Phu Quoc 2019 Day 7 – Vinpearl Land and Waterpark

Woke up late since it was a day of fun at the water park which we got unlimited entry because of our stay at the the resort. But the slow pace of life continued from the day before.

There were 2 restaurants for breakfast and we were directed to the second one, not sure why. After reaching the start of the queue, we were supposed to scan our faces for entry but nothing was detected. Of course, as it wasn’t set up because during the night before, we were supposed to do it and now we realized why we were told to go to the concierge after check in (and we realized that was what was mumbled to us about). Anyhow they took our room numbers and we went in.

The area was in a mess, like a food war zone with many tables either taken or not cleaned up. One of the staff directed us to one table and she herself starting to clean up the table. The restaurant seemed severely understaffed. We settle K down and started to go to the buffet line.

Like many buffets before, this one had quite a variety and like many Vietnamese ones, there were options with pretty heavy, meaty stuff and rice. What was interesting here was that there was a kids station where the tables are shorter in height, designed for kids to go pick up their own food. It was an interesting concept, only thing that it was not that workable since I didn’t see any kids doing that.

However the pace at which the clean plates and bowls were being replenished was slow. I had to wait a while to get bowls so as to get K some yoghurt. And the hard boiled eggs tray had invisible eggs cos I never saw them. I couldn’t get omelette from the egg station and didn’t know the reason cos I couldn’t understand what the staff said, so I settled for scrambled eggs. K was disappointed without hard boiled eggs and didn’t like the scrambled ones.

Returned to the room to get dressed and brought along the water gun we bought in Da Nang and his safety vest and then we proceeded to the reception to get our photos taken and tagged to the individual room cards.

Along the way, we stopped by the kids club to check the place out. There were quite a number of children in there already. Most of the stuff in there looked more for kids in pre-kindergarten and K loved to play with those stuff meant for younger kids so he spent some time there and at the ball pool before we managed to get him out and continued our journey to the water park.

The tickets of the water park were tagged to the room cards and so we only needed to provide the cards for access into the park. Inside the small water park (by area), it did have quite a few options of fun. While mommy settled herself under shelter at the cafe, we went onto the lazy river, which in my opinion wasn’t lazy, the water was moving pretty quickly! So fast that some kids actually found themselves being washed away (it’s not deep so it’s ok). It felt nice sitting on a float as we went around pretty quickly.

We then went over to the wave pool which generated waves at certain periods (but I don’t know what’s the schedule as it seemed pretty random) and enjoyed some play time there. There was the usual play structure for children but K was afraid of the water splashes from the overhead big bucket and didn’t want to go there. He only tried twice on kiddy slides and then he was back at the wave pool.

For the adults there were bigger slides, I got on one with a mat (as K wanted me to go try and he watched) and it was pretty nice and decently fast. We couldn’t do the rest since those were for bigger boys but we can see that not all the slides were operational since there weren’t a lot of people.

We stopped for lunch and found that the only eating place was that cafe but it only served western food and had lots of people. We exited the park to go to the beach only to find a beach bar. In the end, we decided to go to Vinpearl land for lunch instead.

We walked back to Tower A where the pick up can be arranged and took the buggy there after it arrived (which was full as many people also had the intention to visit the theme park). It was a quick ride there taking only a couple of minutes. Went to the ticketing counter and was informed that there were no discounts for guests staying at Vinoasis but the only freebie was that guests who buy their tickets at the hotel itself would get unlimited entries whereas if we got the tickets from the counter itself, there was a dinner buffet from 5pm to 730pm. We didn’t have much of a choice and got the tickets for 1.4M (500k for adults and 400k for child).

To our dismay, we couldn’t find any other restaurant with sit in options other than Lotteria. Found ourselves seated with quite a crowd there and mommy went to purchase food while K and I waited and spent some time on phone games. And it was quite a long wait! The supposedly fast food only arrived after about 20mins of waiting.

Once done with lunch, we went on to look for rides (we missed the mermaid show and shark feeding show that happened during our lunch time and we decided to skip the water park there since most of the rides there were for heights 1.2M and above and K only already been to the water park within the resort) and got onto some of the rides like dizzy teacups and bumper cars (which was one of the popular ride) and later went into the much appreciated shelter (as it was freaking sunny) of the arcade zone. This was where we spent the most time (again), going from machines to machines to try out the different games, like what we did in Ba Na hills, even though the area here was not as big. There was a mini pirate ship but no one was operating it. K had a go at the indoor playground but there was no routes that led to the slides – the slides were more like a display.

After much persuasion (for K to leave), we managed to proceed to the aquarium. The aquarium was not very big but still there were some nice marine life to see, like one with a huge blue coloured fish with the huge moray eel, a baby shark tank with open surface and a long glass tunnel where we saw a stingray slapped against the wall. But compared to the time we spent at the arcade, we simply breezed thru.

Walked to the ferries wheel and there was a small queue for it. The wheel was going pretty slowly ( much like the pace of the entire island).  While at the top, we were treated to a nice view of the surrounding in sunset hue. But soon after, we were down to the ground and it was over.

Went to the free dinner buffet which was close to the entrance of the musical fountain show and it was there that we saw most of the crowd (whereas the park wasn’t having a lot of people most of the time)! We got ourselves a table quickly and went to get the food from the buffet line which didn’t look good. Ate whatever we could eat (and worse off for K being a super choosy eater) for our dinner and proceeded to the fountain show to sit in.

K was looking extremely tired from not having enough sleep so we decided to skip the musical fountain show, thinking that we have seen enough fountain shows to know which were the good ones and which not. Also, coupled with the fact that after the show, there might not be enough transportation back, we decided to return. We boarded the buggy as soon as it arrived and we were back to the room, after getting ourselves some scopes of (paid but delicious!) ice cream from the stall near the bar for 55k each cup.

We spent the night watching YouTube videos of the fountain show and were gutted to find out that we were wrong! The fountain show looked really impressive but it was too bad that we made the choice to return to the room earlier. Spent the remainder of the night with K with his Beyblades and bath time before going to bed.