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Published: April 11th 2011
Greetings from Vietnam and our final blog from Our Asia Adventure. We have found a little piece of paradise here on the island of Phu Quoc!
The weather is fantastic; warm, sunny and calm. We are staying at the Seastar Resort in a beach front bungalow surrounded by palm and almond trees that is one of the nicest small ocean front resorts we have been to. The beach has beautiful soft white sand and the water is clear and perfect for swimming. Somedays the water is like glass and other days lovely gentle waves to play in. The temperature is just right so we spend a lot of time bobbing around. Besides beaching it, there are massage and spa ladies on our beach that give a pretty good 45 min massage for $3!!
The only drawback is occasionally blue jelly fish show up and unerve some people. Apparently they are not dangerous and will not sting, some say you may feel a slight skin irritation. Unless there is a whole lot of them we just ignore them and carry on. But as I say, it is only the odd time that they have shown up. One day in the
11 days we have been here there was a lot of seaweed and yucky stuff but the next day it was gone. I suppose it has to do with the ocean currents. Apparently the jelly fish have a very important purpose in keeping the alkaline level right resulting in the clear clean water. The cycle of nature!!
Phu Quoc is a southern Vietamese tropical island in The Gulf of Thailand that is actually closer to the Cambodia. By boat it is only a hour or so ride to the Cambodian coast. We took a 50 minute flight from Saigon arriving in Pho Quoc around 2 p.m. Pho Quoc in Vietnamese means "Beautiful Country".
The island is about the same size as Singapore (50 kms long) and 80% of the land is protected as Natural Forest. The island is noted for its fish sauce manufacturing and black and red pepper plantations. In fact many places you walk you can smell a faint scent of black pepper .... it's really nice! There are a number of pearl farms. We toured some of them and found it interesting to learn how it happens. We actually got to see a pearl being
cut from a 3 year oyster. The pearl jewellery is very nice and reasonably priced.
Apparently South Vietnam imprisoned 40,000 VietCong at the Coconut Tree Prison during the war which still stands today. As you can imagine tourism is booming here and we are glad we are visiting now while it is still fairly quiet and you can get a feel for the local culture. We will be able to say "we went there before it was touristy"!
One day we took a motorcycle ride around the island. It started out on a lovely paved road but soon we found ourselves on a combination of red sand/gravel/rock and pot holes!! It was hilarious. Thank goodness Warren is a good driver. The traffic was okay but the roads were something else. All in the adventure!! One of the bridges we went over was patchy, loose sheets of rusty steel with no railings. Many people walked their bikes over but Warren drove steadily through like a local. We enjoyed driving through the local villages, watching their daily life and enjoying a drink at a local cafe. Most of the people in the area do not speak English so it is
Nui And Warren
This friendly lady runs a convenience store and rents bikes just outside our resortquite funny playing charades with each other. Often they will call their kids out as they seem to know some simple phrases in English (perhaps from school) and are always proud to help out. We got mixed up in a parade of bikes of kids coming home from school. It was like a pilgramage. There sure were a lot of them. We stopped at a few statue gardens, temples as well as drove through the fragrant pepper farms. The interior is very mountainous. We also stopped at Bai Sao Beach on the other side of the island. Wow!! Pristine, turquoise clear water a pure white sand. So far on this secluded beach there are only 4 restaurants and one hostel. It would be nice if it stayed this way.
The food here is like all the rest in Vietnam - scrumptious! We never tire of the spring rolls. Each place they are a little different and fun to try. The seafood is amazing at the restuarants and night market. We have been experimenting with different kinds of snails, oysters, clams, mussels, crabs and scallops. Usually they come grilled on the barbecue with garlic and butter. So tasty when it's
feresh and so cheap. We had a half kg. of mussels the other night for $2!! Some restaurants have live music and make for a very enjoyable evening. Warren has developed a new taste for iced Vietnamese coffee.
An interesting fact about Pho Quoc is a unique breed of dogs called Ridgebacks that only live on the island. They are excellent hunters, intelligent and loyal. They are an average sized black dog with a pointy nose. They are credited with nearly completely ridding the island of all pests that crawl, walk or creep! The most unusual things is that they will only breed on the island and controlled breeding on the mainland has been unsuccessful. Go figure!!
On Friday we took a 12 island/snorkel/fishing cruise to the south of the island. It was a great day, fair snorkelling and we stopped at the most beautiful secluded beach. Hard to believe places like this still exist. Warren tried his hand at fishing but to no avail. Many of the others were catching them left right and center so I guess it just wasn't his day! One of the highlights was lunch on the boat which included sea urchin soup,
fresh and barbecued sea urchin. We noticed at one of our first stops that one of the crew was swimming towards the rocks with a knife and big round pail. He soon returned with a pail full of black pointy sea urchin. They set about cutting the spikes and spend the next two hours preparing the soup and barbecue. To our surprise it was excellent! They say it is very good for your heart and our captain said it is the Vietnamese viagra!!
We also enjoyed observing the floating fisihing villages and boats go about their business. Small boats would pull up to larger boats which would in turn load up even bigger boats with all kinds of fish I suppose for export or production. Some of the small boats would take all kinds of fish, snails, shrimp, squid etc. to the dock where others would load them into baskets that were attached to motorcyles and would head off the the markets. This I assume is where the restaurants would get their fresh seafood. Kind of puts the "Made In Vietnam" package of frozen shrimp we buy at the grocery store into perspective. We still can't get over how
the Vietnamese people use every scrap of fish or seafood for something. They certainly are not wasteful people.
We hve met lots of interesting people at our resort. Lots of Aussies, Brits, Germans and people from New Zealand, Belgium, Switzerland, France and Sri Lanka. Our neighbours are a young couple from Poland (38 yrs) who we have really enjoyed talking to and learning about Poland. Me a few couples from Vancouver and a young couple from Calgary. Funny story.... Steve from Calgary is a Pilnser fan and if you can believe it he brought four large cans of Pil with him from home on his month long vacation in Vietnam!! Well, yup you guessed it, her shared one of them with Warren who most of you know is a big Pilsner fan! Most of the people here from France do not speak English so I have been practising my rusty french with some of them
We plan on just relaxing on our beautiful beach and enjoying the ocean for our last two days on the island. I think I have read 6 books since we got to the island. The book exchange at the resort is a handy
thing. Monday we fly to Saigon and on to Bangkok for an overnight then on to Hong Kong for a night and leave for Vancouver 6:30 p.m. Wed and get home on Wed at 11:20 p.m. We get home before we leave kind of thing!! We are glad we booked a room in Hong Kong as apparently they are heavily booked due to the Japanese people who can afford it or can get time of work moving over to Hong Kong during the nucelar scare.
Thanks again for reading our blog for 2011. See you back in Canada!
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anonymous
non-member comment
How can you top this!
Your blogs have been awesome. Worthwhile publishing somehow, somewhere.Thanks for the education!