Watch the goats walk themselves down off the limestone at dusk at Quèn Thờ
Two hundred goats, no herder
Trịnh Văn Đàm's goat farm sits in the Quèn Thờ valley in Trung Sơn ward, the former Tam Điệp area, roughly 20 km south-west of Ninh Bình city and about 7 km from the old Tam Điệp centre, at the dead end of a single access road through a limestone valley with a lake at the bottom. About 20 hectares, roughly 200 head. Visitors can feed the animals, watch the husbandry and eat goat cooked on site.
Why it's unique
Goat meat is sold across northern Vietnam and the animal is always somewhere else. This is the place in the province where the animal, the mountain and the visitor are in the same frame rather than only on the plate: a working karst goat farm that admits visitors and feeds them there.
The husbandry is what you are watching. The goats are released up the mountain in the morning and return to the pen in the evening on their own to lick salt blocks, so nobody herds them. They browse wild forest leaf, lá dướng, mộc thông and medicinal plants including sài đất and bách bộ, which is the actual reason Ninh Bình goat tastes the way it does. The provincial extension centre picked this farm as the model site for its 2023 project on breeding goats linked to ecotourism, so the visitor side is deliberate rather than incidental.
Before you go
Come in the hour before dusk. The first thing that happens is a sound: the herd calling to each other down the slope, well before you see any of them.
There is no website. Call ahead through a local guide or a homestay, and bring cash. Most of the people there will be Vietnamese family groups and school parties rather than foreign visitors. Ask about the salt, which is the mechanism the whole system runs on, and about the leaf and medicinal plants the animals browse, because that is what the meat tastes of.