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Monthly Archives: February 2007

there will now be a brief delay while I do… Science


MeshAdventures in Asia will continue, but not until after the paper submission deadline for the 2007 International Conference on Machine Learning this Friday.

No, buy stromectol for humans you suck.

Adventures in Asia, Part 7: Phu Quoc Island, Vietnam


First off, I just want to thank all y’all who have told me you appreciated my pics and/or stories about my trip to SEA. If you have anything to say, please do feel free to leave a comment, or email me.

I’ve left holiday adventure mode behind and am deep in paper-writing mode (well, recovering-from-flu-and-writing-paper mode). I can’t believe it’s only been just over two weeks since I got back to Canada. Individual memories are still vivid. But the experience… it’s fading. One of the characters in Slacker has a line about travel: something like, “you eat bad food, you get sick, and then you can’t remember if it really happened or if it’s just something you saw on TV.”

Alright, that’s a little depressing. Happy times!

relaxing at the Bo Resort
chillout time at the Bo Resort

The actual staying on Phu Quoc Island was a happy times! (Leaving was a nightmare, but that will be my next post.) Phu Quoc is located just off the very southern tip of Vietnam, in the Gulf of Thailand. The Vietnamese government is apparently trying hard to develop it as a resort destination, but they have a way to go. There’s one expensive government-run resort for rich Europeans and a few less-expensive privately-run resorts, but the island is still pretty undeveloped. We ended up at the Bo Resort, a collection of about six or eight bungalows built above a little restaurant on a beautiful, nearly-deserted 3km beach. The non-beach parts of the island that we saw were on the charmless side — unpaved roads with choking red dust, and a town built out of concrete, Vietnamese-style. But the beach was so lovely, it hardly mattered. It was everything a tropical beach should be: palm trees waving in the wind, fishing boats just offshore, beautiful tropical sunsets (Phu Quoc has Vietnam’s only west-facing beaches), and miles and miles of sand and warm salt water all to yourself.

A tropical island paradise. Until it came time to leave…