Environmental Proselytizing

On the beautiful island of Phu Quoc, we signed up for a snorkeling trip. On this snorkeling trip we stopped at three small islands to snorkel around the coral. Phu Quoc's snorkeling is reported to be some of the best in the world and we were very excited. Here is where it gets ugly; of the three stops, only one of them had coral that was still alive and it was also dying. The boat we were in anchored on the coral itself, never mentioned to anyone "don't touch or stand on the coral". We also all fished off the boat and caught tiny fish which were not thrown back. I don't know what happened to them but they were clearly not full grown.

A guy who worked at our hotel came to our porch after we came back to talk to us. He said that he used to lead snorkeling trips where he was careful to not anchor on coral, he never took his boat fishing for small fish and always explained to people not to disturb anything while snorkeling. He said 90% of the coral around Phu Quoc was dead (I am always sceptical and this guy seemed a little off so who knows about the numbers) and that he was put out of business, in fact he was verbally threatened by the tourist mafia that runs the island. I could certainly see there being a mafia of that kind here.

I say all this to share what we've learned with other potential travelers. One of the best thing anyone can do for the environment when traveling is to use companies that act responsibly, unlike the one we ended up participating in. This is not easily done in places like Vietnam and may require more research beforehand. Spending an afternoon swimming around looking at dead coral is a very depressing and consciousness raising sight.