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

Attending the Nagaoka Hanabi Matsuri (Fireworks Festival) has always been a travel bucket list item for me. This year, I finally managed to check this item on my list. I attended the event on both days, on the 2nd and 3rd of August 2023. With an estimated 20,000 rounds of fireworks launched into the summer night sky of Nagaoka, this is arguably one of the best fireworks display not just in Japan but probably in the world. Held along the Shinano River, this is truly the mother of all Fireworks Display for me. Here, I am sharing a couple of photos and a short 12-seconds video of part of the fireworks display. I have a lot of other clips of the fireworks, including its finale. But those will take time for me to process before I can share them in this blog. A lantern with the words " Japan's Number One Fireworks" in Japanese. Many of these lanterns were hung all over the fireworks site along the Shinano River, Nagaoka, Niigata Prefecture, Japan (2023) A selfie of myself looki

2018 Travel Review....... In 2018, I did not travel as much as I wanted due to work commitments. Compared to the preceding year of 2017, I traveled a lot less. Nevertheless, I still managed to clock some amazing personal trips and got to visit many places for the first time. These included the cities of Moriyama, Omnihachiman and Takashima in Japan's Shiga Prefecture and also Perth and its surrounding areas in Western Australia. I also got to visit Indonesia's beautiful island of Bali for the first time in 2 years as well as my favourite and usual destination cities of Hong Kong and Taipei. And all these trips within a year in which I was supposedly "grounded" in my home city because of work!  Fireworks over the harbour to celebrate Western Australia Day on the night of 3 June 2018, Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia (2018) My travel in Shiga in April 2018 was amongst one of the best trips I had ever taken. The itinerary was intentionally p