Well, I arrived in Phuket Thursday morning without any trouble; other than the handful of soldiers which I saw at the airport exit, there was no indication that anything out of the ordinary was happening in Thailand. After an hour's ride from the airport in a chauffeured Toyota Highlander, I arrived at the Mövenpick Resort & Spa. On the way, my driver pointed out several local points of interest, including the Monkey School, which is exactly what the name implies - a school for monkeys. He told me that the same place also had a guy that handled huge king cobras. Sensing my interest, he sent me a video from his phone (via Bluetooth) of the snake guy playing with what looks like a 10' cobra! I'll try to add that later - remind me. Anyway! Microsoft always manages to find memorable local hotels for its Mobius events, but this time they managed to completely outdo themselves.

As we pulled up to the resort's entrance, my immediate plans were to check in and then get to my room and crash...but I was told that instead, I had an appointment in the spa in 15 minutes! I had actually made an appointment at the spa when I thought I was arriving Wednesday, but had cancelled it when I realized I would lose my free day. Long story short, they had gone ahead and rescheduled me, which was awesome!

After 2.5 hours of complete and totally amazing pampering, I finally made it to my room, and took a moment to check my messages. Joel from Geek.com had sent an email asking if I had yet arrived. In reply, I gave him my room number, and we made plans to walk to the evening's event together. Finally I was able to crash, and did for a couple of hours.

At the reception, I met a group of attendees from Taiwan, Thailand, Japan & Singapore. More familiar faces from the past included Eric from PhoneScoop, Jason from PocktPCThoughts, Ed from Brighthand, and Howard from Howard Forums, and several others.

As expected, the food was amazing; we noshed on a tasty variety of local specialties and America standbys.

The highlight of the night was when John Starkweather, our event organizer, tossed an ancient Casio palmtop in the pool. He had no sooner said he would give a Dopod HTC Hermes to the first person to jump in the pool that retrieved the Casio, than Andrew (I'll add his site later) was in the pool getting it! I think Andrew might have jumped in with his mobile phone and room key still in his short's pocket...seriously! Ah well, he seemed pretty pleased with the trade-off. Ha!

We were joking that the punchline was that we would all receive an HTC Hermes as we left...but we were wrong. Instead we received a red Roadwired Pod complete with Mobius dogtag, which I know will come in handy. I cut out of the reception early and was soon fast asleep in my bed.

More later...