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

From the balcony of my hotel room at the Eastern & Oriental Hotel, I saw Royal Caribbean's Anthem of the Seas leaving port enroute to Thailand's Phuket on the night of 3 December 2024. The colourful lights of the cruise ship and its reflections in the pitch black water of the night was a delightful sight to behold. A rare photo moment that I just could not miss. 📸 Royal Caribbean's Anthem of the Seas leaving port, Georgeotown, Penang, Malaysia (2024)

Ending my travels in 2024 with a stay at a heritage hotel.....  I did not travel much in 2024. I was simply too busy with everything else to go away on  vacations. My last trip for the year was a good one though. It was a relaxing 6-day sojourn to the Malaysian city of Penang where I was booked to spend 5 nights at a heritage hotel. The 135-year old Eastern & Oriental Hotel, also simply known as E&O. Following my stay at the 150-year old Nikko Kanaya, the E&O was the next heritage hotel on my travel bucket list and I was glad that despite a relatively barren year of travel in 2024, I did actually get to stay at both the Nikko Kanaya and E&O during the year. Heritage hotels have a rather nostalgic feel with their rich and storied histories. Staying at these hotels and walking along the same hallways that many historical figures had walked before was a surreal experience. Especially so when some of these historical figures were amongst those we read about in hist...

France,  Toulouse Way back in 2005, I travelled to the southern French city of Toulouse for the first time. I was there to attend an engineering conference and took the opportunity to squeeze a little sight seeing over a single weekend. Capital of France's Occitanie region, Toulouse is one of the largest city in France. I had always wanted to visit Toulouse since I was in school, having read about the city in a magazine when I was a school librarian. I was thus extremely happy when I was nominated by my then-boss to attend a conference that was to be held in the city! I flew from Singapore to Paris and from there, took a connecting domestic flight to Toulouse. A school-hood travel bucket list item came true! ****************** Toulouse, is located in the south-western region of France and is the capital city of Haute-Garrone. It is also known as the Pink City because of the unique architecture of some of the buildings in the city which use pink terracotta bricks. Home to European A...