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Phu Quoc was amazing, all we had hoped it would be (and the Lonely Planet had promised), and a fine way to finish our Vietnam travels! Our holiday from travelling for four days (which turned into five), and despite past failures at enjoying extended beach time, with neither Paula nor myself being naturals at the "activity" known as sunbathing, the sparsely populated, coconut palm fringed beaches, with sand so soft you'd think it'd been sieved, the warm, clear sea water of the Gulf of Thailand and the chilled out backpacker vibe within the bamboo roofed bungalows and bars made it impossible to do anything but relax. And add to that mixture a few ice-cold beers, BBQ-ed seafood, some snorkelling over nearby coral reefs, a beach massage and a bit of cycling along dusty, red coast-side dirt tracks, and it was absolutely our tropical paradise!
I haven't much to add to that, as we didn't do very much! Sara's birthday on day four was naturally the most significant one of our stay, and this was our chosen boat trip day, with snorkelling, around the smaller, southern islands. Then followed by slightly more food (birthday curry again, and probably the best of the recent three!) and a lot more drink than an average Phu Quoc day, but nothing massively different from the norm! A great day, though, despite a near death experience late on thanks to a falling coconut!
However, one final bit of additional news, Phu Quoc did pick up an award, that of best menu of the trip so far. A lovely little veggie restaurant, looked after by a small and incredibly smiley handful of young locals. They had very little grasp of English, and so to produce the English descriptions of the meals on their menu, they had blantantly just used Google Translate or some equivalent. Which would be fine with many languages, but the difficulty with Vietnamese is that there are six different vowel accents, so, for example, the word "ma" can mean "mother", "rice seedling", "horse", "ghost", "gravestone" or "but" (so a bit too easy to accidentally insult someone's mother, I think!), depending upon which variation is used. A combination of non-Vietnamese keyboards and Google clearly cannot handle this. Subsequently, some of the options on the menu included, alongside normal items such as seaweed soup and vegetable fried rice, "Building Great Post Office Discharge", "Rotten Narrow Table South Brazil Wood", and varieties of tofu dish such as Malaysian (normal, excellent), "express" (well, quick delivery is fine), "Port Security" (?), "Mushroom Indigestion" (hmm, started OK, but...), "Bride" (? again!) and "Urinary Chicken Rice"! Lovely!
And that brings us to the end of Vietnam! Off to Cambodia next, for Christmas by the beach, a visit Angkor Wat, the so-called "eighth wonder of the world", and maybe a bit of jungle exploration on elephants!
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