TANKS Travel Tales - a travelogue.......

Singapore, Turtle Island Off the southern coast of Singapore lies many small and beautiful islands that one do not normally associate with a high-tech driven city. But herein, havens of tranquility, nature, beautiful beaches, turquoise-coloured waters and wide-opened spaces offer unique escapades from the busy city-life of mainland Singapore. That all these islands can be reached within half an hour by ferry makes traveling there even more appealing. UNESCO World Heritage Sites these islands are not. But they definitely do qualify as  personal Bucket List items . In this blog post, I am featuring one of these island. Kusu Island is where one can find several shrines, nice beaches and yes, many turtles (mostly red-eared sliders,  Trachemys scripta elegans). ****************** Kusu Island, a.k.a. Turtle Island in the local dialect, is also known as Pulau Tembakul in Malay. Lying less than 6 km from mainland Singapore, Kusu I...

As digital technologies and devices continue to take over our daily lives and habits, I now try to "digitally detox" myself whenever I travel. While my work dictates that I cannot fully rid myself of my digital communications channels even when I am on vacations, I have tried to limit time spent on my digital devices in my recent trips. And I will continue to do so in the future. Work aside, I believe we had all spent a fair bit of time reading news, checking in on social media and even doing some online shopping while we were traveling. Besides, what was there to do if we happened to be chilling out in a cafe in a nice Tokyo suburb or dining at an eatery by a picturesque riverside along the Mekong River? Enough of that, for me at least. I have decided that books and journals are the way to go when I travel. Conversations with people around me; with my travel partners, fellow travelers, folks working at the cafes or the locals. Through conversations, I discovered whole new wo...

"Writing allows me to travel beyond my small world, to other worlds limited only by my imaginations ." -    Timothy Tan, tankstraveltales Islets at dusk, Yatsushiro, Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan (2023)

Journaling......  Journaling is my way of keeping memories. Journaling on the move, both overseas and local, helps me record experiences, events and notes as they happen. While there are many ways to journal, I personally prefer to journal the "old-fashioned and analog way". I write, with pens and notebooks.  I keep several journals all at once. The first is my personal journal. This notebook never leaves my desk. I use it to write about my days, not every day, but on days when I feel like writing.  On some days, there may be more than one entries. This is the beauty of journaling. There is no pressure to write. I only write when I feel like writing. It is a conversation with myself. What I wrote in this journal are meant for my eyes only. Next, I have a travel journal. This is another notebook which I only write in when I travel. Being a travel journal, I use this to record my experiences during my trips. Unlike the personal journal, this travel journal is usually not ju...