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

Singapore, Turtle Island Off the southern coast of Singapore lies many small and beautiful islands that one do not normally associate with a high-tech driven city. But herein, havens of tranquility, nature, beautiful beaches, turquoise-coloured waters and wide-opened spaces offer unique escapades from the busy city-life of mainland Singapore. That all these islands can be reached within half an hour by ferry makes traveling there even more appealing. UNESCO World Heritage Sites these islands are not. But they definitely do qualify as  personal Bucket List items . In this blog post, I am featuring one of these island. Kusu Island is where one can find several shrines, nice beaches and yes, many turtles (mostly red-eared sliders,  Trachemys scripta elegans). ****************** Kusu Island, a.k.a. Turtle Island in the local dialect, is also known as Pulau Tembakul in Malay. Lying less than 6 km from mainland Singapore, Kusu I...

As digital technologies and devices continue to take over our daily lives and habits, I now try to "digitally detox" myself whenever I travel. While my work dictates that I cannot fully rid myself of my digital communications channels even when I am on vacations, I have tried to limit time spent on my digital devices in my recent trips. And I will continue to do so in the future. Work aside, I believe we had all spent a fair bit of time reading news, checking in on social media and even doing some online shopping while we were traveling. Besides, what was there to do if we happened to be chilling out in a cafe in a nice Tokyo suburb or dining at an eatery by a picturesque riverside along the Mekong River? Enough of that, for me at least. I have decided that books and journals are the way to go when I travel. Conversations with people around me; with my travel partners, fellow travelers, folks working at the cafes or the locals. Through conversations, I discovered whole new wo...

"Writing allows me to travel beyond my small world, to other worlds limited only by my imaginations ." -    Timothy Tan, tankstraveltales Islets at dusk, Yatsushiro, Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan (2023)

Journaling......  Journaling is my way of keeping memories. Journaling on the move, both overseas and local, helps me record experiences, events and notes as they happen. While there are many ways to journal, I personally prefer to journal the "old-fashioned and analog way". I write, with pens and notebooks.  I keep several journals all at once. The first is my personal journal. This notebook never leaves my desk. I use it to write about my days, not every day, but on days when I feel like writing.  On some days, there may be more than one entries. This is the beauty of journaling. There is no pressure to write. I only write when I feel like writing. It is a conversation with myself. What I wrote in this journal are meant for my eyes only. Next, I have a travel journal. This is another notebook which I only write in when I travel. Being a travel journal, I use this to record my experiences during my trips. Unlike the personal journal, this travel journal is usually not ju...

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...

These days, I realised I have become more conservative in my dressings when I travel. I had always dressed conservatively back at home and at work due to the nature of my profession and the industry that I am in. That has not changed and will likely remain unchanged. But, whenever I travelled on vacation, I tended to let my hair down a fair bit when it came to choice of clothing. I had written all that in the past tense because I realised, those days of past were indeed that, the past! Not that I am consciously doing that, as in dressing more conservatively when I travel. But somehow, that change just crept in without me realising it. Until, I started to look at the photos of myself in my recent trips. Is it because of age? Or is it because I have somehow got brain-washed by the mainstream media that everything nowadays have to be politically correct, freedom of choice and thoughts be damned? Maybe yes, may not. I don't know for sure. But dressed conservatively I did. Browsing thro...

Back from a month-long trip......  Home, from a fresh trip that lasted close to a month, I am currently buried up to my nose in work! Ah, the payments for my wanderlust. To be honest, even though I spent a small fortune on my month-long trip across Asia, these are funds that I had already budgeted and put away as spare money since last year. All my credit cards had been paid in full, maintaining my good credit score. That is how I can enjoy my vacations without having to worry about finances. Money matters aside now, in order not to digest from this month's edition of Travel Bits. 😆 After my long trip with many individual travel bucket list items fulfilled, I no longer have any major trips planned or booked. Apart from the yearly sojourns to nearby destinations such as Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh and Bali, no major trips are in the horizon on my calendars. Ok, I do have an 8-nights cruise to Bali and Lombok booked. But that trip will only happen in February 2025. Who knows what the world w...