Yang Shaoxun
While everyone was traveling the world during the holidays, I stayed home in Singapore and watched the world go by through posts, videos, live streams, and stories.
When did the world become a stage where everyone is an actor in his own movie?
Judging from their posts, it seems like half of my friends are in Japan and the other half are in China. China’s visa-free policy has indeed had an effect on the Southeast Asian market. Airlines have opened many flights to second-tier cities, and passengers are also heading to previously inaccessible destinations such as Xi'an, Nanjing, and Ningbo. Chengdu has always been a favorite.
I asked my 30-something niece, who spent two weeks traveling around northern China, what she liked about the country. “It's interesting, every region is so different. Prices are affordable, the food is delicious, and technology is convenient.” The super app removes many barriers to traveling to China for mobile-phone Asians, including language barriers.
So, my first prediction for 2026 – it's not that hard: Chinese inbound tourists will be big news in Asia.
Anyway, in between sneak peeks of other people's vacation videos, I visited local places, slowed down, read a book, and watched movies made by professionals.
In the interest of keeping up with the trend, and my apologies for taking more than 15 seconds of your time (which is the gold standard for video content these days), I'm going to try to summarize the thoughts I gathered over the holidays into four points.
1. Be the best, not the understudy.
One day I decided to explore the “countryside” of Singapore. I shared this wish with my friend from New Zealand and he immediately laughed. “Does Singapore still have rural areas?”
Well, it turns out there is one last kampong (village) left. It's called Kampong Buangkok. It's sandwiched between the highway and high-rise buildings and is really easy to miss. A gravel road. wooden house. Fruit trees overflow the fence. A rooster crows in the distance.
It feels out of place in a way, but in sync, like it's always had a right to be there. It was founded in 1956 by Sng Teow Koon, who leased land to families at low rents.
Remarkably, it has survived the massive development that Singapore has experienced. This is because the founder's daughter Sng Mui Hong, often referred to as Singapore's “last kampung landowner”, rejected all offers from developers eager to monetize the remaining 12,248 square meters of land. Today, about 30 families live here and continue to pay low rent.
It’s a quiet statement of personal choice, defying the norm, standing out and standing up for what’s important to you.
In a world where everything is sucked away by machines and squashed into uniformity, people like her could be the heroes of our time.
Eric Chong of Green Acres runs a durian workshop at his farm in Penang. Photo credit: Green Acres
2. Take your time and smell the durian.
As I slow down, my mind goes back to our last online travel event this year in Seoul, where we invited a farmer from Penang, Eric Chong of Green Acres, to talk about the slow travel trends he thinks will pick up pace this year, and the growth he's seen since the pandemic.
He is a supporter of the Slow Food travel movement, whose goal is to “bring travelers closer to protecting food biodiversity and understanding local culture, identity and cuisine.”
He and his wife, Kim, both corporate trainers, actually purchased the 16-acre farm about 10 years ago as a retirement idea because they wanted to reconnect their son with nature. They decided to turn it into an organic farm, the only one in a region known for its durians.
They find it difficult to make a living growing fruit, even the most precious of fruits, durian, which smells like hell but tastes like heaven. So the pair put their entrepreneurial skills to good use and entered the travel industry, creating experiences for individuals, businesses and school groups.
His guests come from all over. In fact, Lindsay Gasik from Oregon visited Green Acres a few years ago. She now runs a durian-focused tourism business, providing travel services and delivering fruit to clients in the United States, Canada and the European Union.
Zhuang said that in addition to looking for durians, many tourists also seek natural and slower ways of traveling.
“They come to our farm to learn about organic farming, the origins of food and activities like harvesting, and we take them to visit nearby villages to learn about the rural side of life,” he said.
What they loved was the personal touch experience with Eric and Kim as hosts. “Technology can't replace that love or warmth,” Chong said. “That’s what travelers want.”
While in Seoul, he visited a farm community in Jeongeup, a two-hour drive from the city, and experienced slow travel for himself.
He found that wherever he went, people were friendly and offered him free food and drinks. He found the local tea “ssanghwacha” made by local farmers' collectives so good that he wondered why hotels in Seoul didn't offer local tea. “Travelers are looking for something local – whether it’s getting out and experiencing the local scene or eating and drinking,” he said.
Sounds like the perfect antidote to the year of rapid change.
3. The lost art of letter writing and keeping an open mind.
I usually avoid books that tell stories through letters. For some reason, probably some childhood trauma, I find it difficult to read other people's letters.
But realizing I need to burst out of my algorithmic bubble every now and then, I decided to pick up Virginia Evans’s “The Correspondent,” in which a woman tells the story of her life through the letters she writes to others.
It makes me want to write again.
Correspondence in the book provides justification for this: “Imagine that all the words you said to another person, all the comments you exchanged with friends over drinks, all the comments exchanged on the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the small talk sent quickly via email, the messages typed into your phone, in fact the sum of this human interaction was the substance of your life, and as we now know in later life, human relations are the substance of our lives; but all of it is gone. Gone!”
I found unexpected joy in things I would normally avoid, which made me realize that keeping an open mind has become one of the greatest challenges of our time.
Algorithms put us in a bubble where information is so readily available that we know everything. Social messages with incredibly beautiful images raise our expectations – how do you keep your mind open when your mind is constantly being manipulated and filled with so much confusion?
However, the best way to travel is to keep an open mind. Better yet, bring a pen and writing pad with you when you travel to write letters, even if it's just to yourself.
4. Be prepared to “take it one battle at a time.”
I really can't bring myself to write about K-pop Demon Hunters anymore, but one movie that I think struck a nerve around the world is Paul Thomas Anderson's “The Fight.”
It's been described as a breathtaking action thriller, but it's much more than that. This is epic. How brave. It's naughty. Very interesting. Very ironic. It's rebellious. One film buff described him as “the kind of anti-hero we didn't know we needed at the moment.”
For Western audiences, this is this generation's Easy Rider. For Eastern audiences, this is the “Enter the Dragon” of this generation.
It is also a love story and as we all know, love is universal.
Watching it—especially the frantic, dizzying, heartbreaking car chase through the rolling hills—made me think that traveling in 2026 is going to be very similar, whether you're in Osaka, Oman, or Oregon.
It will be one battle after another as we wait to see where technology, politics and economics take us and figure out how best to get up and down the mountain.
Spoiler alert: In the movie, the newer, faster car doesn't win.
Happy 2026.
