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

Johor Bahru (JB) is located at the southern tip of Peninsular Malaysia and is connected to Singapore via the Causeway , across the Straits of Johor. Due to its close geographical proximity to Singapore, as well as the favourable currency exchange rate between the Singapore Dollar (SGD) and the Malaysian Ringgit (RM), many Singaporeans and Malaysians working in Singapore, typically made day trips to JB via the Causeway. During these day trips, most travelers will dine and shop. It is not uncommon to see folks returning to Singapore from, JB in the late afternoons and evenings, laden with shopping bags. This happens on most days, not just the weekends. Although during weekends, the crowds crossing the Causeway are noticeably larger. Being someone who does not really enjoy being in a crowd, I mostly stay away from such day trips. On occasions when I drove across the Causeway, it was mostly to travel further inland into Malaysia, either to Kuala Lumpur or to Ipoh. But on one weekday after...

Missing those weekend trips....... The saying goes that often we only realised the importance of people or things after they have left or are no longer around us. In this case, it is those weekend trips that I am missing. Prior to the upheaval caused by COVID, going away for a short trip over a weekend was so simple. And because it really was very simple, I did not pay much attention to these trips. Actually, I did not even considered them as overseas trips despite the fact that I was actually crossing borders for these trips and a valid international passport was required to be produced at the border checkpoints. But now that international travel has all but vanished, these little weekend getaways started to be remembered as enjoyable overseas trips and a longing to undertake these same trips now feature as high on the agenda as those bucket list travel items. In December 2019, I went on a short weekend getaway to neighbouring city of Johor Bahru (a.k.a. JB), state capital of the Mala...