We arrived at the tropical, but overcast, island of Pho Quok. We hopped in a taxi and headed off to our hotel. The hotel was about 45 minutes walking distance from the central town, but there are restaurants all along the way.
The hotel is part of a museum. There's a temple, carved wood, and loud squawking eagles.
On our second day we rented a motorbike to explore the island. We went to the northeast side, along a paved and gravel road. Some sections were still under construction, including some bridges. We took the temporary bridge in their place.
When we arrived at the beach about 1.5 hours later, it was windy, nippy, and dirty. We snapped some pictures and headed back to the other side of the island. However the weather got gradually worse and worse - turning to drizzle, then rain, and finally pouring cats and dogs. I drove on, carefully, with the rain hitting my skin like tiny needles. When we arrived back at our hotel I had a shower and we both collapsed on the bed, tired from the long day on the motorbike.
The next few days had more rain and thundershowers in the weather forecast. So we decided to stay nearby and lounge on the beaches. We enjoyed spending time relaxing on the beach, reading books, playing card games, and cooling off in the water. It didn't get too hot as the sun was usually covered by clouds, but it was very humid.
On one of those days, we went to have lunch (at 3pm) after spending time at the beach. We were finishing up when it started drizzling, then down pouring like we've never seen it before. We thought we were back in Vancouver! We settled back into our chairs and ordered another MANGO drink to wait out the storm.
On the second last day we met our first Canadians at the beach - a little girl and her grandma. The grandma was Vietnamese and her daughter had married a Canadian. Unfortunately we could only communicate intermittently as they spoke French, being from Montreal. The little girl, who was 4, didn't let that stop her though and babbled away at us in French, with her grandma interpreting occasionally. She told Anna she had "nice big blue eyes" and was fascinated with the scrabble style game we were playing called bananagrams (Thanks Sheldon and Jane!)
We also enjoyed as much ice cream as we could - quickly learning which places had good homemade waffle cones and authentic New Zealand ice cream. But my favourite was called the Mango River. It was made entirely of mangos: mango ice cream, mango smoothies, and mango chunks. It was so good I had it each of our 5 days here!
Speaking of food, we enjoyed Thai, Italian, and even some Swedish foods for lunch and dinner.
We are about to head to the airport to start our long trip home. We feel so blessed to have gone on this trip. It will be difficult to come home after being away for more than 3 weeks, but we are both feeling it's time to go.
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