I think I have found a decent kit at a good price - Carman's Photo has a kit just over $1,000: You get the body, two Sigma lenses (listed on a UK site for £200 each), two hi-cap batteries, 256mb card, chargers, a LowePro case some filters and a whole load of other bits.

I have just blown a few hundred on a used laptop and have a car coming into port in a week so I'm going to keep thinking and reading until I know how much that's going to finally cost me!

Anyway, I spotted this photo on the dpreview forums and thought it was excellent:

http://www.members.shaw.ca/ranplett/gifs/baby_grasshopper.jpg

Apparently used a 55mm Canon lens, 1.4x teleconverter and 69mm of extension tubes.

Gareth