Going to the Beach!

During our Cambodia trip we were talking about and dreaming about the beach.

Our conversations would generally go something like this:
"It's so hot! I don't even want to move...."
"You know what would be great right now? The beach...."
"Ah, the beach..." and then we'd look dreamily off, and think about being able to sit and do nothing, with brief dips in the water to cool off.
The conversation would generally stop here, partially because of the daydreaming, but also because it was too hot to even carry on a conversation.


We knew already that we had beach time coming up--we had already booked our tickets to fly to Phu Quoc island for 5 days to do just this. Phu Quoc is an island to the south of Vietnam, right near the Cambodian border (and Cambodia still claims it as theirs, which is why Vietnam has military bases on it).






Before we went to Phu Quoc, we had a couple days in Saigon. There were a few things I noticed in this short time.

One was all the topiaries! (A topiary is a sculptured plant--Nile taught me this word while we were there). The trees were all so meticulously pruned? We even saw someone doing it once, removing leaves individually by hand.


And also all the traffic! Crossing the street was like wading through a sea of motorcycles. And the noise was amazing --it seems as though you are supposed to honk regardless of what you are doing "Watch out! I'm going to continue doing exactly what I'm doing and go straight!" There seemed to be no rules whatsoever, including what side of the road to drive on, so crossing was an adventure. We would generally cross together so that someone could be looking in every direction (best done with someone that you have complete trust in. Having motorcycles passing within a foot of you, coming from a direction you are looking, can be a bit disconcerting otherwise.)


Matt and Nile have a pretty good video that Matt shot from his hip while we were crossing the street on their blog here

Finally though we left for the beach. We were really excited!

We spent the first day snorkeling. We took a boat out to a couple different areas all down the coast of the island and went snorkeling from there. The water wasn't as clear as I've seen other places, but there were still great fish and coral to explore. We had a very choppy boat ride back, but made it back safe, and a little nauseated for our dinner of fresh sea food.

After this though we realized that once we'd drank out of coconuts,



and seen a sunset from the beach....


That there wasn't really so much to do. Apparently, despite what we thought, we aren't really sit on the beach and do nothing type people. So.....

Nile, Matt and I changed our flight dates (through a very confusing and time consuming series of phone calls which at one point left us with not only not an earlier flight off the island, but no flight off the island at all) and flew back to Saigon.