Vietnam Continued

To pick up where I left off:

We bade goodbye to the minibus scam artists in the town of Rach Gia, an unremarkable port city that serves as a launching pad for our next destination, the island of Phu Quoc. While overnighting in Rach Gia we ate barbequed pork chops on the street that rivaled the ones at Le Cheval, and didn't do much else (we had an airconditioned room with cable, what do you expect). People were nice to us though: in the morning before boarding the ferry, I was standing outside a restaurant while Charlsea ducked in to get a bottle of water. The ferry ticket-taker saw me idling and rushed over, indicating with enthusiastic gestures and pantomines that the ferry wasn't leaving for another twenty minutes, and why didn't i head on into the restaurant and grab a quick bite to eat first--I deserved a little pre-departure rice bowl as much as the next passenger! I didn't want to be late, but he was right: I did deserve a rice bowl. So we went in and had some rice and pork, breakfast of champions, and when I came back he gave me a little aren't-you-glad-you-got-some-

rice-and-pork-before-the-journey smile, and off we went.

We got to the island early afternoon and settled into our private bungalow, a tile and palm-frond delight set amid a garden of eden:hibiscus and plumeria everywhere, geckos shimmying around the palm trees and the tropical sea mere steps from our door. It sounds idyllic and it was, except for the unfortunate vietnamese practice of disposing of trash by placing it gently onto the ocean waves and trusting nature to do the rest (they must have heard from the Senegalese how trash actually prevents encroaching seas from flooding low-lying houses when it rains a lot--thank god word is spreading).

Anyway, while on Phu Qouc we decided to rent a motorbike and scoot around the island for a day, beach hopping like the fabulous beach hoppers we are. Of course, being a fabulous beach hopper is never quite as simple as it sounds, especially with a motorbike driver like yours truly. We spent all day getting lost, driving into people's front yards, trying to turn left and taking it a little wide and causing pedestrians to scatter in terror until we corrected ourselves and got back on the road (which we did, of COURSE), and generally not spending much time at all at any beaches. We also got held hostage by an 8 year old cowherd, who refused to move his dumb beasts off the public highway unless we bribed him. Naturally I flatly refused, and, indignant, honked at the cows until they parted and sped past, wobbling a little but generally maintaining my moral superiority.

We got back at the end of the day hot, sweaty, exhausted, covered in a thick crust of red dirt and mildly traumatized, but then we went swimming at the perfectly lovely beach that we had abandoned all day long in search of other, harder to find beaches, maybe beaches that didn't even exist, and then had a massage (i had a lot of those while we were there--at one point i asked for an hour long and instead i had two ladies massage me simultaneously for half an hour--vietnamese effeciency?) and paradise was restored.
The other interesting thing to note about Phu Quoc is that they have a native dog found only on the island that look like a cross between a dingo and a fruit bat. I have pictures if anyone's interested.

Our next stop will be my next email. These are getting longer...