A sprawling theme park beneath the world's longest cable car, where roller coasters, a water park and an open-range safari fill an entire day.
I’ll admit I went into VinWonders expecting a slightly tired regional theme park, the kind you find bolted onto a resort as an afterthought. I was wrong within the first ten minutes. Lia and I arrived on the Bãi Dài coast in the island’s north — a stretch that, until this whole Vinpearl development went up in 2020, was mostly empty sand and scrub. Now it’s rides, a water park, and what’s billed as one of Vietnam’s largest aquarium-style marine facilities, all stitched together under the shadow of the Hon Thom cable car cutting across the sky above.
That cable car is really what pulled us here in the first place. It opened in 2018 and held the Guinness World Record for the longest three-rope cable car on Earth, stretching 7.9 kilometers over open sea to connect the mainland with Hon Thom island. We rode it in the late afternoon, and I remember Lia going quiet for a good five minutes just watching the fishing boats shrink beneath us — that’s rare for her, she’s usually narrating everything.
We spent the middle of the day at Safari Phú Quốc, the open-range zoo next door, and this is the part I didn’t expect to love as much as I did. Nearly 380 hectares of enclosures where animals actually have room to move — we watched a white lion pace along a ridge and later caught a small group of giraffes ambling toward a feeding platform while our jeep idled a respectful distance away. It felt closer to the parks I’d read about in East Africa than anything I associated with a beach island theme park add-on.
By evening we’d cooled off in the water park and Lia had dragged me onto at least two roller coasters I hadn’t agreed to. What struck me most, walking back to the cable car station under string lights with sunburned shoulders, was how deliberately engineered the whole place felt as a destination in itself — not a detour from Phú Quốc’s beaches, but a full day that could anchor a trip on its own.
When to go: Aim for the dry season between November and April — the rides and the cable car views are much better without the monsoon clouds rolling in, and you’ll want clear skies for that ride over the water.