The Edible Island

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Welcome back to Phu Quoc Island.

We have been here for some time now and have had some fun and some not so fun. I will talk about the fun since we can always regail people with not so fun stories if they desire.

I am now officially an open water scuba diver after 4 dives aboard the SS. Rainbow Divers boat. Got to see all kinds of neat critters under the water like blue speckled moray eels and nudibranches. Caroline got to join me on my last dive and since my instructor and I felt she was missing out from all my skill testing and lessons we decided we would leave the 50 m surface swim with compass skill until the end so she could enjoy it as well. Well when we popped up around 70 m from the boat she didn't seem impressed, oh well. She had fun nonetheless. She was probably relieved since on the 2nd dive the underwater current was so strong that she could barely make it to the dive site. I cheated by descending down the anchor line and did some skills like taking off mask under water and such so didn't have to deal too much with the current.

We found a nice place here on the island (you have to be careful since you can eat kangaroo and weasel here as well) at the Tropicana resort just down the way. Waiters are very friendly and excited about everything you eat, particularly when Caroline ordered fish and asked what kind it was. According to our waiter it was Bob (or sounded something like that). So Caroline ate Bob the other night. He was good. The guys at the Scuba bar said they'll miss Bob, and his stories (they're somewhat bonkers).

Since they have the Asian Bird Flu here in parts of Vietnam no one is serving chicken. Its quite fun, you ask for chicken and they frown and shake their heads. You ask why not and they say: "Chicken is sick". Stick with Bob.

We also rented some bikes to putter around the island (well specifically to look for some pearl farm (never found)). We did see a lot of trash and friendly kids who love to yell out "Hello!". Plenty of giggles when you answer back. We finally decided to turn around when a bunch of old vietnamese guys asked me if I wanted to sample some of their snake wine. I don't like snakes on the ground why am I going to want to drink wine from a bottle with a snake in it?? Usually a cobra and sometimes a green snake for extra flavor - apparently it cures all your problems (or in my mind causes some worse than what you had already).

We fly back to Saigon tomorrow and will be booking a one-day tour in the Mekong Delta. We stayed here one more day instead of taking a 2-day tour (seen plenty of rice paddies already).

We also discovered the mysteries of sweat. Sweat (pronounced sweet) is some form of potato like vegetable that is commonly eaten in Viet Nam although the person I told that we had some as dessert sort of looked at me puzzingly and laughed.

Thats all for now.

Chao Tambiet!

Ken (and Caroline)

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