Four days on Vietnam's largest island: snorkelling in the An Thoi archipelago, a traditional fish sauce house, pepper farms and sunset on Long Beach.
Photo: Vivu Vietnam / Unsplash
Day 1
Your guide meets you at Phu Quoc International Airport and transfers you to the hotel. Late in the afternoon we visit Dinh Cau, a small shrine built on a rock at the mouth of the Duong Dong river where fishermen still make offerings before going out, and stay for the sunset. The evening is free at the Duong Dong night market, where you pick your seafood live and it is grilled at the stall.
Day 2
A full day on the water. A speedboat takes the group from An Thoi harbour out to the archipelago of fifteen islands off the southern tip. You snorkel at Hon Mong Tay and Hon Gam Ghi, where the reef sits shallow and the water is clear enough that no tanks are needed. Lunch is seafood on one of the islands, and in the afternoon you can try hand-line fishing the way the local boats do it before heading back.
Day 3
The morning is spent swimming at Sao Beach in the south, fine white sand set inside a bay that stays calm almost year round. On the way back we stop at Phu Quoc Prison in An Thoi, a wartime detention camp now preserved as a historical site with reconstructed tiger cages. In the afternoon you visit a traditional fish sauce house, where anchovies are salted and left in boi loi wood barrels over three metres tall for more than a year, then a pepper farm where the vines are trained up wooden posts.
Day 4
The morning is free to rest or swim at Long Beach, the island's longest beach, on the west coast. On the way to the airport we call at a pearl farm to see how the nucleus is implanted, with time to buy pearls, pepper and sim wine. Your guide transfers you to Phu Quoc International Airport, where the programme ends.
Phu Quoc covers about 570 square kilometres and more than half of it is national park, so however much has gone up in the south, most of the island is still forest. This itinerary leans towards the sea and the island’s working life rather than the attractions — we run a separate route for groups travelling with children.
Day two is the day that matters and we always place it early. The speedboat out to the An Thoi archipelago depends entirely on the sea state; scheduling it for day two means that if the water is rough there is still day three to swap into. The calmest months are roughly November through April.
The fish sauce house tends to get skipped because of the smell, but it is what kept this island going for more than a century before there was an international airport. Standing among barrels taller than you are while someone explains why only anchovies landed the same day will do is one of the better half hours of the trip. Group size and hotel category are agreed before the contract is signed.
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