Sun World: The only reason you really need to visit Phu Quoc, Vietnam

I'm generally not a fan of massive corporate attractions in places in the world for a number of reasons: I think that they take away from the economy of the average person and for the most part, as we have seen from a number of the things I have featured on this trip so far, they tend to be gaudy, stupid, and overpriced.

The reason why I went to this was because it has a waterpark up on the top and well, I have such fond memories of those from when I was a kid and I haven't been to one in ages.

The fact that it has a tram I think they are called, that is one of the longest in the world was just an added bonus.

Down there on the bottom you can see the massively overdeveloped portions of the island that I referenced in my last post. The only part of the abandoned "European style" village was the part that had the tram entrance to take you to Sun World.

I'm sure you've seen these sorts of things before and I don't know if we just happened to be here during a low season that I am unaware of, but there was almost no waiting in line at all. It was 600,000 VND to get to the top and I wasn't going to groan about the $25 charge or so because it must have cost them millions upon millions to make this thing in the first place.

Here you get another look at how not at all busy this eurovillage is and how you can basically park right next to the entrance, which is what our taxi driver did. DisneyWorld this certainly is not. The ride up was interesting but like most things that take 20 minutes, I was kind of over it after the first 10 and 3 or 4 pictures.

Once we got to the top it was clear that they probably anticipated this place being much more popular than it is since half of the attractions weren't even open at all.

There was still plenty of cutesy stuff that is so common in Asia.

bananas playing music because, why not?

One thing I was totally unaware of was that our tram ticket price also included entrance to the entire waterpark and that was a delightful surprise because I totally expected to have to pay more for that. Once again we didn't go the correct direction to gain access to the park and I think we may have actually accidentally walked in a staff only entrance. Neither of us can read Vietnamese so we may have. I have no idea but nobody seemed to have a problem with it.

Now I didn't get many pictures on my own because they have a strict "bring nothing with you on the rides" policy but there are a lot of images online so I took a few of the rides I liked best.

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Those green and yellow rides were 4 to 6-person rafts that twisted you all around and when it throws you into the main basins there, you are moving very fast. Since there were only the two of us, we ended up needing to ride with strangers, but that was fine and expected.

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They also had one of those lazy river type things that I normally avoid because they are almost certainly at least 20% urine, but we did it anyway because it was so hot that day. Whatever, they have showers there and I kept my mouth closed while underwater.

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One of the best things about being at this park is that there was barely anyone there so we just basically walked up to the front of the line on every single ride. I recall this being a problem in places when I was a kid where you spent the entire day waiting in line and only got to go on half of the rides. Here, we went on everything that wasn't closed for maintenance and it was a joy to do that.

One ride, which I can't find an image of so I will have to try to pain you a visual picture was one that I thought I was going to enjoy the most but ended up being my least favorite: It was one of those almost straight down slides where you are standing in a capsule and a timer counts down and then the floor drops out from below you and rockets you down at such a speed that you can't really even tell what the hell is going on until it spits you out the other side. Maybe it is because I am in my 40's but that was a little too intense for me and I didn't go on it a 2nd time.

You have a pretty advanced waterproof bracelet on you that you can put credit on so you don't have to carry wet cash around with you and they don't even charge you extra for this. This bracelet also is the key to your locker and maybe this is common all over the world now for all I know. I've spent the past 2 decades living in a less-than-super-modern world so to me, I had never seen anything like this before.

I think if I was going to be critical of anything that they had up here it would be the food offerings: There was very little available at all and it was not very good. At least it wasn't captive audience expensive like they would do to you at an American theme park.

We left a bit earlier than we had planned on doing so because by the time it was mid-afternoon we had already ridden all the rides twice except for the capsule one I mentioned before. There was almost no one even on our tram heading down as well.

I think that if I was here during a busier time that I would have enjoyed it a great deal less but given that we basically had the park to ourselves it was one of the most awesome things I have done in many years and I am delighted that I got to do it.

So if you ever find yourself in Vietnam maybe make your way down to the country's largest island and pay the $25 to go to this park. I thought it was a tremendous value.