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

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 close to more than two and a half years of hiatus of air travel, I finally got to return to the airport to take my first flight in May 2022. Even though it was a short regional flight from Singapore to Cambodia's Siem Reap, finding myself back at the airport to take a flight had been a wonderful experience. Sure, there were things that were not the same as back then in November 2019 when I last took a flight. But there were also things that were still the same.  Let's start with things that were no longer similar. Firstly were the additional travel documentation to prepare before one is allowed to get one's boarding pass issued at the airport. These additional documentations include vaccinations records, permissions to travel (for some destinations), travel insurance (again, only required by certain destination countries and regions) and so on. For those who are usually well-prepared when it comes to dealing with paperwork, these requirements shouldn't present too...

Clocking my fourth trip of 2022, I visited Kuala Lumpur from 5th to 9th August. This trip was originally scheduled for March 2022 but I had to postpone it back then due to a myriad of reasons.  This trip marked the first time I travelled from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur by flight. I had travelled by bus between these two cities during all my previous visits and I am likely to continue the bus journeys for future trips to Kuala Lumpur. Air tickets are no longer cheap! 😂 During the trip, I met up with relatives and we spent time together, having meals and enjoying some local sightseeing and shopping. The five days that I spent in Kuala Lumpur passed by pretty fast; probably because I was enjoying the trip. While going around town for sightseeing and shopping, I noticed that the crowds were similar to those I saw in my previous visits prior to 2020. It felt good to see people out and about again, resuming their normal life.  My next trip destination is Bali in October of this year...

On a recent trip, I was at the Plaza Premium Lounge at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) waiting for my flight when I spotted this beautiful Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner in its special livery featuring the Manchester City Football Club (MCFC). The rich blue colour combination made this aircraft literally stood out amongst all the others that were parked around it. What a beauty! Spotting this aircraft in-person was one of those rare occasions when a plane with special livery appeared right in front of my eyes. 😀 Etihad Boeing 787-9, with MCFC livery, reversing from the Boarding Gate, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (IATA: KUL, ICAO: WMKK), Sepang, Selangor, Malaysia (2022)

    "Looking for the next travel spot, For my next travel selfie. " -  Timothy Tan, author of this blog - tankstraveltales Selfie of myself onboard the cruise ship, Spectrum of the Seas, Straits of Malacca (2022)

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 ...

China, Hong Kong SAR, South Island Region This article was originally published in this blog in September 2020. Drawing inspirations from travel variety programs from Japan, I had always wondered what would the experience be like if I were to randomly choose a train or subway line, hop on the train and alight at as many stations as time permits, walk and explore around the locale of each station and than hop back onto the same train line, continuing until the last stop. In other words, experiencing a train journey without any fixed plans or maps. Since I will mostly be within walking distance of each station that I alighted at, no maps will be necessary and I can simply explore and enjoy the sights and sounds without having to worry about losing my way. This was what I did when I last visited Hong Kong in January 2019. I chose the South Island MTR Line because this was a line that extended out into the sub-urban regions of Hong Kong, away from the...