It was raining when we arrived at the train station in Lucerne from Basel in a Summer morning. Lucerne is a picturesque town in Switzerland with the settings of Swiss Alps, Lake Lucerne and its medieval old town.

As stated in my copy of Thomas Cook European Timetable that we had just over three hours before our next train to Interlaken was due. So, we had time to do some sightseeing around the town. Before we started, we needed to first buy our first Swiss souvenir of the trip, an umbralla for that(it was raining, remember?).

Nikko is a town located 128km north of Tokyo, Japan. My wife and I together with two friends who live in Tokyo joined a day tour to Nikko from Tokyo. The price of the tour was 10,000 Yen per person.

Our tour bus started really early and we arrived in Nikko at about 9:00am. We visited what Nikko is well known for - the extravagantly decorated shrines and temples namely the Toshogu shrine complex(built in the 17th century),

I was born and brought up in this town. Taiping is a town located in the northern state of Perak, Malaysia, it’s about a three-hour drive from Kuala Lumpur or an hour drive from Penang.

Taiping started as a tin mining town in the middle of the 19th century. It quickly flourished through the first half of the 20th century as the British colonial administration centre for the state of Perak and tin mining hub. The name “Tai Ping” means eternal peace in Chinese.