Beach days and busy days

We've spent one day at the gorgeous Khem Beach, which was easily reachable on our little scooter. Traffic is light, but mayhem nonetheless. There are just no rules, oncoming traffic in your lane and abrupt changes by people in front of you are common!

A bigger main road lined with shops and businesses gives way to tiny lanes with homes and market stalls on both sides. Faded sheets and tarps flutter in the breeze, and the brilliance of local flowers provides a glorious contrast.

Khem Beach is a beauty. Clubs line the arch of the Bay, providing the perfect vibe but you can easily just drop your towel on the sand too. Music is more background and distant. It's relaxing to just swim, read, repeat. We ignore the expensive beach club restaurants and walk a block away for bahn mi for lunch. These little French baguette, Vietnamese meat and sauce filled sandwiches are perfect, and about $1.50.

Another day, another sunset, and we are rested and ready for our morning tour pickup the next day. We will stop at a couple of islands, snorkel, visit the aquatic park, then travel by cable car back to the mainland Sunset Town for the famous "Kiss Bridge" and a short show.

A lot to pack in! Our tour group includes a Korean family of 4 that are gentle and calm, and a quartet of obnoxious young men as their counterpoint. I love watching this family interact all day, they're having so much fun with their kids. The quartet ignores safety rules, throw orange peels on the boat deck, are loud, and strip unabashed to their underwear to snorkel. I feel for the tour guides. There's a lot of different languages but very little English. We're pretty isolated.

So, the island is very pretty, the snorkelling disappointing. Still on the water, still in the sun, still good! A massive lunch buffet is well appreciated by this point, and we eat and chat with a couple from Malmo, Sweden. They're headed to the roller coaster next. We hadn't known the park had one!

They have the Roaring Timbers, 32 meters of wooden G force torture 😊. It's barely any wait at all, and Brad is on his way up to a steep drop. How anyone does this for fun is beyond me! The park is huge, you could easily spend the day here. But we're moved along to the cable car.

My prior eagerness for the experience is diluted at the first launch point. The point where the cables creak along with your full cabin - wait, this must be really heavy - immediately slant steeply uphill....and then launch you, over the treetops, to a dizzying view of turquoise blue sea. The mainland is almost 8km away. My nerves calm as we sail over ships, our shadow crossing their wake. The ride is smooth, even over the transiting towers. I checked on this, it's Austrian and Swiss engineered which is reassuring.

The car lands in Sunset Town, in a pseudo Roman coliseum type building. This whole town is built as a pretend Mediterranean, Italian and French staged scene. It's not our taste, but it's well done and apparently extremely popular with Phu Quocs main tourism sectors of Asia and Russia.

And here, from the famed Kiss Bridge, which has two gently sloping sections that almost but not quite meet, we see the sunset show. Performances by jet ski and small motor boats are the backdrop to the fly board show. These water jet pack propelled athletes are incredibly acrobatic performers. Another moment of patriotic pride, as the announcer presents the Canadian fly board champion is in tonight's show, Geoff Hulet.

Its been a day! The bus ride home is much quieter, as tired out tourists are returned to their hotels. A take out salad in front of the TV is the cap on our day!Read more