Vietnam Recap, Part 3

What else is there to say? It was a good vacation for me. I didn’t worry about anything. Well… because I didn’t worry about anything, my mind made up all sorts of stuff to worry about.

This is where we stayed, at the Thanh Kieu Resort (84 0773848394). Because it was Vietnamese New Years, we paid triple, or about $45 a night to stay in an un-air-conditioned bungalow on the beach. But all-in-all, it was good. I would go back. The hotel staff were not professional and only the daughter of the owner (who was on a working vacation, visiting from her home in Hochiminh) could speak English. But they were good to us.

I think the town and harbor of Phu Quoc is very quaint, but like much of Vietnam, is very poor.

BTW, you may notice that many of the pictures seem dark, even on the beach. We tried to keep the kids out of the sun during the day and only went into water in the morning and around 4 PM. On our first day to Phu Quoc, we got excited and went into the water, then got sunburned. And then Akiva and Haga got a “sunburn fever”.

We went on a snorkeling trip. Kenaz went in the water a little, but Akiva really got into it. For me, it was probably the best, prettiest coral I have seen. Akiva loved it, but he would not shut his mouth.

“Daddy, what’s that?”
“Coral”
“Daddy what’s that?”
“Another type of Coral”
“Daddy what’s that?”
“Sea Urchin. Akiva, keep your mouth shut and just look”
“Daddy what’s that fish looking thing?”
“A fish. Akiva I can’t lift my head here to talk to you because then I’ll sink and touch the coral.”
“Why can’t you touch the coral?”
“Because that is not good. Just be quite and watch”
“But why can’t you touch the coral?”
“Because I will scratch and cut myself, like I just did. So just put your face in the water and look around and stop talking please”
“But daddy why did you cut yourself on the coral? Is it dangerous?”

The only problem with this trip was coming home. We didn’t book a return flight from Phu Quoc in advance because we did not know if we would like it or not. So when we arrived, there were already no airplanes back to Hochiminh city. There were no boats available either until 3 days after our return-to-Shanghai reservation. Vietnamese all travel home during Vietnamese New Years, just like Chinese. All the sons and daughters of Phu Quoc’s fishermen live and work in HCMC. We had to fight for a boat ticket. Then we took a boat from Phu Quoc to Rach Gia, then a 7 hour bus ride, at the back of a van, over bumpy roads, to HCMC. And when we got to HCMC, they couldn’t get the luggage compartment of the bus open, so we waited another hour until past midnight. The next day we went to the airport at 11PM to catch a flight at 1AM, which was delayed until 2AM, to travel back to Shanghai. The kids both got fevers and were tired out, but luckily we got through health quaranteen in Shanghai. We are mostly OK now, though still a little weak and tired from the last two days of the travel.

FYI, this is going to be the last post here for about 2-3 weeks. We are going to switch from the Blogger blog-posting system to WordPress. There are several reasons for this, including that the Blogger tools are blocked in China, and also that Blogger will stop providing FTP support (so it will not hook-up with our blog server) anymore. So we are going to do a redesign, but hopefully keep everything intact.

To all our friends and family, we miss you. We hope on our next vacation we will get to see some of our loved ones.