Phu Quoc

The Lonely Planet Guide - and Lianne, who came here as part of her travels last year - were right - Phu Quoc is everything a tropical island is supposed to be. It's lined with exquisite white-sand beaches fringed with swaying palm-trees and gently lapping turquoise waters. Around the shores, the harbours and fishing villages are dotted with hundreds of green-and-turquoise painted fishing boats, all flying the red-and-yellow-starred Vietnamese flag. Very colourful indeed! Further inland, dense tropical jungle - some of it a protected National Park - provides an exotic backdrop. This tear-shaped Vietnamese-owned island (ownership disputed by Cambodia*) lies in the Gulf of Thailand, about 15km south of the Cambodian coast. So far, too, Phu Quoc is delightfully under-developed - though, like much of the East Coast of Vietnam that we saw last year, this surely won't last.

[* Over the past few weeks, UN-chaired meetings about disputed terroritory have been taking place in Phnom Penh, with some agreement already reached between Cambodia and Thailand about removing troops from the troubled Preah Vihear area on their shared border. Not sure if the ownership of Phu Quoc is also on the agenda, though. Oh, and while we're doing the local current affairs bit, we've also learned that the UK and Vietnam have recently signed a Strategic Parnership agreement, to increase trade and business between the two countries, which includes agreement for the first direct flights to Vietnam from the UK by the end of this year (2011). The same article also pointed out that Bradford College is hosting the Vietnamese Olympic Team for its pre-Games training, and that the British-owned 'Man from the Pru' is the single biggest foreign employer in Vietnam.]

Anyway, back to Phu Quoc .... We've spent the past 12 days, including Christmas and Boxing Day, just chilling out here, doing proper 'holiday' stuff. Apart from lazing on sun-loungers on the beach, slipping into the calm waters for a cooling swim now and then, we've been on a couple of snorkling/fishing boat trips. One of these took us to the An Thoi archipelago to the south of the island, where we sailed around several small islands/islets, including Thom (Pineapple) Island, stopping to eat a BBQ fish-lunch, including, a first for us: barbecued sea urchin, which, disappointingly, tasted more of the satay (peanut) sauce than anything. We also took a similar boat-trip to to swim/snorkle around Fingernail Islet, just off the north-west coast, from where it's possible to look over the neighbouring, Cambodian-owned Islands only 4Km away.

As part of these trips, we've also visited a pearl farm (strangely, I had never even thought about the meaning of 'mother-of-pearl' until we learned about the way the farm 'nucleates' the oyster using a 'bead' prepared from mother-of-pearl (the shiny inside of an oyster shell), by taking a small piece of mantle tissue from the 'donor' oyster to implant into the receiving oyster's gonad); we've trekked through the National Park for an hour or so, unsuccessfully looking for wildlife such as deer and monkeys (though we HAVE seen sea-eagles soaring over the nearby harbour). In the National Park, we visited a small pepper farm run by a Vietnamese woman living alone, save for several dogs, in the Park's only dwelling place - itself reminiscent of a Greenham Common encampment (did we call them 'bender' tents - I can't remember? Geoff may, though!). Here, we were offered, but declined, Vietnamese 'whisky' from two large glass containers - one with the pickled bodies of several snakes, seahorses and lizards, the other with a variety of pickled insects and wildlife - including the whole skeleton of a baby monkey!

We also visited a fish-sauce factory, where Andy tried his best to assist the men loading a boat with containers of fish-sauce, as part of a human chain, each man carrying two 20-litre plastic containers on the ends of a bamboo pole strung, Vietnamese-style, over his shoulder. The strange little bobbing up and down 'dance', rather than walk, that people carrying all kinds of goods this way learn to acquire, is to prevent the containers (of whatever kind) from starting to swing, which, given the weight they thereby manage to carry, would otherwise make the whole caboodle completely uncontrollable.

Our hotel, the Coi Nuong, is very comfortable, but also very 'quirky' in many ways. From the inside, our room itself is great - very large, with two huge double beds, a small ante-room with table and chairs, a fridge, and a fairly sizeable bathroom (well, shower-room, actually). But there's something about the set-up which reminds me a lot of the Soviet-era sanitoriums (sanitoria?) which I saw in and around Yalta, in the Crimea, several years ago. There's a pleasant, but slightly abandoned-looking garden with several empty concrete-lined ponds, beside which the rendered terraces of 'Butlins'-like chalet-rooms are located, each chalet having the really thin aluminium-framed doors and windows so popular in Russia and Eastern Europe. There's a large three-storey building where the Hotel Reception, and a huge pearl retail outlet, are housed on the ground floor, but it's not at all clear what the first and second floors contain - have certainly not seen any hotel guests coming and going there. The staff, though, are very pleasant, and one or two of them have a bit of English, which they enjoy trying out on us. One of our waitresses asked me the English for the spoon on our table. After writing it out for her, and pronouncing it as clearly as I could, we went on to the rest of the items on our table. However, despite my best, but fruitless, endeavours, I couldn't dissuade her from assuming that EVERY item began with an 's' sound. So, we now have a sfork, a splate, a sbowl, a sglass, and a snapkin! Good job I'm retired from teaching/training!

As for food, we've had some really wonderful - and inexpensive - seafood meals here, in ln some of the half-dozen or so beach-side restaurants about 5 minutes'walk from the hotel. We've particularly enjoyed a couple of lovely lantern-strewn beach restaurants where we've sat and eaten less than 2 feet from where the lapping waves reach. It's quite exciting, sometimes, just wondering if the occasional audacious wave might JUST reach far enough to tickle our toes under the table! We've also been several times to a very lively Australian-owned, but Mexican-themed bar, Amigos, where we've spent a few nights over a beer or two (or occasionally, a Cointreau or two) listening to some live music, and from where we managed to make a few Skype calls to our families on Christmas Day.

Actually, it was in Amigos on the day we arrived here that I was - perhaps paradoxically - reminded of our Christmas in Vietnam last year. I overheard a crowd of young Aussies whooping, cheering and hugging each other with delight at the news that a good friend would, after all, be flying out to join them in time for Christmas. Their joy immediately brought back the almost exactly opposite feelings we had experienced last year when we learned, with only a week to go, that our good friend, Cynthia, would NOT after all be joining us for Christmas, snowed in as she then was in Bridport! Hope you're faring better this year, on your walking tour of the Yorkshire Dales, Cynth.

And, while we're about it, hope you've all had a really good time over the Christmas festivities, and we wish you all a happy, healthy and prosperous (despite the Coalition Government's best efforts!) 2012.

This is Us - Taking-off for KL!