Sedate your time at Can Dao, Vietnam

Cities I dwell in surrounded by friends
Friends who fill my loneliness
Only to cast away from friends into remoteness
Isolated and desolated islands with sand in my hand and wind on my face
Peace in mind and no more the chase

When I look at the globe, Hong Kong is marked with a small dot, but yet home to almost seven million people. In this vertical city, like many other metros people eat, sleep and breathe chaos. Not surprising that very often I feel like running away from the claustrophobic trains, crowded markets and smelly taxis; run away to far far away islands where all I’ve is Mother Nature.


This time, we decided to once again explore Vietnam and took a trip to of Con Dao, a cluster of 16 island at the southern tip of Vietnam. Islands that served as prison cells during the French Colonial era and later Saigon regime imprisoned the opponents of the regime in its infamous cells known as “tiger cages”.

That was past, but now it serves as life cell to boost life into people like me, searching for isolation and seclusion. The islands have got everything that one can ask for and one could very well live “Eat, love and pray” life on these islands.

Like every other emerging country, there is some chaos in this country but it is good chaos; chaos that makes your trip memorable. Before we even started the trip I got a notification that Vietnam Airlines has canceled the flight from Con Dao to Saigon, forcing me to stay additional day/s on that island. Unfortunately I could get a seat on another airline – Air Mekong, only to cut my stay short by a day.


Ninety percent of tourists in Con Dao are local Vietnamese people who visit the island for its interesting and rich history, and many to visit the graves of 20000 or so prisoners who died here during imprisonment. This means that the island is not spoiled by a splurge of hotels catering to the rich Chinese and Russians. But that was true only until recently when the first luxury resort was opened by Six Senses. And there you go; the island will now be on a fast track to becoming a booming tourist destination filled with McDonalds, bars filled with loud sub-whoppers and “happy ending” massage places. But I shouldn’t be complaining, at least not yet.

Like most foreign ignorant tourists, we booked ourselves at the luxurious Six Senses resort. The resort which is built on a beautiful beach has all water-front villas and most of the all wood villas have private infinity pool. The staff is very friendly and service impeccable. All this naturally comes at a price, but with cheap money funneled by central banks around the world, money is a problem for another day.

The island is also a breeding ground for turtles that come on the island to lay eggs from June to September every year. It is something not to be missed, so I have heard. I was so busy that I didn’t find time to do any activity. My days were packed with beach, pool, nap and beach again. I had to top all of that with good food and beer. Yes indeed, it was tough but I somehow managed to fight it for few days.

With very few tourists the beaches, forests and lagoons are unspoilt and untouched. Mostly you will have the whole beach and ocean to yourself. It’s a natural paradise, at least for now.

“Ja jee le apni zindagi” (Go, live your life) as famously said in a Bollywood movie.

Why Marissa Mayer should close down Flickr?

I’ve used Flickr for years and with every passing year I felt the value of my “paid access” diminishing to the extent that this year I decided to give up my account.

I’m sure Flickr is providing some value to a handful of users, but I’m speaking from a common user’s perspective who seeks good service at a good price, with an important option to switch services if a better alternative comes along. So why did I use flickr in the first place. 3 simple reasons:

1. Share photos with my friends and family
2. Backup my photos on the internet so that I can still access them if my house is robbed
3. Access these photos with ease in any part of the world that has internet access

So what has changed since then?

1. Over time I found it easier to share photos with friends and family over social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
2. With cloud computing, there are full blown services that provide back and storage of your entire hard drive, making flickr an invaluable proposition with just its photos and videos.
3. I may not be an expert on this topic but I see accessing photos (or data) from cloud drives is much faster and easier for repetitive use. So for e.g. if I access a set of photos once from dropbox, it downloads on my device making it easier to reuse it while flickr would go back to the server every time I access a file.

Now elucidating a bit more on #2, if a customer rents a storage space, he is a legal owner of the goods stored in that space and should have the freedom to take it out anytime.  But flickr seems to think otherwise and has a one-way policy where once you get in you cannot get out. It is amazing business model but completely illegal is my view. So it kills my objective of using flickr as a backup if I cannot download back my files if for some unfortunate reasons I’m burgled of my hard drives and computers. 

I’m sure there are thousands of customers globally feeling cheated the same way I do, especially the loyal customers who have stuck to flickr over the myriad number of free services.

I’m not even talking about some of the other complaints that customers may have related to picture sizes, file types, mobile access etc which may be point of consideration for moving away from flickr, but I’m talking about the basic premise of a storage and photo-sharing site. So it is time to bid adieu to flickr forever with my farewell words “It was nice meeting you and I just wish you hadn’t ripped me off and we ended this relationship on a better note”

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are my own.