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

    "Travelling allows us to escape from our daily lives and gives us a new perspective of who we are ." -    Timothy Tan, tankstraveltales Boats at the beach, Senggigi, Lombok, Indonesia (2014)

Traditional-styled watercraft are unique and defined the people whom the designs of these crafts originated. They are also extremely photogenic subjects even when framed against simple and common backgrounds like the beach or just the sea. When I first visited Lombok in 2014, I had no lack of subjects to photograph while walking along the beach looking for watercraft. The photograph in this blog post shows a fleet of jukung on the beach at sunset. These small outriggers are traditionally used for fishing. More modern usage includes ferrying scuba divers to their favourite dive sites around the many islands of Indonesia.  Fleet of Jukung on the beach at sunset, Senggigi Beach, Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia (2014)

Sustainable Travel....... Climate change is the catchphrase of our time. To ensure that I play my own small part towards more sustainable and environmentally-friendly trips, these are the little rules that I follow while travelling: Do away with disposables - I pack my own small set of re-useable cutlery in my check-in luggage and use them during my travels. This allows me to totally eliminate the need to use any disposable cutlery for my meals during my trips. As much as I can, I will also avoid dining at eateries where food are served using disposable bowls, plates and cups. Cut-down on single use plastic bags - Bringing along my backpack when out sightseeing, small purchases on-the-go can be placed right into my backpack, drastically cutting down on the need for single use plastic bags. Re-useable Water Bottles - Boiling water at the hotel room and filling up my water bottle with the boiled water after it has cooled down to room temperature. This way, I avoid the

Do what you want on you travels....... Travelling for me, has always been to do what I want and not what others think I should do. For that reason, I seldom signed myself up for package trips. While package trips are good for some destinations where I can just leave it to the tour agent to plan everything as I sit back, relax, and enjoy what the trip has to offer, these trips do also include certain stops or activities on the itineraries which I just do not find joy in partaking. Thus, for the most part, I always book my own air tickets, hotel accommodations and jet off to the destination to enjoy the trip at my own pace, space and time. For some difficult-to-travel-to locations for sight seeing, I may sign up for a day trip. But that's about it. Most of the time, I prefer to enjoy trips at my own leisure. Having said that, I did thoroughly enjoy myself on some package trips including escapades to Nepal for trekking and white-water rafting. And there were also the packag

In-between my planned trips to the Maldives in August 2014 and Japan in October 2014, I decided to take a short trip to some place nearby; preferably within a 3-hour flight time radius from my native Singapore. As part of its 25th anniversary celebrations, Silkair was offering 50% discounts on award redemption tickets to some selected regional destinations and I jumped on the opportunity to redeem my return air tickets to Lombok using my Krisflyer Miles (Silkair is wholly owned by Singapore Airlines and thus I could use my Krisflyer Miles to redeem award tickets on Silkair flights). Each return ticket only required 7,500 Krisflyer Miles to redeem after the 50% discount. Of course, I still had to pay the usual taxes and surcharges in cash. :-) My flight onboard Silkair MI128 from Singapore's Changi International Airport (IATA: SIN, ICAO: WSSS) to the new airport near the city of Praya; the Bandar Udara Internasional Lombok (IATA: LOP, ICAO: WADL) took about 2 hour 35 minute