70 SEPTEMBER 2019 / TRAVELANDLEISUREASIA.COM
Still, the place that put Phu Quoc on the global map is
the JW Marriott, which opened at the end of 2016, feels
like Harry Potter’s Candyland, and has ambitions to coax
out a similar vibrancy under the waves. It made sense that
Collins took charge of my itinerary, for on this fantastical
property that looks like a college campus from 1917, the
general manager is known as the dean, and he strolls
around, from the French-colonial rue that hosts a street-
food market with real local vendors on Sunday night (find
the couple with the banh bot loc—tapioca-flour shrimp
dumplings) to the mini-stadium with a running track–
encircled soccer pitch to the decks of the three beachfront
pools, in a period waistcoat and with a twinkle in his eye.
That there was never any such place as Lamarck
University, that designer Bill Bensley created the entire
thing from his expansive and insanely detailed
imagination in no way lessens the immersive effect of
being on the grounds. There are antique trophies, old-
timey cleats, oversized lanterns, painted travel billboards
everywhere. It’s impossible to walk briskly when every
three meters the view changes and you find another spot
you need to pause to capture in your mental (or, let’s be
honest, phone’s) memory bank. In the Department of
Chemistry, I had a private bartending lesson with the
ocean breeze at my back and, in my lap, an oyster po’boy
custom-made for me by chef Pino. Next door, Pink Pearl,
a villa pedigreed as the university’s (fictional) first dean’s
(fictional) second wife’s grand salon, is a magenta fever-
dream where your fine dining is served by flappers and
to the tune of live opera music. Perhaps the trippiest
location is The Spa Chanterelle, which brings Alice in
Wonderland into the plot, for some reason.
Hotel rooms and villas are grouped into categories of
learning (Department of Visual Arts; Department of
Entomology) with design features to match, and the
educational theme extends to the daily class schedule,
jam-packed with things like surf yoga, sushi making,
calligraphy and marine biology. That last, a priority for
the hotel and its property developer Sun Group, is taught
by the staff at Flipper, who started a coral nursery in the
JW Marriott’s bay in May that currently houses more
than 100 baby corals, some of which have already grown
from one centimeter long to four. Government approval
on a little-known, all-natural method of coral propagation
created by Malaysia-based environmental group Ocean
Quest Global is next, Xavier Forain, the uni-loving dive
instructor who is one of Flipper’s managers, told me.
Rather than build artificial reefs, whose base materials
can actually harm the sea, this method gathers so-called
live rocks (substrates already covered by marine life) and
positions them to account for waves and tides. Broken
coral fragments that have been recovered from the ocean
floor—no more than five kilometers from the nursery,
and in comparable oceanic environments—are affixed to
the live rocks and coated with a natural catalyst.
Sun Group, which owns a huge swath of the south of
Phu Quoc, including that cable car that hops from islet to
islet to a terminus holding theme parks and beach
eateries, hopes approval of the coral propagation method
at JW Marriott will be the go-ahead for more such
nurseries. “Our chairman is a very low-key man,” owner
rep Duong Nguyen Anh Thi told me, “but he doesn’t want
us to cut any trees or hurt any animals.” Pushing marine
sanctuaries is long-game thinking both ecologically and
economically, something that can be tough to sell to a
local population that has forever relied on seafood for
sustenance. Sanctuaries can lead to an explosion of life,
life that doesn’t stay within the limits of the protected
areas. This is good for tourism and good for fishermen.A
T THE OTHER END of the design spectrum and
of the island from JW Marriott, on a peninsula
jutting out from the northwest coast, Nam
Nghi was originally conceived by its owners as
sustainable luxury—dark timber buildings
were placed based on the natural terrain and
trees, none of which were cut for construction;
none of the 49 private villas has a pool, instead
harnessing good airflow through large
hammock-bedecked porches, most of them over the
ocean. From mine, I could see guests frolicking on the
beach on the islet across the channel that is home to the
hotel’s Rock Island Club. Over there (crossing via their
super-comfy pontoon ferry rivals their glass-bottomed
kayaks for fun), elevated above the waves crashing on the
boulders below, surrounded by clear barriers, and
clutching a mojito, you feel like you’re floating in the
middle of the ocean. One evening, as the horizon in front
of us turned from pink to violet, a rainbow appeared high
in the sky behind us—someone declared, “It’s like a
strawberry-jam sandwich,” and though that was a tad
nonsensical it was right on target. Phu Quoc does sunsets
like Langkawi and Bali: full-length and in Technicolor.
Hyatt took over management this year, adding the
property to its boutique-minded Unbound Collection, and
promptly set about going even greener with the place. Nam
Nghi no longer serves any imported fish, just the catch of
the day from their local partners. “It’s better for
overfishing, for taste and for quality,” the director of
culinary operations, Pankaj Bisht, told me. He has set up
his own lobster traps in Nam Nghi’s waters, and scoured
the country for responsible suppliers. Shrimp comes from
Nha Trang, veggies from Dalat, and soon, eggs from cage-
free chickens kept by a guy up the road... once he gets that
commercial farming license he’s applied for.
Nam Nghi owns another private island a 20-minute
speedboat ride north, Hon Bang, a little spit of land with a
pier, where security guards keep away fishing and tourist
boats. It’s a shallow, calm place to snorkel. All the more so,
I realized, when we motored down to Turtle Island. It took
me a while to recognize this as the same place I had visited
four years prior, then an empty key I paid a fisherman to
take me to in a wooden dinghy, and lend me his homemade
snorkel mask, and hope the current wasn’t aggressive
because I wasn’t sure he could swim and there was no one
else to be seen. Now it was cordoned off with a buoyed
rope, just beyond which bobbed several boats and a
floating restaurant/dive shop. Because it’s a beautiful reef