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

Beitou is a district of Taipei located to the north of the city. Although well-known with locals and travellers for its hot springs, Beitou is also home to the "green" library of Taiwan. Designed with eco-friendly features, the Beitou Branch of the Taipei Public Library is outfitted to be both energy efficient and environmentally friendly. Beitou Branch of the Taipei Public Library, Beitou, Taipei, Taiwan (2018) Beitou Branch of the Taipei Public Library, Beitou, Taipei, Taiwan (2018) Besides its eco-friendly features, the library itself is an architectural marvel and definitely the most distinctive feature in the Beitou landscape. Visitors to Beitou just can't miss this architectural landmark. The Beitou Library, Beitou, Taipei, Taiwan (2018) Shelves of books lined the Library's interior, Beitou, Taipei, Taiwan (2018) The spacious interior is designed to be energy-efficient based on the Library's overall eco-friendly concept, Be

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

Safeguarding important personal belongings when travelling....... Over dinner with friends during the weekend, one of them related to us about an incident in his recent  trip to Europe. He was on a group tour and one of the travellers in the group had lost her passport as well as all her cash and credit cards. She was the victim of a pickpocket. Apparently, the act occured while the group was in a small crowded lane while moving from one point in the city to another. The pickpocket (or pickpockets) must have had made use of the confusion and the crowd to carry out the theft. The aftermath of that incident effectively ruined the victim's trip. She was left without her important travel document which also happened to be her only form of identification in a foreign land. And she was also left penniless as all her cash and credit cards had been stolen. Thankfully for the lady, my friend loaned her cash and assisted her to contact the nearest diplomatic representation of her

Reading and Travelling....... What has reading got to do with travelling? Plenty of reasons. For me, reading up on the countries and cities I am visiting provide me with lots of information on the sights and sounds that I can expect. It also allows me to better plan my itinerary and help me to decide on where to stay and how much time to spend in a particular place. Other important information like currency exchanges, local culture and customs, potential immigration hurdles and visa applicabilities are also what I look out for when I read up on the places i am about to visit. Most of these information can be found in travel guides or on the internet. Dungeons and Dragons, a wall mural in a former dungeon and now a toilet, in a restaurant housed in a heritage building, Tallinn, Estonia (2017) And of course, reading about the experiences of other travellers provide me with a whole new world of information not usually available in officially published literature. For this r

Review of my travels in 2016... 2016 has been an extremely busy year for me. It also marks a year when many of my planned trips could not proceed as scheduled due to a hectic work schedule. However, there are also a great many unplanned trips which happened during the year. Trips which I have to cancel in 2016 include visits to Osaka (Japan), Barcelona (Spain), San Francisco (California, United States) and Auckland (New Zealand) as well as my annual personal retreat to Bali (Indonesia). Unforeseen projects that crop up along the way as the year progressed lead to these cancellations which I will eventually undertake at a more appropriate time in the foreseeable future. Trips which were not planned but happened in 2016 include visits to Thiruvananthapuram (India) to attend a friend's wedding and to Orlando (Florida, United States) to attend a software conference with my customers. The visit to Thiruvananthapuram and Orlando were my first ever visits to India and the Unite

The to-do-list before embarking on a trip....... Fresh from a short trip in early July to nearby Phuket, I am already looking forward to my travel plans for next year. I already have one confirmed trip in the month of May next year where I will travel to Helsinki, Tallinn and London for a 10-day vacation. Only the air tickets have been booked. I will settle the rest of the bookings closer to the travel dates. But before you think that I really truly enjoy myself on my travels, think again. The hectic nature of my job meant that any vacation is never really a vacation. When on vacation, I am still expected to reply to office emails promptly which usually means within an hour or two. Replying to office emails is the easy part. The difficult part is when I have to prepare tender and contractual documents, budgetary quotations etc and the list goes on. The need to handle such tasks and to deliver the output required, usually within a single business day regardless of where I am in t

I flew 'J' Class on from Hong Kong (HKG) to Taipei (TPE) on EVA Air (BR) during my recent vacation. This was my first time flying on EVA Air. As this was a vacation, I had wanted to take things a bit slower and also to travel in a bit more luxurious style to reward myself for working non-stop, including weekends, for the past 5 months. Thus, I decided to fly via Business Class in the late morning which I supposed is a relatively off-peak period for flight reservations, especially on a weekday. Thus, I was booked and flew to Taipei's Taoyuan International Airport via EVA Air's Flight BR852. The Flight BR852 that I was on, uses an A330-200 to serve the relatively short route from Hong Kong to Taipei. Total fight time was 1 hour and 45 minutes (official estimates) although based on my watch, we actually touched down in Taipei in less than 90 minutes after leaving Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok Airport. As this was a short flight, I did not get the chance to real