Phu Quoc Island
Trip Start
Jan 23, 2006
1
2
6
Trip End
Feb 05, 2006
Duong Dong, Vietnam
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Lloyd and I stayed in Beach Club, the place with the unimaginative name, but everything else going for it. It's situated at the south end of long beach and it's nearest neighbor, the Thousand Stars Resort is a five minute walk away and nearly out of sight. This is a good thing, since the Thousand Stars is know primarily for it's odd collection of concrete monstrosities, including a miniature Petronas Towers, a bigger than (imaginary) life-size mermaid, and a flock of swans. The mermaid has incredibly perky (pointy?) boobs, complete with realistic red nipples that invite drunken nighttime beach strollers to stop and take exceedingly strange photographs of each other (I will not name names).
If you continue south from Beach Club, you will hit 2 fishing villages and a pearl farm in 5 kilometers of beach. After that, much of the same, although a small sign along the beach-front dirt road promises the construction of a five star resort atop a filled-in mangrove swamp. In the last 3 to 5 years, Long Beach has gone from sleepy backwater to prime vacation destination and huge new resorts are going in up and down Long Beach. The survival of small, family run places like Beach Club may be in doubt.
Our 3 days at Beach Club went pretty-much like this:
sometime between 8-11: get up, throw a swim suit and maybe a t-shirt on, walk 50 feet to restaurant, eat omelette and baguette (the best contribution the French made to Vietnam), drink some sort of fabulous fruit concoction and strong, sweet Vietnamese Coffee.
migrate to beach loungers under palm leaf umbrellas to read/sleep/stare at the horizon, occasionally jumping in the ocean to cool off, if necessary.
wander back up to restaurant to eat a lemon grass/chili concoction and have another fruity drink.
now we would enter the "active" part of the day: one day it was a walk up the beach for a few kms, one it was renting motos to cruise around the south side of the island, another it was the Long Beach Crawl.
It would be very easy to get used to this sort of lifestyle.
