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

Month-long Pan-Asia Trip, East and South-Asia Asia This was a major trip which took me months to plan. Because there were many key details to follow such as accommodation, train travel times and inter-city transport connectivities, I had to cancel and re-book many of my hotels and train tickets bookings repeatedly. And also because I was visiting many of the places for the first time, my only source of information was from the internet. Not much of this information was accurate and some of the inaccuracies nearly resulted in me missing my inter-city connections. Lesson learnt and note to self, take information from the internet with a big pinch of salt! But this was a wonderful trip. I am unlikely to be able to go on such a long trip with so many different destinations in one single vacation again anytime soon. Work schedule always dictates that I can go away for at most two weeks at any one time. Thus, I was really glad I managed to complete this trip. While I had to lug my work lapto

Note from the Author: This article was originally written in February 2000 based on my first ever visit to Ho Chi Minh City. Many years have passed since and I am quite sure many of the places mentioned herein have changed. The currency exchange rates mentioned in this article were based on the prevailing rates at the time of my visit. The photographs that accompanied this article were taken by myself using 35mm films and scanned into digital format simply because digital photography in the year 2000 was still in its infancy! Thus, I apologize for the relatively "low quality" of these photos. Time flies and it has been 14 years since that visit. This reminds me to make another visit to this awesome city to see for myself how much things have changed since! - Timothy, Sep 2014       Saigon was the former capital of South Vietnam prior to the official reunification of the country in 1976. After reunification, Saigon was renamed as Ho Chi Minh City. Today, Ho Chi Minh City