A Tight Corner
Eating cold fried eggs and soggy white bread in the convent, under the scrutiny of a spreadeagled plastic Christ and an increasingly baleful Pope, Z...
Tagged: motorbikes
The Great Hot Springs Disaster
The rhythms of life at the convent in Ruteng do not encourage sloth. The sisters start their day early, in their cells up the hill,...
First Leg. Second Thoughts?
Struggling to get off the ferry, I begin to wonder whether my wizard wheeze, to ride a motorbike through Indonesia to Papua with my ten-year-old...
Two Dinners and Four Goodbyes
“You need a ticket to come in,” says the briby man at Denpasar airport. “I don’t have a ticket,” I say. “My son is flying....
In Which I Lose A Child and Gain a Motorcycle
If there is one thing more disconcerting than being woken up while sleeping al fresco under a mosquito net by a chap who wants to...
Learning to Love Our Motorbike
It didn’t take sharing a road with the Bali Merzy Motorcycle Club, arguably the best-behaved bikers on the planet, to teach me that there’s nothing...
Confession: I’m a Rubbish Traveller
Meeting up with a couple of travelers t’other day, it dawned on me that, actually, I’m quite a rubbish traveller. Not, so much, when it...
A Very Little House
This is the view from our very little house in the rice fields in Ubud, Bali. We’ve taken it for a month, to study Indonesian...
Heaven and Hell on Wheels…
Bali. One of the most consistently beautiful places on the planet. With (outside the timelessly international package hell of Kuta) a culture that is beyond...
Like Jane Austen But Not: The Single Gal's Guide to Travelling Asia
1: Avoid Spaghetti Straps Shoulders are an erogenous zone in many cultures. Particularly shy ones. In South-East Asia, nothing, and I do mean nothing, says...