And now, for something a little more relaxing. We spent four nights on the island of Phu Quoc at La Veranda hotel. I highly recommend a stop here - both on the island and at La Veranda. Below are some pictures of the beach in front of the hotel - basically where we spent all day every day.
A view in each direction down the beach from our hotel. This beach is known as "long beach" and is lined with bars, restaurants, and hotels. You can easily find lunch, drinks, or dinner anywhere along this beach. The waves were calm while we were there - they may always be this calm but I'm not sure. The water was perfectly clean and clear too, no worries about seaweed, garbage, sharks, etc.
The calm ocean (Gulf of Thailand):
Every morning we enjoyed an hour of yoga on the beach - and it was somewhat strenuous vinyasa yoga with some good stretching thrown in which is exactly what I'd hoped it would be. We really missed this after we left.
And this is the fruit lady - she wandered up and down the beach all day carrying baskets of fruit. We bought a mango, passion fruit, and two bananas from her one day for $1. She's the best thing that ever happened to me. ;)
One of the hotel buildings with a few rooms in it (not ours - these were the nicer rooms lol). These were interspersed throughout the grounds, surrounded by trees which gave a nice feeling of privacy. The hotel grounds consisted of relatively narrow paths lined with greenery. It was kind of neat though we did get lost a few times before we learned the way from our room to the beach.
We did not have a spectacular sunset any of our 4 nights there. There was always this low bank of clouds right on the horizon that the sun slipped behind and that was it. But, here are the pictures we did manage to take.
Some night shots of one of the hotel restaurants (one on the beach and one on the second floor of the building in the background) and some trees and the jungle-lined paths at night:
We only ate at the hotel one night - they gave us a complimentary dinner to compensate us for some construction that was occurring down the beach. It didn't really affect us but we certainly got in on the free dinner! It happened to be a 6-course dinner and several of the courses we could have done without. I had a piece of fish for one that was so dry I could barely eat it.
We actually found a restaurant in town (the town is called Duong Dong - I think the only town on the island?) that we loved called Hai Nam. Here you can choose a fish from the front of the restaurant (they're on ice, not alive) and they will bbq it for you with lemongrass, garlic, and ginger and it is amazing. Possibly the best fish I've had. We went there twice, we enjoyed it so much. Phu Quoc is also known for its pepper and the way to eat fish there is to dip it in a small bowl of pepper, salt, and lime juice (seen on the table in front of Martin). It was pretty tasty.
Our first night at Hai Nam was Thanksgiving day in the US so we treated ourselves to dessert and received the saddest, smallest-ever piece of Tiramisu. It tasted good at least, all two bites of it.
On our second night at Hai Nam we did even better at ordering and had a feast. Have I mentioned that they do amazing things with eggplant in this part of the world?
The second restaurant we tried on the island was the Crab House. Here, you can eat crab. Also, other types of shellfish. That's about it. It's also very small but the food is really good if you enjoy shellfish.
And naturally, we enjoyed pre-dinner cocktails at the La Veranda bar and also at the bar next door where all the young'uns hung out, Rory's. Every bar had happy hour every evening, which was nice.
One night we wandered around the Night Market in town. It was bigger than I had expected and we did manage to buy a few souvenirs and Christmas gifts here. But it's mostly fish, bracelets/jewelry, and elephant pants. Here are a few pictures from it:
And that sums up everything we did during our 3 full days on Phu Quoc.
Oh and these were the fun frogs that hung out at La Veranda up by the reception desk. I think they sound really neat.
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