So we’ve had a great time so far in Phu Quoc, and don’t really want to leave. We pack up at Beach Club and move next door, and within an hour we both REALLY want to leave! We realise pretty quickly we’ve made a mistake – you know when you get a bad feeling about a place, well we’ve both got it and in spades. Our “bungalow” is actually an end-of-terrace, and given it’s apparently the biggest and best (read: most expensive) room in the place we’re surprised to see it’s less than half the size of the (real) bungalows next door (for a 50% uplift in cost). In fact, the only redeeming feature about the room is that it has AC, but this is a moot point when the power fails and they don’t bother to put the backup generator on (power failure is a fact of life on Phu Quoc, there are brown- and blackouts all the time, but all businesses have generators that they can turn to to provide power during these times – unfortunately Paris Beach don’t seem to value their paying guests that much!) The staff are just too friendly – really overbearingly so to the point of being extremely intrusive. I don’t like this too much and quickly get a reputation for being “serious” which I don’t mind as it keeps them away from me! Compared to Beach Club this place is really not great at all, and we’re both seriously questioning the reviews (we’ll fix that later, don’t you worry...) – I mean, even getting down onto the beach requires climbing gear and a healthy attitude towards personal disregard for safety! We decide to do a Bo Peep and head down to the town to pick up our dive kit from Rainbow and grab a couple of beers and maybe an early dinner. But even then, the Gods are not looking down on us favourably. It’s still the tail end of the rainy season and we’ve had quite a few big storms (and I mean REALLY BIG thunder storms) but they’ve mostly been at night. Unfortunately, as we head down the road to town we get caught out in one and by the time we can find a place to jump into for shelter we’re both properly soaked – from the front anyway, we’re OK from the back! Still, like most of the storms, it disappears fairly quickly, we enjoy a beer while drying off (even though we’ve just jumped into a restaurant to avoid the weather, the typically helpful staff offer us towels etc.), then pick up our kit (Rainbow’s new generator is working very well!) and head out for food and beers, then back for sleep!
We’d got plans to avoid Paris Beach the next day by renting a bike and seeing a bit more of the island, but we have a massive storm overnight and it doesn’t properly let up until late the next morning – this isn’t helping Linda who’s now got a bad cold and chest infection, courtesy of Thom the Rainbow DM. After the storm finally subsides we decide to chill out some by leaving Paris Beach and walking up long beach into town, grabbing late lunch (and a nice swim) on the way, then grabbing some beers and dinner on the way back, prior to packing and getting ready to leave PQ. We’re almost caught by another torrential downpour but get lucky this time and dive into a local bar which turns out to be pretty good. Then we head back, pack, and drop into bed ready for an early start.
We leave PQ, and while we’ve had a great time for the most part, we’re not sad to go – we both ponder what the future holds for the place: from our trips down the beach and into town, it seems obvious that there are already tour packages available to come here and this market will definitely grow as there are new hotels being built right now and a new (international) airport is planned for the near future. I think Phu Quoc’s quiet time has been and gone, but it’s still possible to get bungalows on a beach at a pretty decent price if you know where to look so it’s still a long way off the busier places in Thailand.
So we head back to Saigon, and it’s like greeting an old friend. We go back to Saigon Mini Hotel 5 and the staff recognises us when we enter – it’s genuinely touching, and they’ve actually given us the same room! One thing I should mention about Saigon, and particularly the backpacker areas in district 1, is the concept of the mini hotel. Essentially, these are very narrow, quite long and pretty tall buildings – by narrow, I mean the width of one room, our hotel was narrower than our house at home, but 10 storeys tall! It’s quite unnerving, particularly when you take breakfast on the top floor! We then head out to sort out final bits and pieces before departing for Thailand in the morning. We also dress up and head out for a nice dinner – it is our 9th wedding anniversary after all!
We’re both genuinely sad to be leaving Vietnam. It’s fair to say that when we booked up the trip and sorted out our schedule, we we’re both very comfortable with the Thailand stuff but didn’t know what to expect of Cambodia and Vietnam, and both countries have surprised us inordinately. In fact, we’re now regretting being slightly too prescriptive in our scheduling as given the option, we’d have both opted to head up north and see a lot more of Vietnam – we both agree it’s probably the best country we’ve been to in a very long time and we’ve already decided that we need to come back here and see more of the place – and we also need to get over into Laos too before that becomes too busy. The people are hugely friendly, everything is pretty laid back, and the cities feel organic and full of life – and the strength of the £ (or almighty US$) versus the VND makes it a very cheap place to visit. Get yourselves out here before it becomes as busy as Thailand! (Incidentally, Facebook is banned out in Vietnam, but we’ve managed without it for a couple of weeks so it’s not too much of a bind really!)
