Blogging Pubbitch

Phu Quoc Island is a quiet place, as yet mostly unmauled by tourism. As such, there's not much to do there, especially if the weather is ropey and you don't have a 4x4 (normal cars being rendered a poor choice by the lack of proper roads on much of the island)

We spent a happy morning walking up and down the beach, which was covered in a charming mixture of flotsam and jetsam and could only be described as "filthy" To be fair, this might have been caused by the previous few days' terrible weather, but if you ever find yourself heading there, don't believe the hype.

The other thing we did was walk into Duong Dong, the nearby town. We felt like royalty as we walked around. The reason was that everyone was waving at us and shouting "hello!" and it took us a while to figure out what was to us quite un-Vietnamese behaviour. There were hardly any western tourists, and we only saw 4 that were our age, none of those in town; we were a novelty! It was great: the people really made us feel welcome, unlike elsewhere where we felt more like walking piggy-banks (the kind that need to be broken open before anything comes out)

Despite this, the weather still looked ropey, so we caught the innocently named "Super Dong" speed boat to Rach Gia, an strangely empty local bus to Long Xuyen and then another back to Chau Doc along roads where the bridges seemed to have been built with a large step up to them, before grabbing some food and suffering one of the bigger upsets on our journey.