For the final week or so we’d decided to chill – hop over to Phu Quoc island and get in some serious beach time. But what the hell…?
The taxi from the ferry knew the address straight off, and after 20 minutes or so we found ourselves turning through some weird Mussolini-style gates and down a half mile of road to…well, what, exactly.
Parisian boulevard-by-sea, apparently. Pics on Booking.com had half-warned us what to expect, but the real thing was still a bit of a shocker, not least because it was all but deserted – an alien landscape, transmatted into place then abandoned.
It was only a couple of days later that we stumbled across the full monte: just a mile or two away, a vast chuck of rain forest had been levelled to accommodate a fair-sized town consisting entirely of vast hotels, in rank after rank, in Italian Riviera style. Like those massive public housing developments in Albania or Uzbekistan – but in pastel colours, and punctuated with Greco-Roman statues, busts and frescoes.
This – nearing completion, though for the moment still largely empty, is presumably the future of tourism in Vietnam, as promoted by a government eager for dollars – or perhaps more to the point, Yuan.