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

After more than 5 years, I visited Phuket again in October 2022. While this trip was a short few hours because I was visiting this beautiful island as part of my cruise ship's sailing itinerary, it was nonetheless nice to be back in Phuket. More than 2 years of border restrictions due to the COVID pandemic, things seem to be returning pretty much to normal in Phuket. Eateries are open for business again, although many do remain shut, tourists numbers are rising again and the locals seem a lot happier to be able to again welcome visitors to lovely Phuket. In my few short hours on shore, we kept to the Patong beach area to dine on our favourite Thai food including Mango Sticky Rice, chill at a beachfront cafe, went for a nice foot reflexology session and just walked along the beach to enjoy the view, the sun and the Phuket vibes. I promised myself I will be back to Phuket soon, for a vacation. See you again Phuket! 😀 A tourist doing the touristy adventures, Phuket, Thailand (2022) A

Getting in the travel groove......  Travel wise, things are slowly but surely getting back in the groove. Having completed four trips this year compared to just one in 2020 and zero for 2021, I can say that my travel experiences are beginning to look "normal" again. Normal when compared to 2019 and earlier. I have two more trips planned for this year, both in the months of October. After which, I am taking a short break from travel for the rest of 2022. My travel budget has its limits! For next year, I have nothing concrete planned for now. But I should at the very least, be able to go on at least three trips. Hopefully, one of these will be to Japan in August to watch the famous fireworks festival in Nagaoka in Niigata Prefecture. Whether Japan will be opened to leisure travellers by this time next year remains to be seen. Despite talks about being in the forefront of opening up, together with the rest of the G7 nations, Japan's doors remain shut tightly to foreigners. I

After the boredom of 2020 and 2021 that is synonymous with stay-at-home, work-from-home and what have you, 2022 has seen leisure travel resuming; a little at  first and then gradually creeping back more and more as pandemic-related border restrictions were lifted.  Personally, I have joined in the worldwide phenomenon in releasing the pent-up demand for leisure travel even though I am currently only travelling regionally. Why so? Cost is the main driver in my choice of travel destinations. I do not have a large travel budget. Thus, I decided that several short regional trips beats one single distant trip. The resumption of leisure travel and the demand that comes with it seems to have caught many airport authorities and airlines by surprise. We have all read about the long queues at airports, the missed connections, flight cancellations and lost baggages hobbling travellers. However, such travel chaos are affecting different regions of the world differently. In my part of the world, So

I finally got to enjoy my first ever cruise experience. A short 4-days, 3-nights cruise from Singapore's Marina Cruise Centre to Penang's Georgetown in Malaysia onboard Royal Caribbean's Spectrum of the Seas. Deck 15 of Spectrum of the Seas, Royal Caribbean Cruise, Straits of Malacca (2022) Maybe it was my first time on a cruise and also my first time onboard Spectrum of the Seas but everything was new and exciting to me. I watched two performances on the first night of my cruise; "Showgirls" and "The Silk Road". For me, the performances were good and I enjoyed both shows. Over the next three nights, I also managed to catch two movie screenings on Deck 15 of the ship, where the pools were located. These movies were "Gorilla vs Kong" and "Cruella". Watching the movies in an open-air area reminded me of the times when I was a kid and had watched movies in those open-air drive-in cinemas which were no longer available in modern Singapore