vietnam traveling with kids – The Flying Dutch Family

Travel with us to… Phú Quốc Island in Vietnam

After having lived in Vietnam for 5 months, we hadn’t seen much else than the city where our home and work is (Ho Chi Minh City) yet. Pippa and I have done a little weekend trip together to Ben Tre in the Mekong Delta and stayed at Villa de Coco. That was fantastic and made us feel even more excited for a vacation for all 5 family members. With the December Break coming up, we started to look for a beautiful location in Vietnam to explore together. When I asked my Vietnamese colleagues at SNA International School, they all recommended the island Phú Quốc. So… that’s where we went! And they were right: What an amazing island to explore and relax. Phú Quốc is forever in our hearts after spending 9 days here.

Let’s take you with us on a family vacation to Phú Quốc!

Mango Beach Resort

We stayed at the wonderful Mango Beach Resort and it is located in the Northeast of Phú Quốc. We would recommend this resort 10/10! The moment we arrived here, it felt like love at first sight for all of us. What an oasis of tranquility and beauty. The lovely staff members made us feel like home and treated us with the best breakfast ever. Our children could not wait to jump into the pool and the staff had a BIG surpise for them: an inflatable swan to use as a fun boat. Every single day of our vacation, Jools, Pippa and Sol had a blast at the pool of this resort.

The pool and the lush gardens overlook the beach and the ocean, which gives the vacation vibe an amazing extra boost. Mango Beach Resort has created a lagoon separated from the sea by wave breakers and nets, which makes safe swimming possible for guests. Our children had so much fun playing and even kayaking here with the friend they made. The little beach was also the best place to find beautiful sea shells and rocks. We always love collecting them and putting them together to create nature art. One of our favorite activities on earth!

Exploring Phu Quoc by bike – from Mango Beach Resort to Sao Beach

Our resort helped us to rent scooter bikes (for 180.000 dong per day) and we enjoyed exploring the island the Vietnamese way. The roads are quite good and calm, so we felt safe while driving around on 2 scooter bikes with 2 adults and 3 children. Our favorite destination to visit was by far Sao Beach. We went here twice and loved how stunning this beach and the clea blue sea looked. The palm trees made the dream destination even more dreamy.

We were struggling to find other accessible beaches in Phú Quốc. When we asked the locals, they couldn’t really advice other beaches to us. Most beaches aren’t public, because they belong to hotels. They said we could try to just act like a guest and enter the beach through their lobby, but we did not feel like doing that 😉 Another thing we noticed is that big parts of the shore are not used as a beach, so you can’t really enter the water or hang out. We heard from other tourists that the beaches on the west side of the island (like Long Beach and Ong Lang Beach) are beautiful, but indeed most of them are only accessible if you’re a hotel guest there. You could go to the famous Starfish beach, but that’s super touristy and for us it was also too far of a drive.

Snorkelling Trip around the An Thoi Archipelago

We absolutely loved our snorkle trip around the An Thoi Archipelago, a group of 14 islands brimming with amazing deserted beaches, colorful coral reefs, colonies of diverse fish species, and amazing bird-life. Jools and Pippa were so excited to go snorkeling for their first time ever and they enjoyed every minute of our day trip. We booked our trip through ‘John Tours’ and they were super helpful canceling and rebooking our trip a couple of times, due to the weather conditions.

Hiking Núi Đá Bạc

We also enjoyed our hike to the tops of Núi Đá Bạc mountain. Our guide worked and Wildlands resort and he took us from there all the way to three different tops of the mountain. When we lived in Norway we went for multiple hikes every week and that is one thing we miss while living in Ho Chi Minh City. Getting back into the hiking vibe (on Christmas Day!) was surely one of the HIGHlights of our Phú Quốc trip. (Oh how I love corny word jokes ;-))

Dương Đông

On one of our bike trips across the island, we rode our scooter bikes to Dương Đông, which is the biggest town of Phú Quốc. We had great coffee and the kids enjoyed a Micky Mouse ice cream at Buddy Ice Cream and Info Cafe in the center of the town, visited two beautiful temples and had lunch at The Home Pizza (a bit further south of Dương Đông strip, which gives some Spanish beach town feels with all the tourists and hotels). We noticed how different the vibe on this westside of the island is with all its big hotels and many restaurants and bars. We couldn’t see the beach, because the coastline is completely blocked by buildings.

Khu du lịch Suối Tranh

On our way back, we decided to follow our curiosity and check out what the kind of story the statues we noticed on the side of the road were part of. We also noticed on Google Maps that it looked like there should be a waterfall near those statues, so we were on a mission to explore this area, which turned out to be a park called ‘Khu du lịch Suối Tranh’. ‘Khu du lịch’ means ‘tourist area’. We loved walking around the lush gardens, while telling each other cray made up stories about all the interesting colorful statues we saw and looking at the many fish at the ponds. We also followed the signs in the direction of the waterfall and suddenly entered a forest with a lovely jungle vibe. Again, there were many statues along the hike up to the waterfall, such as elphants and tigers. During this time of year (December), it was dry season, so the stream down the hill was very small. Still, we had a great time playing on the rocks and even doing a tiny bit of swimming in the stream. Very refreshing! We actuallly never made it all the way up to the waterfall, we had too much fun playing and exploring at one certain spot, which was about 10 minutes away from the waterfall. Other people said it wasn’t truly worth going up to the waterfall. They showed us a pictures and we decided to stay and play at our fun spot.

Rory’s Beach Bar

Jools, Pippa and Sol asked every single day if we could please, please, pleeeeaaaaase go to Rory’s Beach Bar. Of course we could! We loved this so much more than bar so much. The owners are gems and there is a lot to explore in the beautiful pool, fun games to play and lovely people to meet. Our favorite moment was when Rory showed us how starfish are capable to turn themselves back around when they are upside down. It’s like a meditation to watch them do it and you could turn it into a yoga exercise when you join and copy the movements of the starfish!

Can we live at Mango Beach Resort?

We could have stayed so much longer at Mango Beach Resort. We totally, absolutely, 100% had the best vacation ever here. We loved our rooms in our tree house, we loved the lovely staff members, we loved the puppies, we loved the pool, we loved the views, we loved the beautiful garden, we LOVED breakfast every day, we loved finding shells and rocks on the beach and we loved the awesome friends we met here. Our hearts are full and we have created memories that will last forever. We hope to come back to this wonderful resort one day!