I won’t bore you with bio-diversity figures, but it’s safe to say Borneo is the stuff of the legendary David Attenborough’s wet dreams. Malaysian Borneo is also an easy place to visit, free from the hassle-factor so ubiquitous in other South East Asian places. People used to high class accommodation might balk, but for me staying in places with no air-conditioning and no hot water didn’t

...and the winner is:  "Female Exiting Prostitution Worker".  I don't even know where to begin, folks.  I do know I wouldn't want that job title on my business card.  In other job-hunt related news, my father-in-law saw fit today to lecture me about my job-hunting skills.  Have I thought about looking at working for government departments?  No, that major career-path escaped me, despite the fact

Two days after I landed back in Blighty, I was guilted into going to Eastbourne* to visit The Provincials, who were holidaying there, having timed their visit to exactly coincide with our arrival back in the UK. Those of you who have travelled non-stop for seven weeks, and know the pain of a 10-hour flight, will understand that this news was not greeted with quite the joyous raptures I believe

Thank you, folks, for all the wonderful comments about the Waitomo Caves experience! I didn't feel very brave at the time, particularly once the eels slurped into view, but I am glad to have done it. And now: onward!For it is written that on all camping trips, there shall be rain. And it shall be biblical in its intensity. It takes a long time to drive across New Zealand, folks. There are

Much as I love New Zealand, there are certain cultural traits among its people which I take very serious exception to. One of them is su casa es mi casa.* I'm not sure if I'm being peculiarly British, or just a tad anal, but I usually wait to be invited in to someone else's house before I enter. Not so in New Zealand. Today was the pre-Christmas Street Party, and regular readers will be able to

It was my 31st Birthday on Sunday. I dread my birthday, now that I'm old enough to realise that with every passing year the gap between my childhood expectations about what I ought to have achieved by a certain age, and the reality of my existence, grows ever wider. I have formal 'achievements' under my belt, to be sure, but do they actually mean anything? I'm qualified up to my eyeballs, and

For this experiment, we took ten women aged between 25 and 35, and asked them to plan a hen's night (bachelorette party) for a colleague who is flying off to India to get married. The hypothesis was that seeing as each individual woman is possessed of at least rudimentary project and relationship management skills by virtue of being employed in challenging roles, this would not be traumatic.

If you believe the available information in the vicinity of Noosa (most notably the marketing pamphlets of the myriad whale-watching companies), it is an hour and three quarter drive to Hervey Bay. In reality, it is more like two and a half hours. We found this out the hard way, after much cursing and expensive overseas cell-phone "We're almost there, I promise. Can you hold the boat?" pleas.

Our friends own a holiday home in Lake Tekapo:Photo by Fraser Gunn.We couldn't pass up the opportunity of Mate's Rates for two nights, so we wound our way from Kaikoura to Tekapo via the scenic route through the mountains, rather than the boring route across the flat flat flat Canterbury Plains. Unfortunately, the scenic views consisted of driving rain, so the price of an extra hour and a half

Regular readers will know that I am a woman who values her mooching-time. I like to spend some time, every few days, with no commitments, and nothing to do. It keeps me sane. Regular readers will also know that Cowboy prefers perpetual motion, and this dependency on activity is the only aspect of his character which has been known to forge in my inner being a white-hot scimitar of fury. We

It looks like I am out of NaBlo. Dammit, I was doing so well - planning my posts in my head on the way home, fretting if it got to 5pm and I still had nothing to write about. And on those days, I still managed to pull a Dilbert cartoon out of my arse. But it couldn't last. I tempted fate. I commented last week on Jonathan's blog that I was secretly hoping that my shitty old Packard Bell would

Boat, taken during our weekend constitutional. Camera steady because we hadyet to tackle the lung-bursting, quad-defying hill atop which the car awaited our return.Too long have I coasted atop the crest of a wave of jobs which I could handle in my sleep with my hands tied behind my back, where the biggest challenge was staying patient in the face of brutal assaults against logic and rationality.

Dear Gym 'instructor', Thank you for agreeing to meet me yesterday to reassess my fitness programme. There was no need to apologise for being ten minutes late, so I'm glad you didn't mention it. I'm usually receptive to accusations of 'not being around', when in fact I had been sitting on the appointed leather sofa for ten minutes before presenting myself at reception to enquire after your

I finally figured out why my most recent batch of cookies were a miserable failure, and the results of my extensive study make for disturbing reading. Yes, it's all the fault of the USA.*Exhibit 1: The Measuring Cup)Measuring cups are a ridiculous invention, especially when the humble weighing scale already existed. Ingredients have different densities. Thus, a cup full of margarine will not

As I was driving to the gym in the swiftly-darkening evening yesterday, my route took me down a relatively busy, but wide, boulevard-type street. I was bimbling along, singing aloud to Antony & The Johnsons, when the headlights illuminated something white slightly to the right of my path, next to a traffic island.I slowed, and it became apparent that the white thing was actually black and white,

I'm all alone at the office of my new job today. The rest of the team have gone on a strategic planning day to enable new levels of helplessness and bitterness to be felt by staff who realise that they exercise no control over the direction of their work and that they are merely marionettes, dangling at the bottom of strings tweaked by the great corporate puppeteer. I am not included, for my

It came to my attention this morning that a local government entity has made a stupid decision in response to an even stupider proposal from the private sector. I may never recover from the shock.Now that you have picked yourself up off the floor, I will impart the precise details of this important issue. Owing to frantic hurling of brown squidge into a rotary cooling device at work, I cannot

****************************************WARNING: Kiwi readers will probably not appreciate this post. ****************************************In recent days I have wandered into a trough of intolerance for things that are different from my homeland. I imagine this is something many migrants endure, and that it will disappear with time. However, for the moment, I am being picky about the

You know, tooling around town in my new-to-me car, Windy, I was beginning to have more confidence as a driver. I am still terrified of maiming or killing an innocent passer-by, but every time I venture out, the honks are becoming fewer and farther between. At one point last week I even took one hand off the steering wheel long enough to adjust the air-conditioning from one of its two settings

Oz has never been high on my list of places to visit, but when the opportunity for a (nearly) free trip came up, how could an intrepid Cowgirl turn it down? Cowboy had to work Monday and Tuesday, but that left us with two days together, and two days of me and Sydney on our lonesome. Setting aside the minor disaster of the red-eye (6.40am) flight, and the check-in dude joking with us that if we