Images: Lee Hopkins and Zoodoo Da Lat
There are men who plan their lives with vision boards and five-year strategies. Then there’s Neil Schultz, who seems to have tripped over a new country, built an empire out of curiosity, and somehow ended up with permanent residency handed to him by the Prime Minister of Vietnam.
All because he didn’t like how someone else was handling his cows.
It all started with apples,’ he says, pouring coffee that could pass for engine oil. ‘I bloody hated waste. Still do. When you see a truckload of fruit go soft before it even gets to market, you don’t think “what a tragedy,” you think “there has to be a better way.”’
And because Neil’s mind works like a farmyard version of NASA, he found one.
He started experimenting with airflow, humidity, temperature, and timing. Nothing flashy. No grants. Just the kind of back-shed ingenuity Adelaide produces whenever you leave a bloke alone with too many apples and a stubborn streak.
“I didn’t even know I was “innovating”,’ he laughs. ‘I thought I was just being tight-arsed. Turns out that’s the same thing.”
The results were revolutionary. His apples lasted longer. His profits climbed. His scrumpy was lethal. And therein lies a story.
He’d taken over running the family orchard in Lenswood, where he learned the fine art of coaxing perfection out of frost. Honest work. Long days. More apples than one man should ever see in a lifetime.
One day he looked at the leftovers and thought, bugger it, let’s make scrumpy.
The result was both genius and slightly hazardous. It sold itself—until the Adelaide Hills Council decided selling home-made scrumpy alongside home-made apple pies violated some by-law written during the Napoleonic Wars.
Neil’s response was pure South Australian mischief.
“Bugger that for a game of soldiers,” he said.
So he stopped selling scrumpy. Instead, he gave away a flagon to every customer who bought a certain number of pies—two pies for $47, scrumpy free. Legal. Profitable. Deliciously irritating to the council.
“They couldn’t do a thing,” he chuckles. “Everyone came for the “free” scrumpy. I sold out of pies in a week. Australians love a loophole.”
That blend of decency, cunning, and rebellion—that’s Neil in a nutshell. The larrikin engineer who fixes broken systems with a grin and a workaround.
For a while, that was enough. But curiosity doesn’t settle. It looks for new trouble.
After apples came flowers. The business bloomed—literally—across the Adelaide Hills. Schultz’s operation became one of the region’s success stories, timing the market perfectly when flowers were the luxury item.
“You could sell chrysanthemums faster than you could grow them,’ he says. ‘For a while there, it felt like Adelaide was apologising to its mum every weekend.”
He built the company, sold it, and walked away well ahead. Neil has never made a loss on any venture, which would be smug if he weren’t such a humble bastard about it.
“Luck favours the observant,” he says. “And I’ve always had good people around me. That helps.”
After selling the flower business, he started looking outward. Vietnam was emerging as a frontier for agricultural trade. He saw potential—not in the land, but in the livestock.
He and a business partner began working on shipping Australian cattle to Vietnam. Everything looked promising until one shipment landed in chaos: animals left sitting on the tarmac for nearly two days in punishing heat while the freight company fumbled paperwork.
Neil watched, furious. Then he did what only Neil would do.
“We thought, bugger this, we can do it better,’ he says. ‘So we did what any sane person wouldn’t—we hired a plane.”
They chartered their own aircraft, flew the cattle directly, and turned a logistical nightmare into a case study in how to get things done properly.
“The cows were calmer than the pilots,” he says. “That’s when I realised—sometimes you fix a system by ignoring it completely.”
It was that “hold my beer” moment—equal parts decency and defiance—that planted the seed for his next chapter in Vietnam.
Word spread.
Before long, Vietnamese officials were calling him for advice. Could he look at this project? Help with that one? A logistics issue here, a transport reform there.
“I kept saying yes because it sounded fun,’ he shrugs. ‘I had no grand plan. I just figured, if you know a better way, it’s rude not to share it.”
A few years later, he got an invitation. Hanoi. Official ceremony. Dress nicely.
“When they said the Prime Minister wanted to meet me, I thought, “What have I done now?”’ he grins. “I figured maybe one of the cows had eaten a politician.”
It wasn’t that. It was gratitude.
At the ceremony, in front of cameras and a small army of officials, the Prime Minister of Vietnam personally presented him with Permanent Residency, one of the rarest honours a foreigner can receive.
“The PM shook my hand and said, “Thank you for helping our country.” I said, “Mate, you’re welcome.”’
He laughs at the memory, still half-disbelieving. “I mean, permanent residency! In Vietnam! You can’t buy that. They have Olympic athletes who don’t get that. I just flew some cows properly.”
But that’s the thing about Schultz: he never sees his own impact until it’s staring back at him in formal diplomatic gratitude.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, Neil met his future wife, a Vietnamese lawyer who could read contracts faster than most people can read menus.
“She’s brilliant,’ he says. “Keeps me alive, keeps the businesses legal, and occasionally stops me from doing something catastrophic. Every bloke needs one of those.”
They married, built property portfolios in both countries, and became a sort of cultural bridge between Australian practicality and Vietnamese dynamism.
“She’s calm, strategic, elegant,’ he says. ‘And then there’s me, covered in dust and mud yelling at llamas. We’re a good balance.”
In 2015, Neil did what he calls “one of my more questionable ideas’”
He built a zoo.
Zoodoo Đà Lạt sits on sixteen hectares of rolling pine-clad hillside. It’s not a traditional zoo. It’s more like an eccentric Australian uncle-turned animal whisperer, built a playground for empathy.
“Vietnamese kids had never been able to pat a kangaroo or feed a wallaby,” he says. “I wanted to fix that. You learn more about kindness from one feeding session than from a year of school assemblies.”
The place is half Noah’s Ark, half Bunnings sausage sizzle. Llamas, capybaras, ponies, wallabies—all absurdly gentle.
“The trick is: don’t treat animals like exhibits. Treat them like colleagues who sometimes spit.”
He grins. “And yes, they spit. Often at me.”
Zoodoo is spotless, joyous, and weirdly serene. There’s a café that smells like heaven, picnic areas under the pines, and staff who greet visitors as if they’ve arrived home.
“We trained everyone ourselves,” he says. “Told them, “Don’t just manage animals. Watch them. Learn their moods.” If you respect them, they’ll respect you. Except the ostrich. That bastard respects nobody.”
The next project? Koalas.
He’s already planting eucalyptus trees—hundreds of them—so the koalas will have fresh food when they arrive in mid-2026.
“You can’t just dump them here and hope for the best,” he says. “They’re fussy little bastards. So we’re growing their lunch in advance. Takes ages. But hey, I’ve got time. Unless the ostrich gets me first.”
He’s working with Australian wildlife authorities to make it happen. It’s the kind of cross-cultural project that makes bureaucrats twitch and dreamers cheer.
“Vietnam’s kids are going to see a koala in real life,” he says softly. “That’s worth the paperwork.”
When I ask if he ever gets tired, he laughs.
“Tired? Mate, I’m in my seventies and still running up hills. I’ll rest when the koalas do.”
He pauses, then looks at the mist rolling over the valley.
“Thing is, Lee, life’s a bugger. It’ll knock you flat and ask if you’re still paying attention. The trick is to stay curious. When you stop asking “why,” you start dying, even if you’re still breathing.”
There it is. The secret behind everything from his apples to his aircraft to his zoo. Not ambition. Not profit. Curiosity.
He doesn’t call it philosophy. He calls it “something to do between coffees.”
Adelaide breeds a peculiar kind of genius. Modest to a fault, allergic to grandstanding, and constitutionally incapable of marketing itself. Neil Schultz is Exhibit A.
He’s proof that decency scales. That you can be funny, scruffy, slightly anarchic, and still end up shaking hands with prime ministers.
And perhaps more importantly, he’s proof that happiness isn’t found by perfecting your environment, but by doing something useful within it.
“People keep asking me when I’ll retire,” he says. “Retire from what? Curiosity? Madness? Nah. I’ll stop when there’s nothing left to fix, and I don’t like my odds of seeing that day.”
We finish our coffee as school buses arrive at the zoo, full of shouting Vietnamese kids holding bags of carrots. A wallaby hops past like it owns the joint. The air smells of pine trees and rain.
Neil waves at the bus driver, who waves back. They both laugh at something I can’t hear.
“See that?” he says. “That’s why I stay. They laugh easier here. Life’s hard, but the laughter’s loud. That’s a good trade.”
He slaps the dust off his jeans and grins. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an ostrich to apologise to.”
Find out more about Zoodoo at https://www.zoodoo.vn/en
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