He went, he saw and he wrote it all down.
That may be the critical difference between Foreign Service officer Sim Siong Chye and the many of us who love to travel the world.
Bitten by the travel bug at 22, Mr Sim joined the Foreign Service 18 years ago to satisfy his wanderlust. Since then, the diplomat, now in his 40s, has travelled to 41 countries on work and personal backpacking trips.
In
Once Bitten, Never Shy: Confessions of a Backpacking Diplomat, Mr Sim – now First Secretary in the Singapore High Commission in Canberra, Australia – writes of his travels in China, Russia, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Scandinaviaand South America from 1995 to 2004. Drawing from his detailed travel notes, he researched and wrote his book in 2005 and 2006 while on his second official posting in Yangon, Myanmar.
“There wasn’t much to do at night (in Yangon),” he quips. Luckily for him, the writing was done before the civil unrest (2007) and Cyclone Nargis (2008) made him a much busier man. Returning home in 2009, he was finally able to get his book to the publisher’s. He now hopes to write a second one of his travels in Myanmar.