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

Australia, Western Australia, Great Northern Highway I lived in a city state that measures approximately 50km from east to west and 17km from north to south. There are thus no country roads to speak of where I could drive and  drive to enjoy the pleasures of solitude. The longest drive that is geographically near to my city is the neighbouring country of Malaysia where the North-South Highway stretches from the southern state of Johor to the northern state of Kedah, a distance of about 772km. I often embarked on long drives along this route to travel from Singapore to Ipoh (capital city of the Malaysian state of Perak). The distance each way is about 550km (as measured by my car's distance tracker). But the North-South Highway is a relatively busy stretch of road and while the route passed by large swathes of palm tree plantations, this is definitely no country road by my personal definition. The opportunity for me to drive on a lonely country road finally arrived wh...

  "So, this is the place! The crowds,  coming, going, meeting, parting; Friends, strangers, known, unknown. - Translated from poem by  Semimaru (Japanese poet of the early Heian Period, name as recorded in the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu ) Circle of Stones, Kamitsushimamachikin, Tsushima, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan (2019)

When international leisure travel is not possible, the next best thing is to go local. To travel locally and enjoy the local sights and sounds that we do not normally indulge ourselves in. As a wrapped up to my rather pathetic travel calendar for 2020, I embarked on a local cable car ride on New Year's eve. This was my own small way to mark the end of 2020 and to celebrate the arrival of 2021.  That this was actually my first time taking a cable car in Singapore was quite surprising to myself. While I had taken countless cable car rides while overseas, I had not actually rode in a cable car in my home city! Well, that was then. I had since clocked my first local cable car ride and was pleasantly surprised by the beautiful night view as the cable car took me from its starting station at Mount Faber to the resort island of Sentosa and back. The drizzling rain made the ride a cosy one and I loved the natural effects of the rain on my photographs.  Where else next? Local attractio...

Sorting out my travel memorabilia ....... As international travel remains curtailed, I decided that it was time to take a weekend to sort out and clear up my study which now also serves as my home office while the new normal of "working from home" (a.k.a. WFH) continues into its second year. Being someone who cherishes a neat and tidy environment, I naturally have all my books, documents and other stuff neatly arranged and displayed on the shelves lining the walls of the small room which is my study. However, with WFH taking its toll on the daily-in-use home office, stuff naturally got built up after 15 months of working from home daily, 7 days a week. The result was small piles of documents, books, magazines, work materials, letters, memos, notes and online purchases stacking up first, at the corners and then the corners-of-the-corners as space around the small room quickly ran out. That was when I decided a day of area-cleaning had become necessary. As I got around sorting ...

Finland & Estonia, Gulf of Finland, Baltic Sea The ocean has more often than not, invoked a sense of romance (travel-wise) for me. And for someone who was born and grew up in a part of the world near the equator and in South-East Asia, the northern seas of Europe are often seen as exotic and exciting. Thus, when I was planning a trip to Finland for spring of 2017, I just could not resist including a short sailing trip across the Baltic Sea, just for that personal vanity of checking off another item on my travel bucket list. Besides the bucket list tick, of course I did get to visit Estonia as well and walked on the famed cobblestone streets of Tallinn's Old Town, another item on my bucket list! To be honest, I did not actually get to sail right across a large swathe of the Baltic Sea, but only that tiny fraction from Helsinki to Tallinn across the Gulf of Finland to be be exact. But because the Gulf of Finland is technically classified as the easternmost part of the Baltic Sea,...

Keeping track of continuous changes in travel plans ....... One year into internal border restrictions due to the pandemic and there is still none of the proverbial light at the end of the dark tunnel of cancelled and disrupted travel plans. While previously the rollout of vaccines have been touted as the silver bullet in the fight against the pandemic, the now often-touted phrase is "vaccines ain't silver bullets in the fight against the pandemic". Meanwhile, international travel remains an impossible task. Like many travellers who previously had trips booked in advance and had to rescheduled and then further rescheduled these trips or even cancelled them, I have had my own share of dealing with the logistics and administrative hurdles of doing so and seeking refunds. Thankfully, most of my trips had now been cancelled and in most cases, I have had refunds being credited back to my bank accounts. However, I still have a hotel booking in Bali which was originally booked f...

"The Journey Is the Reward "  - Steve Jobs Jizo statue, Itsukushima, Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan (2019)