Phu Quoc Island

Val and I left Ha Tien early with our moto drivers, who had arranged us passage to the island aboard one of there friends boats. Was pissing down with rain, fun times with a backpack and two grown men on a scooter, they do surprisingly well though, I've seen a family of 6 on one little bike, I've seen a man and 3 large live pigs on one, I've seen 4 male adults crammed on one.

At least I had a helmet, they told Val to wear her straw hat to keep off the rain. Once we got to the little port town we met the captain then had breakfast, we were then told we had to take a small boat along the river to the harbour/ river mouth, but we had to leave our packs on the boat, which we did, was a bit sketch but some Vietnamese dudes were doing it as well. The purpose was to bypass the police checkpoint so the boat captain would not have to pay taxes on his illegal? passengers. We then swapped from the small long tail to the big fishing boat mid-river. We then got placed kind of between decks, I could not set up straight but could stretch out my legs, at least we were out of the rain. Four Vietnamese dudes were on the same deck, none spoke English and all were poor. They consumed a large quantity of rice wine and became very amicable. Val and I shared what food we had with them. At one point I could here ducks quacking and a sack near me started to wriggle and a ducks head popped out a hole in the sack, was fairly random. I had taken a sea sickness pill before we left, would have been sick otherwise, many of the other passengers were. The boat in all took around 4 hours and is not recommended by Lonely Planet ;).

Once we docked we were overwhelmed by the usual swarm of moto drivers, found one who spoke English, haggled him down to half price and got a ride over to the other coast to the main tourist beach and our bungalow on the beach for $7 US a night. The beach was very nice, white sand, but the water was not very clear due to a few recent storms.

Next day we hired a bike and I rode us around the Northern part of the Island, red mud roads on. The bike was a piece and the roads were shocking, but we had a blast, lots of nice beaches to pull over and swim at, and fuck all people about. Both my legs were covered in red mud by the end as I had to brace few times when the bike went out of the mud ruts. Got very sunburned on my face as neglected to put sunblock on after swimming. Headed back to our bungalows around two for a brake, went to take the bike out later on but it was misbehaving so got another bike which we rode a couple of kms up the road to find it had a flat back tire, fun times pushing back home, luckily one of the bungalow moto drivers saw us and traded bikes.

The following day the typhoon hit us, high winds and a shit load of rain, luckily we only caught the edge of it, apparently it was alot worse in the central Vietnam. Still it meant no boats were running so a hydrofoil to Rach Gia was out. We waited out the storm for a couple of days, was a nice place to do it, no early morning wake ups and no annoying traffic like the rest of Vietnam. Walked along the beach into town a few times to check the net and get some beers and food. Ended up getting a flight from the Island to Saigon for $33 US. So it was big city on.