What Are the Types of Rural Tourism? A Roundup of New Ways to Enjoy Countryside Travel
The countryside and the city each have their own beauty. The city, with its forest of high-rises, lets you take in the beauty of prosperity, while the countryside, with its fresh air and lovely surroundings, lets you enjoy the beauty of nature. More and more people now like to travel to rural areas, so what types of rural tourism are there?
1. Sightseeing Rural Tourism
Sightseeing rural tourism focuses on natural and cultural landscapes such as fertile fields, specialty vegetables, flowers and nursery stock, rural farmhouses, streams and riverbanks, horticultural grounds, green belts, industrial agricultural parks, and special breeding bases. It mainly satisfies visitors' desire to return to nature and experience its pristine, natural beauty, relaxing amid clear mountains, beautiful waters and colorful ethnic customs, so that they gain a sense of spiritual pleasure.
2. Leisure Rural Tourism
Leisure rural tourism uses the rural landscape as its backdrop and the quiet, relaxed rural atmosphere as its foundation, offering leisure and entertainment services such as board and card games, singing and dancing, and sightseeing and sketching outings. Some also include the traditional features of rural residents' production and daily life, utensils and tools, houses and buildings, interior furnishings, food, clothing, etiquette, festival activities, courtship and marriage customs, as well as ethnic songs, dances and language, within leisure rural tourism.
3. Vacation Rural Tourism
Vacation rural tourism makes use of the countryside's “blue” sky and “fresh” air, letting visitors ride the gentle breeze, breathe the fresh air, listen to the rhythm of the springs, and gaze at shooting stars and the bright moon, experiencing the aesthetic realm of “unity of heaven and humanity.” Country walks, mountain climbing, skiing, horseback riding, boating, and rafting, along with other rural vacation fitness and entertainment activities, also belong to this type.
4. Experiential Rural Tourism
Experiential rural tourism is mainly combined with local folk culture, agricultural production and agricultural by-products. Through taking part in folk activities, planting flowers and trees, pruning plants, weeding and fertilizing, digging the soil and planting vegetables, picking melons, fruits and vegetables, fishing and catching shrimp, raising animals, grinding rice and flour with a water mill, irrigating with a waterwheel, hulling rice in a stone mortar, learning to make rustic country snacks, weaving cloth on a wooden loom, hand embroidery, making simple farm tools, and making pottery, visitors experience the simple elegance of rural life and the joy of sowing and harvesting. It is an overall experience along the lines of “the house is yours to live in, the fields are yours to farm, the cattle are yours to graze, the fish are yours to raise; we help you set up a home in the mountains and fields.” It also includes tasting the countryside's rich local specialties, such as flower foods, pollen foods, wild plant foods, fruit foods, distinctive flavor snacks, and delicacies of rare poultry, livestock and aquatic products.
5. Shopping Rural Tourism
Shopping rural tourism is developed around resources such as clean, fresh specialty vegetables, melons and fruits, rare poultry and livestock and precious aquatic products, beautiful flowers, distinctive bonsai, uniquely flavored local specialties, exquisitely crafted handicrafts, simple and elegant farmers' paintings and calligraphy, and uniquely designed tourist souvenirs.
There are many kinds of rural tourism. Different places can create different distinctive villages to attract visitors and make their rural tourism more competitive.