Mekong Delta & Phu Quoc Island...the written part

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We’re back again and slowly trying to catch up. In an attempt to use our time efficiently here in the internet cafe, Matt is going to publish a photo blog (so he can start uploading the pictures) while I write a separate blog.

Our last blog left off in Ho Chi Minh City. This was the end of our Open Tour bus ticket, and so we started off on our own to explore the very south of Vietnam and the Mekong Delta. While the Open Tour buses were easy and convenient, the minibuses we negotiated for ourselves were adventurous and confusing. It seemed we were always transferring from one to another and were never quite sure that we were headed in the right direction. Our ultimate goal was Phu Quoc Island, in the very south, but we decided to make some stops along the way in order to see the Mekong Delta. We spent our first night in Chau Doc, a surprisingly charming town that follows the banks of one of the Mekong’s tributaries. We were dropped off by our minibus on the outskirts of town, and because our Lonely Planet book didn’t have a map of the town (this book sadly becomes every traveler’s best friend and it is not uncommon to see just about every Westerner with their head buried in it as they meander the streets of whatever town we’re in) and no one seemed to even slightly understand basic English, we ended up wandering the streets for a almost an hour before finding a decent hotel.

We organized our own Mekong Delta tour that wasn’t part of one of the big tour groups and it was definitely the way to go! We woke up the next morning at 5am to be on the boat by sunrise. Our boat cruised up the river to the various floating markets (where all the boat people gather to sell produce and other food), then continued on to a noodle factory and a fruit orchard. It was awesome to see the river life as it really is, and not commoditized for tourists!

We made it back to Chau Doc by mid-afternoon and caught another minibus down to Rach Gia, where we spent the night in preparation to leave on the ferry to Phu Quoc Island the next morning. After a two and half hour ferry ride (with many seasick Vietnamese-they seem to all get really carsick too!) we arrived in Phu Quoc Island, which is a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of Vietnam. While driving down the Vietnamese coast, there is literally not a single spot along the highway that isn’t occupied by some sort of store or house or other building. Finally, in Phu Quoc we saw open land!

We stayed at an awesome little guesthouse, Nhat Lan, that had bungalows surrounding a little garden and it’s own little section of beach. It was at the very end of Long Beach, the main beach on the island, so we had a little more privacy-not that we really needed it though with how relaxed it was there! Our guesthouse’s restaurant had awesome food that they would serve to us right on the beach! We rented a motorcycle the first afternoon and set off down the west coast of the island. There were long expanses of deserted beach interspersed with tiny fishing villages.

The next day we decided we were going to head north from our guesthouse by motorbike, and try to circle the entire island, finding deserted beaches and a mountain peak that supposedly existed somewhere near the top of the island. Well, soon after leaving our main beach area, we ended up on dirt tracks barely wide enough for a bicycle. We just assumed that the road system wasn’t too well developed on the island and kept going, thinking we were following our map. We finally thought we had reach the north coast of the island, when we made a turn and realized we were somehow back at our main beach, right where we had started. So, in about 3 hours of driving, we had made it absolutely nowhere. We set off again, thinking maybe we took the wrong turn out of town, but that road quickly turned into a soggy swamp of mud. Almost four hours later, frustrated and defeated, we went back to our guesthouse and spent the rest of the afternoon lounging on our beach-and watching an absolutely gorgeous sunset that hopefully Matt posts some pictures of!

The next day we took a snorkel tour of the An Thoi islands off the southern end of Phu Quoc. We were disappointed by the snorkeling-the reefs were completely dead (and our guides spent the entire time collecting sea urchins to feast upon, which is obviously not helping the reefs much). However, we had a great group on the boat and enjoyed cruising around and hanging out with everyone.

Our last day in Vietnam was spent making it from the island to the Cambodian border. It was quite a hassle and the minibuses tried desperately to rip us off. The hilarious part was that we knew how much it should cost, and they knew that we knew, yet we still couldn’t seem to manage to get a fair price. It was quite an ordeal, that left us pretty sour at the time, but luckily we’ve gotten over it by now. We did, however, spend most of the bus ride scheming about getting the U.S. government to set special “Vietnamese” prices just to get back at them. Oh well.

We spent one last night in Vietnam that true to the rest of our day also proved quite interesting. After settling into our room, the hotel realized that our Vietnam visas had expired, which according to the frantic girl who came to usher us out of our room would be quite a problem if the police checked the hotel. So, we were ushered into some upstairs, hidden room that the police didn’t know existed, to spend the night being eaten alive by mosquitoes (I had at least 15 bites on my forehead alone the next morning).
The next morning we crossed the border by boat - paid off a few immigration officers to make-up for our expired visas- and began our journey into Cambodia.

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Photos

Phu Quoc island
on our first motorbike cruise...not the one where we got lost