New Adventures In Backpacking

One of the highlights of my trip to Chiang Mai was finding a little café named Juicy 4 U. I do love those cheeky suggestive Thai translations! As the name suggests they make a host of fresh fruit and vegetable drinks as well as providing a host of healthy veggie goodness meals on the menu. Be it with a beetroot, apple, celery and ginger juice, a wheatgrass shot, a veggie breakfast in the morning to start my day or a delicious Thai mixed veggie and tofu stir fry in a satay sauce, and my personal favourite Khao Soi Soup for dinner, Juicy 4 U never failed to make my stomach smile.

As well as providing amazing food at a low cost, they also looked after their regular customers like me. To be fair I was ensuring a good pension for the owners, but they ran a promotion that allowed me to take part in a lucky dip for every 500 baht (10gbp) spent. Given that I was running that up every two days it was no real surprise that I eventually won the big prize: one free night at the owner’s home-stay farm. So at the end of my stay in Chiang Mai I took the one hour journey north to the estate that I dubbed ‘The Juicy Factory’ to see where all the healthy goodness came from.

Kitty and her husband Tommy from England own the cafe. Kitty has the ideas and is the face of the company whilst Tom works from the farm providing all the hard work, labour and common sense (according to him) that go into living the organic dream. Both had lived in Thailand, then moved back to England whilst Kitty brushed up on her veggie cooking skills as well as experimenting with traditional English dishes like Yorkshire puddings and making them Thai veggie friendly. Whilst staying in England they became avid viewers of the C4 show ‘How Green Are You?’ and felt inspired enough to make the effort to try and live entirely organic, and needless to say it was made a lot easier with a move back to Thailand!

Their house is just amazing as is the home-stay. A renovated old farm house, with high ceilings and wooden floors to give it the old fashioned barn house feeling, decorated with an eclectic mix of old typewriters, tv’s, cameras and bicycles used as planters all around the house. Literally nothing goes to waste in their house, and whilst giving me the guided tour, Kitty proudly boasted the price of her finds in second hand junk stores. My favourite was a 60’s style television that doubled as a small table. This was the type of luxury that a backpacker like me simply does not come across too often on my travels.

The farm is 3.5 acres, filled with all the ingredients I had come to know and love in the café. As well as a duck pond and hen house and the all important outdoor spa, strolling around are two of the luckiest cats in the world. It really was inspiring hearing Kitty and Tommy’s story. Tommy had no experience in farming and basically learnt from scratch from books and the internet and to my eyes is making a darn good job of it. He works long hours in the hot Thai heat on the farm and there is still lots of hard work to be done, but watching the sun go down from his beautiful new handmade porch overlooking his farm certainly explains his motivation.

I think deep down I would love to own my own little café, just like Juicy 4 U serving veggie food that most of you would turn your noses up at, making fresh juices most of you could never afford and playing snobby art music that none of you are sophisticated enough to like. It might only last two months, but it’s my dream right? It was very nice to see a couple living their dream first hand, but also to see how much hard work goes into running such a niche styled café.

In the morning I was given the job of picking the fresh eggs from the chicken coup which were so fresh they were still warm, and then cooking omelettes with tomatoes, mushrooms, and basil all picked from the juicy farm. Delicious! As I mentioned in my previous blog I quite fancy coming to live in Chiang Mai one day and used this as my audition for a job in the Juicy kitchen one day. Whilst I’m sure Kitty was very impressed, omelettes don’t exactly have the wow factor. Next time I’m coming back with veggie haggis in the backpack.