Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

We left Hoi An to fly to a little island off the south west coast of Vietnam called Phu Quoc. The extent of our research for this trip involved a handful of conversations with ChatGPT looking for advice on where to go in SE Asia with three kids for a relaxing beach vacation. Phu Quoc kept popping up as a suggestion, the pictures looked nice, we could find reasonably priced accommodations so we booked it.

We arrived at the airport and immediately realized that it was not actually that hot in Hoi An – that it was somehow much hotter here. We learned our lesson with the airport taxi in Hoi An and remembered to set a price before we set off. We booked our accommodations outside of the main town on what was supposedly “the nicest beach on the island”. Our taxi pulled into this absolutely stunning complex, and then we couldn’t find our hotel. The cab driver had to pull over a few times and despite us having working cell phones and Google maps we couldn’t find it.

After circling around for about five minutes we finally figured it out. We found the “reception” and were taken up to our room. We are very clearly the only people staying in this hotel. We might also be the only people staying in the entire complex. The room itself is enormous. The hotel is right on the beach. Aside from the possibility that we have been dropped off in the Truman show, it’s perfect.

We quickly dropped our stuff and headed down to the beach. We lasted about 30 minutes before the kids began to melt from the heat and so we set off to find the pool. We finally found some other tourists at the three pools in the middle of the complex, well half a dozen of them anyway.

This place is absolutely stunning but so frigging weird. The complex is probably 60 acres big with these massive buildings. The roads are all named. The buildings all labeled. There’s gorgeous landscaping. There’s detailed maps on all of the corners. But the place is almost completely empty. All of the buildings are just shells. It’s like being on a movie set of some post apocalyptic film.

We eventually got an into the owners of our hotel who happen to be Canadian. They told us that up until about 12 years ago this island was a prison without electricity. And now in typical Asian development fashion they have come in and just bulldozed the sand dunes until they could find bedrock and then erected these entire villages. This entire complex has an underground parking lot – that’s how deep bbq they had to dig – but then covid hit and they didn’t get the investment they were expecting so now all of these buildings just sit empty waiting.

The island is the host of APEC 2027 so I expect there will continue to be significantly more investment and building. It’s actually insane to see what they’re doing to the island – enter sections are designed to look like the amalfi coast while others like Greece. The northern section basically is only an amusement park. This place is all the best and worst things about Asia wrapped into a neat little island.