Kuala Lumpur, we often rubbed each other the wrong way.
Five years ago, we met after a very long time and I was frustrated by the chaos of your traffic and the craziness of your city. Which was ironic because I came from the city with probably the worst traffic condition in the world. Needless to say, it was partly my fault – I was too pampered after living in the orderly Singapore for a year, where everything works the way it should.
So does my friend JY who went to Taiwan together with me (she is slightly taller than me but only half my width which goes to show that the world can be very unfair, but let’s ignore that fact for the purpose of this post).
We also don’t plan a lot when we travel. Hence it is no surprise that we did not have a list of tourist attractions to visit.
But still, we did have a list of food we needed to try. That is simply how much we love to eat.
After eating our way through Cingjing, Sun Moon Lake and Taipei, we had several hits and misses when looking for awesome must-try dishes. So in order to do the world a service and turn the wasted calories into something useful, I have decided to create the list of food we had there that was absolutely worth trying, with occasional notes of which food turned out to be disappointment.
Fried salty mini fish (Cingjing Farm, Cingjing)
I honestly did not expect much out of the eatery at Cingjing Farm, but this mini fried fish was a nice surprise! It was served hot and crispy with just the right amount of salt, but be careful of lurking fish bones!
Vanilla Roast Chicken (Lao Ji Po, Cingjing)
This fragrant roast chicken was recommended by our driver from Taichung to Cingjing. I was half surprised and half glad that the main dish of the mountain with the famous sheep farm is not, well, sheep meat. (I find it morally wrong to be eating any animals that I have pet previously. I may have deliberately not pet any pigs in my life because pork).
Before we went for our trip to Taiwan, my friend and I made a pact. We would each pick a city in Taiwan that we were going to visit and book an accommodation there without consulting each other.
Naturally, we both got slightly nervous, mainly because we did not want to disappoint each other with our surprises. To be honest, I am generally pretty easy with where I spend the night while travelling, as long as there are no cockroaches, demons or poltergeist present. But I have to say, not only was I fine with the hostel my friend chose in the end, I was actually very pleased with our accommodation at Sun Moon Lake.
Once she had established that I did not mind staying in dorms, she decided to research into a few places and found this new undiscovered gem called perBED Hostel. It sounded very backpacker-ish, and it did live up to its name, only with an interesting twist. Instead of having the backpackers sleep on normal bunk beds in separate rooms, the hostel has decided to convert cargo boxes and other industrial things into beds and put them all in one big room. Continue reading “perBED Hostel, Sun Moon Lake.”→
I just came back from a trip to Taiwan with a friend, and it was wonderful. Lots of interesting things happened, mainly because of our lack of planning. Most of them were great, and I will have a few accommodation places to recommend if you are looking for something affordable and interesting in different parts of Taiwan.
But before all that, I have to talk about Sun Moon Lake, the main highlight of our trip. Which is ironic because if you have asked me about Sun Moon Lake before this trip, I would have told you that there was nothing too memorable about the place, save for a giant lake and a few temples.
My first visit to Sun Moon Lake in 2011.
But this time round, Sun Moon Lake was determined to make itself memorable. It has definitely surged up to become the highlight of my trip, although not necessarily in a very conventional way.
We arrived at the Shui She Pier, the main pier of Sun Moon Lake, from Puli some time in the late afternoon and realised that our hostel was at the other side of the lake, at a village called Ita Thao, which was away from all the main attractions and the walking trails.
Travelling makes you realise a lot of things about yourself. It puts you in touch with who you are and over time you will realise some things that you are good at, some improvements you have made, and some things that you just stubbornly can’t master.
As I’m nearing my last travel in Asia (for a while at least), I reflect and realise that I’m hopeless at these few things – no matter how much practice I have got, I still behave like I’m a novice.
Booking accommodation early
Trust me, things like airbnb.com, hostelbookers, agoda, booking.com have made life easy for everyone. But it is just ingrained in me that I have to leave things to the last minute because I’m too lazy to check locations for accommodations, read every single review etc, so much so that all the good places are always snatched up by the time I decide to move my lazy fingers and type those websites in. Thank goodness that we are spoilt with choices, I still manage to end up with some decent places whenever I travel.
Sense of direction
I can get lost anywhere I almost think it’s a talent. I have been lost on countless streets of every country I’ve visited, in the malls or buildings in general, bathrooms (I kid you not), hotels, etc. I honestly don’t know I have survived this long living in general, let alone travelling.
And something closely related to this…
Reading maps
I tend to abuse all paper maps that I get hold of, turning and turning while I am stuck at crossroads until the criss-crossing lines start to make sense.
With the advent of Google Maps, one would think that things have improved for me. But no. I still turn my phone around and curse at it whenever the map rotates along with it.
Bringing a pen
Pens are almost always essential in every travel. You would need them to fill in those immigration forms, pen your thoughts down in a travel journal or just for taking general notes on the go. But despite telling myself sternly countless times to bring a pen for my next trip, I still don’t, and will only realise it when it’s too late, like when I’m already in the taxi on the way to the airport or worse, on the plane a few thousands feet up in the air when they start distributing the immigration forms.
Although if bringing this pen means that I can find my prince charming right away, I will have it with me ALL THE TIME.
I have never truly appreciated the wise words of Hans Christian Andersen until the end of last year, when I am denied of my ‘freedom’ to travel because I have decided to take up a new job. I have been very fortunate in my previous company, being able to take many days off to explore the world while still doing relatively well in the office. But all good things must come to an end when circumstances changed and I decided to take the leap and get my hands on a different career path.
My lifestyle for the past nine months have been by choice, travelling less in the name of pursuing my career. I have travelled exactly twice thus far: once on a cruise trip to Langkawi and another on a semi-photography mission to Bali. This is pale in comparison to what I have been doing the past few years – I used to plan a travel on average once a month, both to neighbouring countries or somewhere further north like Nepal and Alaska.
This low travel period has made me realise something. I have been bitten by the travel bug (to put it in a cliche term), and there is no turning back. I have attempted to be more grounded, using steep learning curve and lots of reading as substitutes to packing my bags and seeing the world. Those substitutes or rather, distractions, have not worked and I find myself daydreaming, browsing through old travel pictures and reading others’ adventures.
I crave to feel alive again and not run away from my calling. The only thing that has helped so far is changing my mindset about Singapore – that I can travel by staying put and that there are new places for me to discover. I start to appreciate the little things around me more and marvel at everything as if it was my first time seeing all of them.
But even this also makes me realise that perhaps 9-to-5 jobs are not for me, at least for now. I feel that there are so many other things that I could be doing rather than being tied down on office chairs, staring at spreadsheets and emails, leaving office only to continue doing work at home. I haven’t found meaning in what I do, and while I still have the energy, hunger and means to see the world, I should.
So I suppose it is only natural for me to decide to leave my job to pursue something different. I will reveal the details much closer to the date, but it is exciting (!!!) and will involve me moving out of this little island that has been my comfort zone for the past nine years.
For now, all I can say is, thank you Hans Christian Andersen for the beautiful words that have been my mantra all this while and brought me to the most incredible places in this world.
I have so far lived my life believing that I was born to be a jack (or jill?) of all trades. I would be interested in something, learn about it, be somewhat decent at it and move on to new things.
Until I found myself in Copenhagen more than five years ago and fell completely in love with the city. Since then, I found that I can be especially good at something, i.e. travelling back to the same city over and over again just to do the same things that I love.
Till date, I have travelled to Copenhagen on five different occasions, and I have met the Crown Prince of Denmark (here we go again), which is why I think I am properly qualified to give my opinion on what the best things to do in this city are.
So here are my personal favourites, in random order.
Take a stroll at Nyhavn
My absolute favourite place, and this lovely harbour has been featured numerous times in this blog. Walking to Nyhavn from Kongens Nytorv Metro Station is like finding a colourful surprise after a somewhat gray (albeit beautiful) stroll at the heart of Copenhagen.
The mall directly on top of Kongens Nytorv Station.
I have been distracted and somewhat grim, judging from my past few posts (or lack thereof). There was work, my badminton journalism stint, being wheeled around on a hospital bed, a boy, and just lots of things that kept me away most of the time from my laptop to write.
But I just came back from Bali, one of the most amazing places in this region, and it would be a travesty not to at least drop by and say hello at my so-called travel blog. Truth to be told, I have lost a little bit of that overflowing ideas on my writing angle on my travel stories due to lack of practice, which is ironic since I’m about to move myself a few thousand miles north to pursue something writing-related (more about that in the coming weeks :)).
So I looked into one of my main sources of writing inspiration – my travel photos (the other one is my favourite travel blog Everywhereist). Apart from finding lots and lots of pictures of food, one place that really stood out was Devil’s Tears Bay at Nusa Lembongan, an island just one hour ferry ride off the the southeast of main island Bali.
It’s looked promising since arriving.
If you think that the name Devil’s Tears Bay sounds intimidating, wait until you are actually at the place.
When it comes to procrastination, I think I’m the queen.
I have been wanting to write this post for a while, and it took me two YEARS to finally get around to it.
I think part of me wanted to make this post perfect, since I felt that this travel story that I’m about to write deserves the best. Everything that had thus far come to my head never sounded good enough – I don’t even know if this post is going to cut it.
It took a terrible earthquake that practically damages Kathmandu to shake me out of this mentality, and I decided to write this post about the kids in Nepal, because I’m thinking of them, and I’m praying for their safety.
The historical tower built in 1832 that collapsed because of the earthquake.
I went to Nepal exactly two years ago on a mission. I had never been much of a charitable person, and definitely not someone who would proactively make time in the weekend to help people in need. And for that, I felt genuinely horrible, as if I were a very evil person. So I decided that perhaps a trip to the poorest country in Asia would make me more charitable.
I expected the living conditions and the tough terrain of Nepalese mountains would teach me a thing or two. And I did learn something from them. But the credit for the best lessons learned should go to the kids, really – I went there to teach them some Mathematics and English, but I came home feeling that I have learned so much more from them.
Here are some life lessons that I had the privilege to be taught by the wonderful kids:
Go the extra mile (or two) to learn
I remember complaining in my head when I arrived at the mountains and found out that we had to wake up at 6 AM the next morning to prepare for the materials because the kids are scheduled to start their class at 6 30 AM. Grudgingly I set my alarm, only to be woken up the next day before my alarm went off by the chirpy noise of the kids outside! The kids were there an hour early! What made me feel even more ashamed of myself afterwards was that I found out that some of them lived two hours’ walk away, which means they woke up at 4 AM, just to attend the classes that we were going to teach! I never recalled having so much motivation to learn, even though I had all the access to education right at my doorstep…
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