Red Dirt and White Sand: A New Year's Escape to Phu Quoc, Vietnam

The plane glided into the tiny airport at around 9am. I sauntered off the plane and down the road to my hotel, enjoying the luxury of waving off taxi drivers even if my accommodation was not to be one of the five star wonders that flank the waves. Having picked my way around a pungent wet market and a rickety wooden bridge, by 10am I was at the beach.

Phu Quoc is a small island in the Gulf of Thailand, off the coasts of Vietnam and Cambodia, the latter which you can see most days from Gành Dầu Beach in the north. Shaped a little like a lamb chop, the main island covers around 570 square kilometres but there are 21 smaller islets too. Ninety-nine peaks, the highest of which is Mount Chúa, stretch down the middle like the knobbly undulations of a spine. An island of modest and unsung proportions, the clean, natural beauty of Phu Quoc makes it the perfect escape from Shanghai's biting winter gloom.

My first day on the island was spent lounging around on a thin strip of beach near the head of Long Beach Road. The water is quite shallow and clear here, perfect for swimming. Even at the height of the busy season and in the days leading up to New Year's Eve to boot, the beaches were not crowded. Tiring of the sun, I visited the small nearby Dinh Cậu temple, established in 1937 for the goddess of the sea, Thien Hau. It has served to guide sailors in more ways than one: the combination of sacred Buddhist reds and golds with the crisp, clear blues and whites of a lighthouse tower make this a unique sight.

However, first and foremost (aside from the pressing need for a new Vietnamese visa from nearby Sihanoukville in Cambodia) I visited Phu Quoc to go scuba diving. This has only been possible for the past ten years and even now there are many sites that lie unexplored, perhaps undiscovered. I dived with Rainbow Divers, Vietnam's top PADI diving centre. If you have been diving in Vietnam before, you'll know that many sites offer limited feasts for the eyes. However, keeping this caveat in mind, there are still many reasons to dive off Phu Quoc.

The dive boat swiftly passes upmarket bungalows and downmarket fishing boats: tourism is in the process of transforming Phu Quoc. Its effects are everywhere apparent. Outside Dương Đông town, the main settlement, a riot of construction is manipulating the rich, red dirt of the landscape into something slicker, more international. Resorts are creeping down (and up) the coast and soon a new ferry will link the island to Kep in Cambodia, making it easier than ever to include Phu Quoc on the backpacker trail. Of course, not all of this is necessarily bad. But it does mean that if you'd like to visit a quieter, more laidback Phu Quoc, now is the time to visit. The boat travels further south and with each passing nautical mile the beaches become more deserted. It's a beautiful, blindingly sunny day and the water ripples like silk. Fishermen haul in their catches, lifting bulky nets worth of fish onto their colourful boats.

Visibility was fairly good on most of the dives but I was unlucky in that I didn't see many fish. The islands in the south off An Thoi port are reputed to be the best diving spots but I happened to see more in the north on my dives. There are many nudibranches and one of the dive sites is even called the 'Nudibranch Garden' but apart from these seemingly ubiquitous critters, we saw some angelfish, clownfish darting amongst the anemone, crabs, a seasnail in a big, beautiful conch shell, forests of sea urchins, and a big, majestic grouper, which processed through the water and eyed us like a king his subjects. Besides all of this, the boat trip was comfortable and very enjoyable with a delicious, cooked Vietnamese lunch after the second dive. Some trips return to the harbour quite late, taking in the island's beautiful sunsets along the way. If this is the case, you could take a brief (say 25 metre) stroll from either the harbour or the Rainbow dive shop and visit the Night Market for dinner. It's a popular option with plenty of seafood and a variety of other Vietnamese and Western dishes. You can even shop for pearls and other mementoes at the harbour end of the market. For something more intimate, take a taxi or motorbike south on Tran Hung Dao to find some great Western restaurants like Pepper's Pizza, Ti Moon, and Le Bistrot (here, try the Fondant au Chocolat).

On my last day I took an eight-hour motorbike tour around the south of the island looking to find more than the bottom of the sea and the beer bottle. The red dirt road took us by small villages, oyster farms, and dense forest. As the itinerary was flexible, I hastened to strike the fish sauce factory tour from the list not wishing to assault my nostrils while on holiday. There's not a great deal to see in terms of culture or history on the island. The most interesting sight in this regard is probably Coconut Tree Prison, a grisly remnant of French colonialism and, later, the Vietnam War. Though light on history, museum displays are detailed in their descriptions of the tortures meted out to Viet Cong POWs of the US-backed South Vietnamese regime of the 1960s and 70s.