Feeling at peace on the top of the mountain, Son wants more people to be “healed” like him.
Son ‘Troc’, 34 years old, left Ho Chi Minh City for the countryside to do soul healing tours for 6 years. Currently, he lives in D’ran , Don Duong, and Lam Dong, and has never regretted his decision. He has been coming to D’ran since 2017 and chose this as land to stick with due to the wild landscape, he can clearly feel the love between people.
Son is from Binh Thuan, before working as a small business, specializing in the distribution of goods. Recall, that he spent 14 years working in the city before choosing to turn to nature. “I left the street to go to the forest because I look at the long-term direction of work and life. That is the most humane way to treat me, to love myself more fully. I can be myself and observe my inner self. After going back to the forest for a while, I was determined to do tourism to experience wild nature and heal my soul”, Son confided.
When he first left the city, he faced many difficulties, but the most difficult was “enable to smile gently at the worries and judgments of friends and relatives”. “Starting a business in the countryside is always very difficult when encountering the safe thoughts of the previous generations. Being aware of the different ideas of the two generations, I walk slowly, without haste. When I started When the beginning is stable, some friends also wish to return to their hometown but they have not been able to,” Son said.
He started with tours to experience wildlife, then developed healing tourism. Son said, the idea came from a time when he felt at peace on a mountain top and wanted this spiritual dish to be enjoyed by more people. When he entered the forest, he saw the overlapping thoughts in his head disappear.
“‘Healing’ is a rather vague definition. From my empirical point of view, “healing” is a process that only the person who needs to “heal” can do. They need a pure environment. The forest is a mother, never giving up on children, we still inherit the love from mother nature every day, so going to the forest is the way to heal “, Son explains the definition of healing.
The specific healing tour is an experiential journey back to pure nature. The special feature of the tour is that together with the companions, face the things of compassion in their hearts. Surrounded by nature is a catalyst for the inner peace of each person to be aroused more clearly. According to him, such a “forest bathing” tour model is not new, but many people focus on commerce but forget to dig into the mind. Currently, he sells tours with prices ranging from 1-3 million VND.
Nguyen Xuan Thuong, born in 1997, is also a person who left the city to return to D’ran to contribute to a healing tour. “I realize that D’ran has a lot of potential for tourism such as climate, unspoiled scenery and has many similarities with Da Lat but not many people know about it,” he said.
Thuong is a photography enthusiast, often searching and describing the beauties of nature, like when photographing a flower, he will go around to find the best angle. While in Ho Chi Minh City, Thuong worked part-time, studied photography, and then took wedding photos. Through outdoor photography sessions, Thuong realized that he has a great love for nature. After his old job was stopped due to the pandemic raging in 2021, Thuong made a 31-day experience trip and met Mr. Son, from which he fell in love with the experience of nature, participating in the healing tour of Lac Tour.
Thuong said the healing tour revolves around “forest bathing”, which is an ancient Japanese natural healing method, which helps relieve stress and re-stimulate human senses, through a walk in the water. forest without using modern equipment. Tour towards pure natural and unspoiled places for guests to return to the purest and purest environment.
During the trips, Thuong received positive feedbacks, listening and sharing stories about work, life, and learning from each other with visitors. The most important is a moment of silence to feel the compassion within and hear the voice of your heart. “The trips have smiles, sometimes there are touching tears of guests,” Thuong shared.
The biggest difficulty when doing tours according to Thuong is persistence. The form of healing tour has not been chosen by many people and most of them are still new compared to traditional tourism, difficult to spread for people to know and understand better. However, his motivation is that since returning to the forest, Thuong finds himself freer, and feels the positivity clearly: being able to do what he likes, having fun every day and especially having a healthier body.