredibly cost effective everything is and great value.
Yesterday morning I went out for breakfast at our local Gutiao noodle soups, noodle shop. A local lady, lovely family. She’s been cooking the same noodle soup for 45 years. And it is unbelievably delicious. Egg noodles with crispy pork that she crisped up every morning and other kinds of vegetables and pork.
And this large bowl of delicious unctuous soup is 40 baht or about a dollar 10. Which is incredible. And my wife goes to the salon here, has her hair washed and blow dried. Something that might cost 50 or 60 in the States. and here it’s 80 baht or two dollars. You get used to those prices up here and then you go into Bangkok where it’s about three times more expensive, where you go back to the States or the UK or the EU and you suffer sticker shock, but while you’re up here it’s just fantastic.
So I wanted to show you around the farm just for a few minutes. This is a farm that we purchased, my wife purchased about three years ago. And we just started improving things and planting a number of fruit trees. I think we have about 200 fruit trees that are growing up here. We’re starting to harvest, just starting to harvest another couple of years, and it’ll be very verdant and and lovely here.
And then the front two thirds of the farm behind me here, That’s the working part of the farm and they grow man sapalang, which is a tuber that apparently dry out It’s a baking powder. You can grow corn Again, we live in the village of Ban Phot, which is literally the village of corn. People grow beans here Sugar cane, just a number of crops dang home dang shallots gratium, garlic just a number of crops here.
The soil here is so great. Dindy, good soil, dindum, black soil, so just lovely. And it’s just quiet and nice here. So this is the farm, and we expanded the pond a little bit. We have fish there. I can’t eat them because I feed them, and anything I feed I can’t eat, but my family does. We’re growing bananas and we already have some coming in.
There’s where we’re growing the mansapalang. And then we’re growing malaga, papaya, out over this way. But let me take you down To the to the platform here. I got to find my shoes and I’ll take you out over the pond. We just installed an aerator. And one of the things we try to do, or I tried to do is make the farm and our home as sustainable as possible.
And the reason is that. When I’m long gone, I just want to leave something to the family that isn’t, a hassle or expensive to maintain. So we have a well on the property and we have solar. The well head is just over there. And then obviously we have a nice source of water here. You see the duck boa, the lotus blossoms.
And the nice thing about feeding the fish is every time you come out onto the platform, they’re waiting for you to feed them. So this is This is life out here on the farm and, as far as the eye can see, there are no buildings except the improvements on our property. Our property next door, our neighbor next door has kept his property in teak wood, which someday I think he’ll harvest.
And then what we did, because part of the reason for having a farm is for people to come out and enjoy it as we’ve We put up a knockdown house. I know that’s a strange thing to call it, but it’s a house, a little house built from all recycled wood. So that’s why they call it a knockdown. We built a small Hong Nam toilet and shower.
We have a small Thai Hong Krua, little kitchen. And then we have another bedroom in what we call our sala and a storage unit. It’s a property that’s a working farm in part. Our niece and nephew farm the upper two thirds. And in part, it’s a, just a place to come out and relax. We’ll have barbecues out here.
And and just enjoy the property. I think another thing you realize when you come out to the provinces is, Just how important land is and land ownership is. There’s an intrinsic value to land here. If you’re a landholder and, folks that work all their lives in cities love to purchase farms like this, and it becomes their little kingdom, right?
And it’s what they can do, whatever they want to do on their property, and just relax and enjoy it. So that’s life in the province. A little bit of life in the province. I think the other thing is the food here is just amazing. When I first moved here, I was a little worried about what I would eat.
But We live about 15 kilometers away from Wee Shee An Barree, which is a famous city, at least in Thailand, for charcoal grilled chicken. We live another 30 kilometers from Si Thep. Si Thep is the southernmost town in Phetchabun province, but it’s also the place where the original Lanna people settled, and it has ruins that are seven, 800 years old that have recently been designated.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site, and that occurs to me that living in the province, you also get to know, some of the off the beaten track, amazing places that lots of Thai people enjoy and that we expats or holiday travelers never get to see. Petraboon is up in the north, you have beautiful mountains and you have beautiful mountain resorts of Khao Kha.
and Phu Thap Buek and Nam Nao National Park. And every holiday there’s just so many Thai people streaming up our Highway 21, which is in front of the farm in our house. Going up to the mountains and enjoying it. And I just wish, more holiday travelers and expats would come up here to experience what the Thais know are some of the most beautiful parts of Thailand.
Anyway, that’s. A brief holiday hello from the provinces. I’ll look forward to we’re gonna, we’re gonna do one more video about building a house out here in the provinces. There were some lessons learned some good takeaways and some takeaways that I think will prevent you from having any upsets.
But I hope you enjoyed this and until next time from the office in Bangkok wishing everybody just a happy holiday. If you like this, please share and subscribe. Take care.