Hòn Thơm

I will be honest about Hòn Thơm before I am generous about it, because that is the only way I know how to write. The island itself — a small forested hump off the southern tip of Phú Quốc — is lovely, and the way you reach it is a feat of engineering that I found genuinely terrifying. The cable car from An Thới is, at the time I rode it, the longest over-sea cable car in the world, almost eight kilometres of cabin gliding above open water and a scatter of jungle islets. Lia thought it was magnificent. I spent the first half with my forehead against the cool glass repeating that statistics about cable-car safety are reassuring, and the second half admitting, grudgingly, that the view was worth the cold sweat.

The longest ride over water

The cable car climbs from An Thới across the Pineapple Islands — Hòn Dứa, Hòn Rỏi — and the water below changes colour the way a bruise does, deep navy in the channels and a glassy jade over the reefs. You can see fishing boats the size of grains of rice, and the wooden frames of squid platforms anchored in the shallows. The cabins are slow, which is either soothing or excruciating depending on your relationship with altitude. It took me a full ten minutes to unclench. By the time we reached the far station I had made peace with the whole enterprise and was almost disappointed to get off.

There is, inevitably, a large waterpark and resort complex built onto the island, the kind of thing that arrives wherever a cable car lands. I have nothing against waterslides in principle, but Lia and I walked past the queues and went looking for the edges of the island instead, where the developers had not yet got to. The southern shore has stretches of beach that are still genuinely quiet, the sand pale and coarse, the water shallow and absurdly clear, with little coral heads close enough to swim out to from the beach.

Finding the quiet end

We rented a snorkel set from a stall and spent the afternoon drifting over the reef, watching parrotfish chew the coral with a sound you can actually hear underwater — a dry crunching, like someone eating crackers two rooms away. A boatman offered to take us out to a smaller, emptier island nearby for a price that was clearly invented on the spot, and we haggled him down to something merely unreasonable and went. It was worth it: a strip of sand, three other people, and a horizon entirely free of waterslides.

The lesson of Hòn Thơm, I think, is that the spectacle gets you there and your own legs get you to the good part. Most people ride out, do the waterpark, and ride back, and they have a perfectly fine day. But the island rewards the small effort of walking past the obvious, the way most places do.

When to go: November through April, the dry season, when the sea is calm and the snorkelling is clear. The cable car closes in high wind, so check before you commit to the day. Go early — the cabins fill by mid-morning, and the island is best in the quiet hours before the day-trip crowds arrive.