Phú Quốc

Diving here is all day-boat, on wide wooden hulls that often carry snorkellers on the same trip. Most run south from An Thới harbour out to the archipelago: two dives with lunch aboard and a long surface interval, so the day is as much a boat outing as a diving one. When the south turns choppy, operators switch to the sites off the north-west coast instead. Night dives are run less often and are worth asking about, because the sand is a different place after dark.

Nothing here is steep. Boulders run off the island shores into shallow sand, coral heads and rubble fill the gaps, and there is no wall, drop-off or swim-through on the site list. Sites differ mainly in the mix: some are mostly boulder with fish holding in the cracks, others broad sand and rubble flats where the guide slows right down and starts pointing. Current is mild, which makes the dives long and easy to run at a crawl.

The dives that pay off are the slow ones. Guides work the rubble margins for seahorses, nudibranchs and small cephalopods, and stingrays sit half-buried out on the sand, so this is finning at walking pace with a torch rather than covering ground. It suits macro photographers willing to work in short visibility, and anyone fitting a few dives around a beach holiday. Two or three days covers what the island holds; divers after big animals should plan a second stop.