Flashpackers: Phu Quoc, ya Basseh

Phu Quoc (try saying that 10 times really really fast), is an island in the Gulf of Thailand, south of Vietnam. Well, to be accurate, it's south of Cambodia, but it's part of Vietnam (the Cambodians don't feel the same way though, perhaps understandably!).
None of that really matters though, what does matter is that we flew down there for 5 days, and got to look at the island before development and tourism take off.

We flew down about a week before Tet, and the flights were filling up fast with people returning home to visit relatives.
We mistakenly thought that this would mean that the hotels would be full, and decided to book a hotel over the phone - but hey, it was early and we were hung over. People going home to visit relatives, stay with their relatives, not in hotels.
There are only 8 places to stay on the island, all on the same stretch of beach, and we started ringing numbers listed in the Lonely Planet (hereafter referred to as the LP, Emergency Toilet Paper - ETP, or Should be Helpful In a Toilet Emergency - SHITE), we accepted a room in the first place that answered.

The LP describes it as follows:
The Thousand Stars Resort.
There's a beautiful beach here, with delightful plaster animals (not live ones, for a change) welcoming guests along the entry path. The beachfront restaurant is a superb place for drinks or a seafood dinner at sunset.

The FlashPacker Guide differs from this description:
The Thousand Stars Resort:
This monument to bad taste occupies what would have been a nice stretch of beach if the Thousand Stars Resort, the family that owns it, and all of their ancestors had never existed.
The pointless ugliness of the deformed plaster "animals" lining the drive way is only exceeded by the plaster downs syndrome dolphins on the beach. Whoever it was that thought that erecting giant plaster replicas of the Sydney Opera House, the Petronas Towers and Bangkok's Emerald Temple would be a nice addition to a tropical island beach resort should have their arse painted red and be let loose in a cage full of sex starved baboons.
Should you be unfortunate enough to find yourself there, our advice is to check out immediately, walk 1 kilometer south along the beach to the Beach Club (taking care to avoid the used needles and other rubbish that the Thousand Stars haven't bothered to clean up), and stay there.

This is exactly what we did. We spent 2 hours at Thousand Stars, and that is 2 hours of my life I will never get back.

The Beach Club is definitely a great place to spend a lazy few days. There is a clean beach with lots of deck chairs, large bungalows with all the mod cons and a thatched roof, and good food. Its run by an English expat and his Vietnamese wife.
Its the last of the 8 resorts as you head south down the west coast of the island, all there is after that is a 20 kilometer stretch of undeveloped beach dotted with little fishing hamlets like the one you can see below.
You can't see the cute rattan huts in the picture, but there were usually 8 or 10 of them in each hamlet, and that was about it: Huts, Boats and Beach.

cute little round boats the fishermen use to get out to their boats

It was Traci's birthday on the day we arrived, so as soon as she was out of earshot, I snuck off and asked the kitchen staff to go to the market to buy us some seafood for dinner (blue swimmer crabs and giant sized prawns).
We lay in sun loungers on the beach and drank beer, listened to music (DJ Kicks: Nightmares On Wax - do your ears a favour and get it), went swimming, and generally just chilled out in the sun.
Later in the afternoon we went into the main town on the island so that Trace could ring her parents, and while she was on the phone I walked around trying to find a place to buy some candles so I could make some kind of birthday cake. This was a lot harder than you might think, even though I'm sure that nearly every shop I went into sold them - try miming a candle and see how far it gets you.
Finally a young lad in one of the shops got my mime, and understood birthday, but said they didn't have any. Fortunately an old lady in the shop heard the lad telling the owner that I wanted birthday candles for my girlfriend and thought the idea was wonderful, she flashed me a toothless grin, grabbed my arm, and walked me to a shop that had some. Vietnam wins the cute old lady prize hands down.

I couldn't find a cake. I'm sure there were loads of them around, but even with my candles, the mime didn't work - even when singing happy birthday. Perhaps my karaoke/charades skills need some work!
We got back to the Beach Club and I had a brainwave. I headed down the beach and found a green coconut, chopped off the bottom so it would sit flat and dug a small hole in the top for the candle.

Pen and Mark

We sat watching the sunset with really nice couple we had met, Mark and Pen from England (we ended up sharing more than a few beers and fun times), and waited for our food to come out.

When the food did eventually did come out, I carried the candle out to our table by the beach. There was so much of food that we invited Pen and Mark to join us. We sat there for hours picking crabs to bits and drinking beers.

We spent the whole of the next day laying on the beach nursing hangovers..... But I could think of worse things to be doing :)

The next two days were spent exploring the island on a rented bike. We drove up to the tip of the island to a seafood restaurant that had been recommended to us, and its pretty much the same story in that direction too: miles and miles of deserted tropical beaches. It took us about 2 hours to travel the 30ks, we were stopping that often to look at everything.

There are lots of old decaying boats on the beaches. Really gives the place a desert island feel

The restaurant was in a cove on the north western tip of the island, overlooking Cambodia. We sat in a little wooden shack on the beach looking at the sea and ordered more crab, this time stir fried with fresh tamarind, palm sugar, and a few other spices. We also ordered some black king fish fillets which were served with a pepper dipping sauce made from Phu Quoc grown pepper.
I cant remember having ever tasted crab that good.

The islands you see in the top of the picture are Cambodian

The view from our table

Crab, fish, beer, rice. AUD$4.
Views, priceless.

The next day was pretty much a carbon copy of the last, but heading south, to a white powdery sand beach, and another beachside seafood restaurant. We ordered (yes you guessed it).... crab with tamarind! But this time we got to pick our own, fishing them out of a tank.
I think the local population of crabs will take years to recover from our visit.