I'm sat in our friend Jess' house in Sibu with some spare time before getting the plane for Kota Kinabalu in Sabah.  Two weeks ago I was offered a volunteer Finance Officer role with Raleigh International and despite the short notice I decided to go for it.  I'll be there for three months working at the charity's base in KK where they keep tabs on a variety of community and adventure projects for young Brits. Right now I'm thinking "why at the age of 57 am I still doing this stuff?"  I'll be sleeping in a dorm and working with people who will mostly be less than half my age.  I feel old and anxious and a little bit excited.  I said goodbye to Sue yesterday afternoon when she dropped me off at Jess' place and I'm going to miss her.  When I finish with Raleigh I will only have 2-4 weeks left in Borneo, which will be taken up with packing and organising our return to Italy. The plus side is that it gets me some hands on experience of internat...

After our pilgrimage to Singapore Sue, Rosemary and I flew off to Penang for a few days, where we had booked two rooms on a "Clan Jetty" on the edge of Georgetown. The place took us about half an hour to track down, but was for me perfect - a secluded spot on the edge of the busy city looking out over the straits between Penang island and the mainland.  Georgetown is my kind of place - run down, noisy, cosmopolitan and full of amazing places to eat, from cheap and crowded hawker centres to upmarket restaurants so the price of a good meal can range from a couple of pounds to twenty quid or more. Just about everyone has been through Georgetown in the last few hundred years, including the Portugese, the British and the Chinese and they have all left their mark on its culture and cuisine.  It is home to the fascinating sino-european fusion that is the Straits Chinese community and was one of the main departure points for muslims undertaking the Haj.  Maybe Georgetown...

We had one full day in Singapore to visit the war memorial at Kranji with our friend and my ex-wife Rosemary.  Her grandfather Ernest Froggatt has his name carved there and her mum was keen for her to pay her respects. Kranji is on the opposite side of the island from Singpore city, facing the Straits which separate it from Malaysia.  It was here that the British and Commonwealth troops retreated in January 1942, after the Japanese had pushed them back through the Malayan peninsula.  The memorial commemorates not just those that were killed defending Singapore, but all the commonwealth soldiers who died in Southeast Asia in the Second World War, many in Japanese prisoner of war camps. We took the metro to the station nearest Kranji, then walked the last kilometre in blazing midday heat.  Rosemary and I separated nearly twenty five years ago after being together for fifteen years.  Not having much family of my own she feels like my nearest relative and so i...

After Bali it was a relief to touch down at Changi Airport.  I like Singapore, I really do.  I know this is an uncool opinion for a traveller to have and that I should prefer the so-called "real" Southeast Asia that comprises maimed jungle, crumbling and damp-stained shophouses and the smell of mould and dead fish rotting in open drains, but I don't.  Years of working in the public sector in the UK has made me a connoisseur of good public services and walking around Singapore you can see the effect of years of good governance.  They say "nothing works in Calabria" and by contrast everything works in Singapore.  The metro runs on time and is clean and the doors slide open and shut with a regular and reassuring hiss.  The vista from the carriages is of manicured parkland, well pruned trees and crisply painted high rise blocks in shades of pastel.  OK, so the blocks have numbers not names and everything is regimented and maybe a bit boring and there are a...

In a desperate search to find something good in Bali we hired a car.  Our first stop was Ubud, the "spiritual capital" of the island.  This was a tiresome bumper to bumper crawl through what seemed like an endless strip development of temples, stonemasons and furniture shops.  Ubud was OK and the temple monkeys were as honest as the other locals in wanting to get something from the stream of tattooed Australian tourists. On our last day I took a drive further afield to the rice fields around Jatiluwuh.  By this stage Sue was in bad need of some quality beach time, while I still wanted to find the Bali that I feared existed only in my head.  It was a long drive through the strip developments until I broke into more open country and saw a complex jigsaw of small rice paddies, houses and coconut groves in rolling and unbelievably green hills and valleys.  On the road I passed columns of brightly dressed local women balancing large bowls on their heads....

Six days on the supposedly paradisiacal island of Bali and I'm a nervous twitching wreck.  This is not entirely Bali's fault, but it hasn't exactly helped either.  We didn't get off to a good start when we arrived on an evening flight from Singapore to find Air Asia had left everyone's baggage at Changi.  In the confusion I forget to take my debit card out of the ATM I was drawing cash from, which I didn't discover until two days later. Fast forward to a hideously overpriced beach restaurant where we were presented with the first bill I've ever had that came to over a million.  One and a half million Indonesian rupiah to be exact, admittedly this is only about £100, but that's still a lot for a dodgy lobster and some fish.  Out came the credit card, which didn't work, followed by my debit card, not my proper one but my previous one which I'd stupidly forgotten to destroy and now thought was my current card.  Obviously this didn't work eith...

It's just been one long social whirl this week as I host a series of farewell soirees for my English students. For the teenagers it's been Sprite, sandwiches and games based around Taylor Swift lyrics and I actually got some of my big, tough, thirteen year olds singing.  Yesterday, I was sad to say goodbye to my ten year olds.  I had got more sandwich stuff in, but I needn't have bothered as they trotted in happily with plastic carriers bags full of cake, curry, chicken frankfurters and other goodies.  Most of them also brought gifts.  I have been inundated with presents, including diaries, pens, key rings and even a powder compact from Shanghai, from this lot since we started in May last year.  During our last lesson we sang songs, had a treasure hunt around the ground floor of the house, ate all the food and played games.  After a final game of "killer shark" ("hangman" without the capital punishment overtones) I stood outside in the warm night a...