Phu Quoc island, Vietnam

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What attracted us to Phu Quoc was reading that it was still relatively unaffected by mass tourism. It’s coming, but still not on a huge scale. After trying unsuccessfully to book into one of the beach resorts (fully booked, bloody high season!), we checked into a guest house in the town centre Duong Dung. You could tell we were off the backpacker trail – no one spoke much English, which actually made quite a nice change. The hotel seemed nice, room was big, etc…imagine our horror when at 5.30am we woke up to some kind of bizarre political broadcast from the ‘voice station’ (dodgy English map translation – I guess it’s like a public radio broadcast tower?!) across the road. Still, it got us up and about I suppose. We spent the day exploring, walked along Long Beach until we got past all the resorts and found a lovely secluded bit of beach. Now THIS is what we came here for, I thought to myself (actually I probably said it out loud to Lizzie, poor Lizzie having to put up with my running commentary of my thoughts)!. Bloody nice it was.

Day 2, we decided to hire scooters – when in Rome, etc. Liz had ridden scooters a couple of times before, but it was my first time. Those of you who know what I’m like as a driver (I’m not the most confident) may be surprised that I decided to give scooters a go – but it was so much fun! We drove down the coast and stopped off at a gorgeous secluded beach. I did have one mishap where I kind of, err, dropped the scooter and scuffed it a bit (woops!) – but we got away with it when we returned them by pointing out that the speedometer didn’t work on one of them, and the fuel gage didn’t work on the other! I think the guy just though “yeah, fair enough love!” Though we didn’t avoid walking past the scooter place for the rest of the trip…

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