Bloom Microventures tours let you explore and learn directly with locals. Photo courtesy of Bloom Microventures

“So, how do you grow rice in Europe?” asks Ms. Ké, one of our project’s borrowers, during a microfinance tour in Northern Vietnam. Our guests, drinking their welcome tea and sitting on the bare concrete floor of Ms. Ké’s small house, smile: “We don’t grow rice in Denmark.” Ms. Ké is surprised: “What? You don’t grow rice?” “No, we really don’t.” Slightly shocked by this revelation, Ms. Ké insists: “But… what do you eat then?” Answer: “We mainly eat potatoes.” Now, having overcome her initial surprise, Ms. Ké bursts into laughter: “But you just can’t eat potatoes the whole day, that’s not healthy! You should eat more rice like we do in Vietnam. It will also help you not to get fat!!”

It is authentic, unfiltered moments of cultural exchange like these which for us at Bloom Microventures  signify Local Travel. We feel that when travelling, tourists should get a complete and unspoiled picture of the places they visit. Local Travel means experiencing the reality of how a majority of people in a place live, think and act and it is this undistorted reality that we show to our guests. For example, more than 60% of the Vietnamese population still work in agriculture. This is why during our microfinance tours the borrowers, nearly all of which are farmers, show our guests their traditional agricultural methods. They allow us to enter a fascinating world which remains hidden to most people who visit Vietnam. A world situated in a stunningly beautiful landscape, where old and new values meet and a world full of interesting stories, some happy, some sad, but always inspiring.

The marginalized women that our project works with and that we visit during our tours in most cases have never seen let alone met a person from a foreign country. They have not been trained in the tourism or hospitality industry. Our borrowers have a very different background and different sorrows: how to pay the tuition fees for their children’s education; how to deal with the loss of livestock during the latest chicken disease; how to take care of their grandparents if there is barely enough food to eat for the children. But they also have a lot of hope, energy, entrepreneurial spirit and amazing ideas.

Together with our visitors, we help them to fight their way out of poverty.

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