It’s Friday morning in Wellington, our last full day here for a while. While I’m sitting here in the sun typing, B is looking back over his old newspaper clippings from Hamilton and Wellington zoo – there are lots of mentions of him or his zoo mates in the paper.

We’ve spent the past week in Wellington packing and organising our lives away for the next year or so, as we head overseas for a life change. When we went to get some money exchanged at the Travelex on Lambton Quay, the teller told us we must try some new and exciting jobs that we wouldn’t normally do while in our usual day to day lives. Having given up my public sector analyst role, I am looking forward to trying some new things – but it might be a bit harder for B who is used to hand feeding giraffes, talking to visitors, and who just got back from 2 months in Africa tracking rhinos!

In the midst of the economic crisis and with a lot of friends facing the ”R” word, we have decided to follow our itchy feet and have resigned from our jobs and are heading to the UK, via Hong Kong, South East Asia, Paris and Germany. The UK is a good starting point because we have friends and some links over there (common language is obviously a huge bonus, as is the ancestry visa that I was granted). After 1 summer there maybe we’ll decide to bite the bullet and head to Africa, where I can be B’s PA in the field while he tracks some exotic animals, or maybe he’ll work with me if I end up in a development programme or research/ evaluation work – we don’t know what will happen which makes it exciting! We are lucky in that we have savings to rely on while we try out different things, only ourselves to look after, and have the freedom from being born in NZ to be able to travel pretty much anywhere.

During our past months of applying for visas, organising and packing, we’ve found out there are a lot of other people doing the same thing – it is a kiwi tradition, something that my former colleague called ‘small island syndrome’. This is what it is known as in Japan where people acknowledge they live in a small country and want to experience other cultures, ways of life, experiences and people.

 We will be sharing our travels here; at dessertnights.com, continuing a family ritual of a regular pudding night. Starting while we were at uni with B’s family, we’ve instigated it in Wellington as a way of making some time every week to catch up with family over something sweet. Hopefully we’ll pick up some tasty dessert recipes along the way and can post them here!

Pirini favourite: Banana and honey winter dumplings (from Allyson Gofton)

Serves 5:

• 1 1/2 cups self raising flour
• 2 Tbsp caster sugar
• Grated rind of 1 lemon
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 1 egg
• About 6 Tbsp milk
• 1 banana cut into 10 slices
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 6 Tbsp honey
• 1 Tbsp butter
• 1 Tbsp brown sugar

Sift the flour and caster sugar and stir through the lemon rind. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles fine crumbs. Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients, add the egg and milk, and mix quickly with a knife to form a dough. To make the syrup, put the water, honey, butter and brown sugar in a large lidded frying pan and bring to the boil. Divid the dough evenly into ten even size portions and mould each portion around a slice of banana into a ball shape. Place the balls into the boiling syrup and cover. Lower the heat and simmer for five minutes without lifting the lid. Serve hot with a sp0onful of the syrup and lashings of freshly whipped cream.