Nobody tells you about the smell of nuoc mam at six in the morning. You step off the overnight boat from Ha Tien with salt in your eyelashes and a mild regret about the third bia hoi — the local draught beer, fifty cents a glass and entirely too easy to order — and the air hits you in a warm, fermented wave that is equal parts fish sauce factory and frangipani. That combination should not work. Somehow, on Phu Quoc, it does. The sky above the Duong Dong wharf is the colour of a bruised mango, the kind of light that photographers set three alarms for, and the wooden long-tail boats are already threading out into the Gulf of Thailand in single file, their engines coughing like elderly uncles. A woman on the dock is gutting something silver with a practiced flick of the wrist, not looking up, headphones in, entirely unbothered by the sunrise or by you. Welcome to the island. It does not particularly care that you have arrived.
Phu Quoc has a complicated past that most tourists sunbathing at the southern resorts never think to ask about. During the Vietnam War, the island's Cay Dua Prison — the locals sometimes call it the Coconut Tree Prison — held tens of thousands of political prisoners and Viet Cong soldiers under conditions that the reconstructed exhibits now describe with a quietly devastating matter-of-factness. I walked through it on my second visit, in the stubborn company of a local guide named Minh who had grown up hearing about it from his grandfather. Minh had a way of letting the silences do the explaining. He would point at a rusted set of leg irons displayed behind glass, say nothing for a full thirty seconds, and then look at you to check if you understood. The French colonial-era prison was also used after the war, briefly, for a different set of detainees — history tends to be recursive in these parts. It is not a comfortable afternoon. It is absolutely worth two hours of your time, because an island this lovely deserves to be known in full, not just in profile.
The real reason to come to Phu Quoc, though — before the beach, before the snorkelling, before any of that — is the food at Dinh Cau Night Market near the harbour. Show up at seven in the evening when the tarpaulins are going up and the charcoal is just starting to glow, and let yourself be gently herded toward whichever stall has the longest queue of locals. On my last visit this led me, thankfully, to a woman named Ba Lan who was grilling fresh sea urchin halved on the shell with a knob of butter, a spoon of spring onion, and a squeeze of something I never identified but have been dreaming about since. Five thousand dong a piece, which is roughly eighteen rupees, and she looked mildly offended when I pointed a camera at her urchins before eating them. The grilled scallops with peanuts and crispy shallots are mandatory. The sim wine — a pale pink liquor made from local myrtle berries, slightly sweet, slightly medicinal, the kind of thing that tastes like a grandmother's remedy — is optionally mandatory. You will probably buy three bottles to take home and feel no shame about it.
Here is what tourists consistently do wrong in Phu Quoc: they stay in the south. The resort strip around Duong Beach is fine — clean, convenient, efficient in the way that resort strips always are, which is to say it has no particular character at all. The north of the island, around Ganh Dau village and the edges of the national forest, is where the island breathes differently. Roads narrow, motorbike rental is essential, and the beaches have names that do not appear on any hotel map. Go in November or December, when the rains have just finished washing everything clean and the crowds from Christmas have not yet descended. Avoid the last week of December and all of January unless you enjoy queuing for sunbeds. Also: the cable car to Hon Thom island is genuinely spectacular as an engineering feat and the view from the gondola is arresting, but the island at the bottom is a theme park that could be in any country on earth. Take the cable car, turn around, come back. You have been warned.
On my third trip I rented a motorbike from a teenager in Duong Dong who seemed delighted that someone wanted the old red Honda rather than the newer automatic. He gave me a photocopied map that was at least four years out of date, pointed vaguely north, and said 'Go forest road, very nice, maybe some pepper.' He was not wrong. Phu Quoc grows some of the most celebrated black pepper in the world — Tieu Phu Quoc, the locals call it — and riding through the pepper gardens in the island's centre is one of those small pleasures that no travel itinerary will ever schedule for you but that you will remember for years. The vines climb their wooden stakes in neat rows, the peppercorns hanging in clusters of pale green that will eventually dry to that sharp, fragrant black. An elderly couple at a roadside stall sold me a bag of freshly dried pepper and a glass of Vietnamese iced coffee so strong it rearranged my afternoon. The coffee, filtered through a small metal drip called a phin, takes its time — which is perhaps the only sensible instruction Phu Quoc ever gives anyone.
The underwater world off the northeastern coast deserves its own paragraph and possibly its own dedicated trip. The coral around the An Thoi archipelago is recovering from the bleaching events of a few years ago, and while some of the dive operators near the main beach front are running too many boats over the same patch of reef, the operators who work out of the smaller fish landing at Vung Bau on the west coast tend to know where the sea turtles are actually feeding this season rather than where they were feeding in 2019. Ask specifically for the night snorkelling trip — bioluminescent plankton when the conditions are right, and they often are between November and March, turning every movement of your hands into a brief, genuinely astonishing light show. One German backpacker in my boat sat bolt upright in the water and said, loudly and completely sincerely, 'I did not expect the ocean to do this.' None of us did, the first time.
Back home in Kolkata, weeks later, I find myself putting Tieu Phu Quoc pepper on things it has no business being on — dal, idli, once memorably on a gulab jamun in a moment of either inspiration or sleep deprivation. It is the way this island lingers: not in dramatic gestures but in small, specific sensory callbacks. The butter-singed urchin. The sim wine's odd sweetness. Minh's thirty-second silences. The way the six o'clock light hit the water at Ganh Dau and made everything look briefly, stubbornly, improbably golden. Phu Quoc is in that interesting, slightly precarious moment where the cranes and the cable cars and the casino have arrived but the fishing boats and the pepper vines and the market women are still very much present — and that particular version of the island, held in tension between two versions of itself, is the one that gets into you. If this has sparked something in you, the team at Dream Destiny Trips has a tendency to turn these sparks into actual itineraries — reach out and watch what happens.
