A Life in Travel

This special extended episode captures the best bits of Season 2 throughout 2020. This has it all – podcasting secrets, lost bamboo, crazy ideas that turn into successful businesses, a sea journey with a mysterious captain, climbing mountains in search of redemption, a bit of boogie-woogie and sitting next to Ol’ Blue Eyes on a flight. Happy listening. And watch out for Season

Travel has been a part of Cyril’s life from the time he was born. His mother was a flight attendant, and Cyril thinks that he probably took his “first flight on a baby chair.” After the sidelining of his plans to become a professional tennis player, Cyril went on the more conventional academic route and had goals to work to earn money to travel. Fast forward to years later, t

Danny has managed to combine his love for music and made it into a business which gives local musicians a platform to perform. His love for music has also brought him and his band, The Souls of Singapore, to different parts of the world. In this episode, Danny shares on his love for the blues, and the adventures that music has taken him on. In this episode: Being in the band, The S

Two setbacks make the founding of a company for Rod. The founder of Viator, who subsequently sold the business to TripAdvisor, began the journey of creating Viator when he was fired from his job as the Vice President of Marketing. Rod then went on to create an online system for a client, but the project fell through. Thus, he set out on his own and based on that idea, Viator was bo

The author of The Gift of Rain (2007) and The Garden of Evening Mists (2012), which were respectively longlisted and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, was in Cape Town during the recording of this episode due to worldwide lockdowns due to COVID-19. The hard pause to life as we know it has given him the space and time to focus on the writing of his third novel. While he enjoys h

While growing up in Hong Kong, journalist Sophie Cairns has always dreamt of becoming a China watcher. Her work at South China Morning Post and then at Reuters have brought her to Shanghai for the Beijing Olympics, and then to Paris. The life-changing moment of her father’s passing set her off to climb seven volcanoes to raise funds for cancer research, and she’s also written a

After five years into her banking job, Anqi caught the travel bug and fell in love with the sea. Her stints as a scuba diving instructor eventually brought her to Thailand where she discovered her love for freediving, which is breath-hold diving without any breathing apparatus. Last year, she set a new national record for Singapore at the CMAS 2019 World Freediving Championships in

CEO, Queen’s Road CapitalEven as a young boy growing up in California, Fritz Demopoulos thought like an entrepreneur, finding a way to make money from distributing flyers. That lesson in distribution may have been what started him on his journey towards building China’s first travel search engine, Qunar, with his two co-founders. And that wasn’t even their first startup toge

Full Potential Labs, Sydney Yes, travel changes lives, and sometimes not necessarily for the better. A young Claire Hatton, living in Singapore then, lost her husband Chris to the Bali bomb attack in 2002. From then on, Claire has lived with the adage that “nothing is to be taken for granted”. The tragedy set her off on an adventure where she took up photography, travelled the

Owner, Nikoi/Cempedak IslandsIn this episode, find out how a former banker found the real gold in beach sand, not bank notes. Andrew Dixon, born in Australia, was taking a holiday on an island in Indonesia when he and friends decided, why not build a holiday house for family and friends? Then more friends came and asked, why can’t we stay too? And so, he expanded it into an islan