tan wee cheng's odyssey

An issue some may raise is, how do you define what's a country/territory, and what's not ? What's considered a visit and what's not ? My definitions are:

1) Sovereign internationally recognised countries and those which are recognised as separate territories by the UN - for example, Western Sahara is treated by UN as a separate territory from Morocco, and so is West Bank & Gaza currently controlled by the Palestinian Authority, i.e., Moroccan and Israeli occupation treated illegal and hence these two are considered separate entities.

2) Constitutionally separate territories, i.e., colonies and dependent territories like Bermuda, Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Faroe Islands. Hong Kong and Macau are considered separate territories before their reunification with China and since I was there before 1997, I regard them as separate territories.

3) Territories enjoying de jure or de facto independence though not recognised by most of the world, e.g., Taiwan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transdniestria and Abkhazia are examples.

4) Territories that are merely culturally different or merely aspire independence but enjoy neither de facto nor international recognition are NOT considered separate entities, e.g., Quebec and Tibet. Their inclusion will bring about excessive disagreement and a temptation to include every province and district.

Various quotations from John Simpsons in A Mad World, My Masters:

"Once we had a planet. Now… we’re left with a suburb."

"There are three bad times: the night before you leave for somewhere difficult, and you sit with your lover or your family trying to behave entirely normally in order to show how safe everything is going to be; the following morning, when the car comes to take you to the airport; and the moment when the plane touches down at your destination. Of all these moments, the last is by far the worst. It is also more unpleasant than anything you are likely to experience later."

"Even if you find yourself under long intensive shelling, which is the nastiest thing I know, or are attacked by an angry crowd, which is the second nastiest, it never quite matches that dreadful sense of foreboding when the plane jolts, the tyres scream, and the trip begins to unfold: the separation from the comfortable, safe, familiar world of an aircraft, the cold air, the uncertainty of standing in line at the immigration desk, defenceless against all the fears you have been suppressing. And of course if shelling, arrest, or angry crowds materialize – and they usually don’t – you are much too busy to worry about the outcome."

"Serious traveling is never comfortable or safe, and is very rarely accompanied by champagne, unless, that is, you have brought your own. Serious traveling is difficult, and the enjoyment is in direct proportion to the degree of difficulty. By which I mean, it only starts to be really enjoyable once it’s over."


Zhenghe	Ibn Battuta	Marco Polo	Lawrence of Arabia	Bruce Chatwin


Kykkos Monastery, Troodos Mountains, Cyprus	Helsinki Bay, Finland	Georgian Military Highway, near the Russian/Chechen border	Train, Ukraine, near the Moldovan border	Torres del Paine National Park, Chile

the many faces of

TAN WEE CHENG

Tan Wee Cheng, Singapore weecheng.com

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