Travel – Page 4 – Wander With Stella

Phu Quoc Island a Tropical Paradise

Phu Quoc is a tropical island in the Gulf of Thailand. It belongs to Vietnam but lies closer to Cambodia. It is easily reached on a short 50 minute flight from Ho Chi Minh City, over the mighty Mekong Delta and is well worth a visit.

After two plus months of traveling throughout SE Asia, Phu Quoc was a welcome beach vacation destination. Admittedly there are many touristy things to do on Phu Quoc but if you’re me and your somewhat tired of shifting about, sitting still on a white sandy beach under some palm trees for a week or more is a welcome respite.

There are several different areas to stay on Phu Quoc and we booked way back in October in an area quite far from the main town of Duong Dong. First impressions along the highway and the side roads may not be favorable, there is a lot of garbage and the ubiquitous unruly collection of traffic, businesses and residences that I have come to associate with SE Asia.

But once you are off the beaten track and you have arrived at your accommodation, then hopefully you will find what we did at the Camellia Hotel & Spa, (spa because you can arrange to have a massage there). We had booked this hotel well in advance and by Vietnamese standards we paid a high price, 63.00 CAD per night, if we’d waited we would have paid much less, maybe even half.

The rooms were big, well appointed and the pool and free breakfast offset the distance to the beach, (about a 25 minute walk, although the hotel ad says 10). Sadly, the closest public beach was squeezed to a bare minimum by beach front hotels with private amenities so we opted to spend most of our day around the Camellia pool.

The area around the Camellia is very rural, as in….there were roosters, lots of roosters and we saw a new born calf, still wet and wobbly legged in the road right in front of our hotel. Nearby there were lots of restaurants and bars so we didn’t have far to go to eat and we found a variety of cuisines from French to western and of course local.

One evening we ventured into town by cab (pricey enough you wouldn’t want to do it everyday) had dinner and wandered through the night market. Lots of seafood of course, Phu Quoc being an Island.

Four nights passed quickly and it was time for my Canadian friends to head back to the chill of the Yukon, the poor things. I was to stay on for another nine nights and opted to shift to a “Retreat” Hotel closer to town. So glad I did, the An Nhien retreat lived up to it’s promised amenities with friendly helpful staff, healthy breakfast, massage, pool and beautiful tropical garden complete with a small stream full of fish and ornamental fountains. My room was a good size and done up like a cabana, very nice.

The hotel was a three minute walk to the beach and An Nhien shared a private beach with another hotel. Great place to the spend the days and the truth is I did little else. Swimming, reading, snoozing, contemplating and ruminating with very little movement from A to B. I didn’t even head back to town.

I met very few English speaking people on Phu Quoc, most other beach goers were from Russia. It is a close sun spot for them and plane loads arrive daily if not hourly.

I made a decision to return to England a week early when I heard that there was a Corona Virus quarantine in a small village in northern Vietnam. A week more in England seemed a good bargain given that the most fun you could expect to have in a quarantine situation would be to stay healthy. If I had only just started or was part way through my explorations I would have stayed on. But I am glad to have had the luxury of playing it safe and don’t feel that I have made too much of a concession. After all, I’m all tucked up at Heather’s in Brighton, drinking tea and watching Tellie and hoping that Vietnam is spared the spread of the virus.

Da Lat – The Central Highlands of Vietnam

Da Lat..the flower city, a breath of fresh air.

Da Lat, the flower city, is located in the central highlands of Vietnam and it is a breath of fresh air. We arrived at our very pink hotel, the Dalat Boutique, with it’s great views of the city below, with enough daylight to wander out and about, down the hill along twisting streets to Lake Xuan Huong, in the center of the city. At the Lake we rented bicycles to ride the 7 km trail that circles the late and that took us through beautiful flower gardens. With spring in the air and on the heels of Tet there were plenty of floral arrangements. In keeping with the “got space…fill it” philosophy of Vietnam, this well used path, was a bikers obstacle course full of runners, walkers and sightseers, and even the odd motorcycles.

Other thank the crowded path it was a lovely ride and gave us a change to get the lay of the land in central DaLot. The center of Da Lat is very busy with traffic circles, open air markets, narrow lanes, busy streets and a hodgepodge of buildings mixing French colonial with Vietnamese homes, stores, malls big and small and myriads of street vendors.

Examples of French Colonial architecture, like a Catholic Church, are interspersed with new construction, much of which fails to conform to any particular style and visual collisions happen on every corner. We saw a building that resembles the tip of “The Pickle”, London’s city hall and just behind it was a communications tower build to resemble the Eiffel Tower.

We reached the end of our bike ride as the sun set, returning the rentals we struck off on foot toward the night market. Hoping for some delicious street food we soon found ourselves faced with the prospect of crossing the road connected to a traffic circle. A near impossibility given the dangerous swirl of buses, cars, trucks and motor bikes. Our weeks in Vietnam have taught us that however counter intuitive it may seem you cross by launching yourself at the vehicles and as soon as they pass you advance as many steps as possible until the next one zooms by. By some miraculous process you go around the cars and the motorcycles go around you. Repeating this process you eventually arrive on the other side of the street shaken but not scathed. It’s like a very complicated game of dodgeball. The other option is to attach yourself to a group of locals, ignoring the traffic and keeping your eyes glued on their movements which you copy through the river of traffic.

The night market was packed, blocks and blocks of open stalls selling everything under the sun. We managed to scrounge a spot for ourselves at a street food spot with their pint sized chairs and tables which are fine until you try to rise up out of them. We paid a pretty penny for our supper, mostly bbqued meat and vegetables which were good but definitely foreigner priced.

Dalat is an outdoor adventure city, perfectly situated in the highlands, surrounded by pine forests, and blessed with natural beauty. For about $25 CAD each we signed up for a small group tour and were picked up at our hotel for a day long trip to the areas surrounding Dalat.

Our first stop was Robin mountain where we rode a gondola to the top and had views to the farmlands below. The area around Dalat is densely agricultural and hothouses stretch as far as the eye can see.

Back in the van, we followed the twisting mountain road to the Truk Lam Zen monastery the biggest Zen monastery in Vietnam. Here

the monks and nuns have built a beautiful series of gardens and trails, including some really interesting bonsai, all linking the various temples and pagodas.

Our next stop was Datania falls accessible by foot or by a much more novel means, a self operated bob sled on a narrow track. We opted for the sled ride and whisked our way down to the falls. At the falls we saw some folks who had repeled down the whitewater, and we thought we were extreme by taking the sleds. Fortunately the sleds also took you back up the mountain and at one point if was pretty vertical with the track taking over the controls so you just had to lie back and stare at the deep blue sky.

A few miles from the bob-sled/falls was the “Glass Pagoda”, which on closer inspection is made from small bits of broken china and glass. An elaborate design it is a real draw for both Buddhist pilgrims and sightseers. You are able to climb the internal staircase of the pagoda and from there you see the farms below.

An odd little stop was at a “Puppy Farm” whose claim to fame was being a breeding kennel for more than 100 breeds of dogs. Not really my cup of tea, I didn’t like to see so many dogs (no puppies) in large but cement floored kennels or small individual cages. Still not sure why this was on the tour except right next door and included isn’t he price of admission was another beautiful garden, well worth visiting.

Saving the best for last we parked the van at the bottom of Langbiang mountain, the highest point in the Da Lat area. Leaving the van we were loaded into a very old, utilitarian jeep to make the steep climb to the top.

The mountain is named after a tragic love story between Lang and Biang, young lovers, and like Romeo and Juliet they were denied the chance to marry by their rival parents, ending in their double suicide. The elephants that were present cried so hard a waterfall, aptly named “Elephant Waterfall” formed nearby.

At the top there are a number of attractions like a craft shop by a local indigenous group, pony rides, hiking paths, a restaurant etc. The views alone were worth the trip up in the clanking grinding jeep.

Tour over we spent our third and final day in Da Lat revisiting the city center and visiting a place know as the “Crazy House”, which was only half a block from our very pink hotel.

A most unusual attraction it was built by Mra Dang Viet Nga, the daughter of Ho Chi Min’s right hand man. She studied architecture in Russia but her creation certainly doesn’t resemble anything you picture as coming out of Russia. The Crazy House is in fact a hotel in addition to be a busy tourist attraction with dozens of bus loads of folks visiting everyday. The place is not finished and has an organic propensity toward expansion not unlike the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Like Gaudí Nga’s vision is a chaotic construction of intertwining buildings all connected by tangled walkways suspended mid-air giving it the air of a tree house.

There are a couple of restuarants and coffee bars, the rental rooms are all named and overall the place looks like Gaudí fed steroids to the Hobbits. There are giant cobwebs, oversized mushrooms, aquarium motifs and a museum describing Nga’s journey.

It was hard to leave the beautiful city of Da Lat, the fresh cool air, the gorgeous scenery and the rural vibe made the “Flower City” well worth the visit.

Koh Pha Ngan A Thai Island

Beautiful sandy beaches…

Koh Panang is one of dozens of islands in Thailand, located along the east coast in the Andaman Sea and off the west coast in the Gulf of Thailand. Like most of them, Koh (meaning island) Pha-Ngan is a holiday destination for flocks of beach goers from all corners of the globe. Popular with backpackers, families, solo travellers, snowbirds and the like, the islands are accustomed to foreign visitors and have really smooth operations that get you from airports to ports, on to ferries, and finally out to the islands.

From my limited knowledge I would think that Koh Panang is fairly typical. White sandy beaches, lots of excursions and activities and plenty of partying, especially notable as we were there for New Years. As evidence of some free spirited behaviour we same many bandaged people on the beaches following the celebrations.

The main transport around the island are rented scooters and motos, which accounted for many of the bandaged limbs and heads we spotted after New Years.

After the heat and hard work negotiating our way through Cambodia it was nice to have a few days of sun, sand and delicious Thai food.Heather had a friend from the UK on Koh Pha-Ngan and she was there with friends from New Zealand. They were a lively bunch of family and friends and were so much fun. The usual FB friends invites transpired and hopefully our paths will cross again. They come to Koh Panang yearly, for several months at a time, and I think this is true of many of the island visitors.

We stayed at the See Through Boutique Hotel which did not live up to the photos on Hotels.com. It was OK but not great in terms of the rooms themselves, in definite need of some upgrades and paint. But you couldn’t beat the location and for a small fee we moved from a standard hotel type room to a bungalow which had a veranda with hammock, a fridge and air conditioning. Right on the beach it was a short walk to their beach front restaurant which served a decent breakfast but not so great after that. Massage of course is a main event and at about $15.00CAD I enjoyed a couple of sessions.

And now on to the real job of traveling and seeing the historic and cultural sites of SE Asia. With Cambodia done my next stop is Yangon, Myanmar, formerly Rangoon, Burma.

Cambodia Part One: Siem Reap

Kind, gentle & beautiful……

Gentle, kind and beautiful my travels in Cambodia have been made easy and enjoyable by the people. I’m traveling with my friend Heather for a few weeks before she returns to work in England. She kindly met me at the international airport in Bangkok after a long flight from London. We transferred to the smaller airport and flew off to Siem Reap where we stayed at a lovely little guesthouse off the noisy tourist streets. Chheng Residence Hotel was lovely with a garden pool area and very helpful staff. Always good to have somewhere to cool down the body temp after a long hot day of exploring.

After dinner and a swim, we wandered out into the evening and strolled down the avenues to the river and into Psar Chas, the old French colonial heart of Siem Reap. There are markets, restaurants and bars tucked away in the old French-era shophouses and the Main Street of the area is known as Pub street. There were tons of tourists and it was crowded but still somehow manages to keep a small town feeling. Lots of travellers, vacationers mingling with the Khmer people as the Cambodians and their language are called.

Other than the pretty zip of this little town people come to Siem Reap to visit the Angkor Temples, impressive monuments to the greatest ancient civilization in SE Asia. These 12th century temples were originally built as places of Hindu worship and later over the eons converted to Buddhist Temples. There are more than one hundred monuments spread over 3000 acres that mark where the Angkor era was born and marked by huge building projects. We managed to visit Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and Phnom Bakheng for the sunset. After repeated attacks from Siam in the 15th century the city was abandoned and lost to the jungle. An extraordinary set of ruins one can see where the early people of Cambodia lived and worshipped and displayed their wealth and culture.

We had a nice mix of town/country while in the Siem Reap area by shifting from the Chheung Residence to the Bong Thom Forest Lodge about twenty minutes by Tuk Tuk outside of Siem Reap. A beautiful resort hotel it had proximity to some of the lesser visited temples and was a nice respite from the hustle and bustle of the city. The food was great and we were given a “certified” cooking lesson on how to make mango salad and the national dish of fish amok, a coconut cream base mildly spiced dish served with rice.

There are buses and vans etc that will get you from Siem Reap. To Phnom Penh the capital, but since hiring a private car was a $100USD option we decided on that and it would allow us to make a couple of stops along the way. Our driver was great and our first request was to stop and see the floating villages on Tonle Sap Lake. Interestingly, the people who live in the floating villages are mostly stateless ethnic Vietnamese fishermen and their families. The homes are pretty basic and the lake is not somewhere you would want to swim but it is pretty nonetheless and bordered by green rice fields. We stuck to the land roads but you are able to catch one of many boat tours that take you up and down the lake and to a variety of villages, some genuinely floating and other on poles. We also tried to visit some Monks who live along highway 6 near Kompong but our driver was unable to locate the school where a Canadian friend had volunteered. It was a long day in the car, broken up by a couple of stops and a great lunch we finally entered Phnom Penh as dark was settling in.