Village Life & Cooking Experience
A bullock cart, a dugout canoe across the tank, and lunch cooked over a wood fire and eaten off a lotus leaf.
This is consistently the half day travellers tell us they remember longest, and it is the least spectacular thing on this list.
You arrive by bullock cart along a track between paddy fields, cross the village tank in a dugout canoe poled by a fisherman, and walk the last stretch to a mud-walled house where lunch is cooked in front of you — eight or nine curries in clay pots over a wood fire, everything from the garden, coconut scraped by hand. You eat off a lotus leaf with your fingers. Somebody will show you how to climb for a king coconut and you will not manage it.
The money goes directly to the families involved rather than through an agency, which is the reason we use this particular village.
What’s included
- Bullock cart ride through the paddy fields
- Dugout canoe crossing on the village tank
- Clay-pot cooking demonstration over a wood fire
- Eight-curry village lunch eaten off a lotus leaf
- Meet the farming and fishing families directly
- Income goes straight to the village, not an agency
Add Village Life & Cooking Experience to your trip
Tell us roughly when you are in the country and we will check availability, arrange the transport to get you there and fold it into the rest of your itinerary.
- A reply within 24 hoursUsually the same working day.
- Fits around your plansWe work it into the days you already have.
- Nothing to pay nowNo card details to check availability.
Other things to do
All activities
Half day (two dives)Diving & Snorkelling
Coral gardens, colonial-era shipwrecks and reef sharks — on whichever coast is in season.
PriceOn enquiry
2 hours to multi-day campsSurfing
One of the easiest places in the world to learn, and a serious destination once you can stand up.
PriceOn enquiry
5–6 hoursWhale & Dolphin Watching
The largest animal that has ever lived, within a morning boat ride of the shore.
PriceOn enquiry