Another day, another continent. Wow! It's just like the old days, before I got to Australia in January. I must say I was filled with a sense of trepidation as I made my way to the airport on Saturday morning: this was the first time for me in an aeroplane since leaving New Zealand six months ago. I was worried that I might have forgotten how to "do" travelling. And the airport transfer bus (which had spat out, TARDIS-like, a ridiculous number of people at Spencer Street bus station before I and ten other people climbed aboard) was taking me along roads I've never been on heading north and west from the city, which only heightened my excitement.

But in fact when I reached the airport I went right back onto international jetsetter autopilot: my feet took me to the toilet, then to check-in, then to immigration, and then to my boarding gate with hardly a conscious intervention on my part. My conscious self was busy relishing the familiarity of this lately unpractised routine. It was truly an Old Pair of Slippers experience.

So anyway, not much to report on the flight. I got a window seat, but it was right over the wing, so I had to crane my neck and twist round to look back over the edge of the wing before I could see any land as we flew. But boy was it worth the discomfort! When not obscured by cloud, Australia showed me such a variety of geography it was mad.

The best bit I think was over on the west coast, just north of Broome, where we flew over the King Leopold Ranges. These mountains are mental! You're pootling along over seemingly endless expanses of rust coloured desert, and then suddenly up rear row upon row of straight-as-a-die towering brick walls, strewn across the desert like so many chopsticks across a tablecloth. They are bizarrely geometric, in ways you just don't expect natural objects to be. One section looked like a rhomboid castle with a moat round it and a picket fence right around that. Most astounding.

The mountains eventually give way to less jagged lines of hills, but these look weird too. The way the land fell in terraces towards the sea resembled a pile of pancakes, but ones where you've poured the batter into the middle of the pan and let it flatten itself rather than lifting the pan and making the batter move. You know how the unlifted ones get that crinkly look at the edge, where the eggy mixture goes golden and fluffy and the hot butter glistens and ... but anyway, that's what the ground looked like: successive waves of pancake edge.

Or, if you prefer, it made me think of the way a sandy stream will drop all its sediment after it goes over a mini waterfall, and the resulting delta fans outwards slowly, always with a crinkly leading edge like an hourglass stretched into a ribbon of sandy angles. Perhaps, thinking about it, that's a more likely explanation for the formation of the hills. But I'm still liking the cosmic pancakes.

It turned dark after that, so I can't tell you what any of the Indonesian islands we flew over looked like. We landed at KL and I had two hours before my onward flight to Kota Kinabalu. I had a minor stress at immigration, where I read signs that said you can be put in quarantine if you don't have proof of yellow fever vaccination (guess who left their vaccination card at home?), but I got away with it. Then I went and drank Malaysian delicacies - iced Milo (yum! I still think of it in a Dutch accent, ever since my time with Erik in the Taman Negara national park) and teh tarik, which is that frothy sweet almost hot-chocolate-esque tea they do here - before heading to my next flight.

We arrived on Borneo at 2.30 in the morning local time, which was 4.30 for my body, but I was too excited to be tired. From the moment the lights came on in the plane to tell us to prepare for our descent I was eagerly taking in all the sights and sounds. Even if that includes the sounds of fellow passengers belching, sneezing, blowing their noses without handkerchiefs and noisily puffing out their nostrils whilst having a good rummage with a forefinger. Yes, their manners really were no better than mine!

Would you Adam and Eve it? I leave Australia to get away from miserable rainy weather, only to have a storm of biblical proportions to meet me as we land! The rain was lashing down in torrents that twisted and contorted themselves vortically (is that a word?) as they got sucked into the jet engine. Once again, I had the benefit of a window seat, so I sat with my face pressed against the window all the way down. It was great! A new landmass for me (yup, not done Borneo before), and what's more, one I've been meaning to visit ever since my mate Simon from high school did his Aero Astro Engineering project on airships in the jungles around here.

The airport was distinctly more tropical and real than KLIA, which is a flourish of modernity and air conditioning. This one has honest toilet smells (in the toilet) and a dodgy luggage conveyor which really couldn't quite cope with the extra-long bags of the Chinese fencing team, who appear to have been on my flight. I was met at the airport by a guy with a minivan from the resort I'm staying at, and I have rarely been so thankful of not having to work out my own transport. At that time in the morning, with that diluvian downpour, I inwardly hugged the driver and gladly climbed into his almost completely waterproof conveyance.

The resort seems very posh after what I've been used to living in in tropical climes. My room even has aircon (which, being a purist, of course I refused to turn on - I went with the ceiling fan option, always my preferred). Breakfast at the beach cafe was very hotel: buffets of fruit, breads, and your usual hot stuff (well actually, no bacon - it is a Muslim country after all), with an Eastern twist of fried noodles and steamed buns.

I munched on my buns and watched swarms of young Malaysian guys playing football (by which I mean soccer, not Aussie rules thank you very much!) and Malaysian girls playing netball. It's strange. At first you notice that many women are wearing a headscarf but then you just totally tune that out. Meanwhile, a dodgy DJ plays dodgy local versions of dodgy international hits and no-one dances. The weather is hot but overcast, and the sea is greeny-grey.

As I write this, I'm sitting in the rather grand reception area, with strings of multicoloured baubles brightening the hardwood-and-terracotta decor, and betassled Chinese lamps fluttering in the gentle breeze. The wicker armchairs invite me to watch a naff monster movie on HBO, and you all are kept abreast of my movements thanks to wireless broadband and a Pentium 4 PC. Modern tropics.

Work work work, rain rain rain, trudge trudge trudge. This week has been a little on the monotonous side. Thankfully I had a splendid twenty-four hours starting on Thursday evening, when I popped out to a nearby pub to have a beer - well, it was the start of the weekend for me - and ended up hanging out shooting pool and the breeze with a bunch of local guys, two of whom are ethnically Spanish (in fact their families emigrated to Australia on the very same flight, but they had never met until a few years ago - how weird is that?) and so I got to chat in Spanish for a while. It was great!

The rest of the weekend was good fun too. I met up with heaps of people on Friday - first a company lunch to say goodbye to the office manager Jane, who is leaving for another job nearer home so she can spend more time with her son; then coffee in Melbourne's oldest Italian restaurant with my mate David; then coffee on Lygon with my Finnish mate Nea (I met her through Jodie; they were living in the same room in their hostel); then a few beers and a boogie - it's what Friday nights are all about.

Saturday turned out to be lots of fun too. The day was more chore-oriented, but the evening became riotous. I blame the bottle of Wild Turkey that made its way surreptitiously into the room. I didn't think a little game of Scattergories with the girls in my house (Kara, Kate & Fiona) and Matai (Kara's bloke) would have such an intoxicating effect on me, but somehow I ended up chundering at - where else? - the Exford Hotel, scene of many of my blackout binges. Oh my God, I sound like such an alcoholic! Trust me, I don't drink like that all the time, honest.

Sunday was understandably low-key.

And then I embarked on a full week of work. I was a bit nervous, seeing as the last five-day stint left me ill in bed for a week, but I've survived. The thought of my impending three week trip to Borneo has helped to sustain me. I'm off today, so I'm quickly rushing out this blog before I go; there's no way I'll remember any of this stuff after I've been diving with manta rays and swinging through trees with orang utans!

I met up with Rainnie & Claire for dinner and drinks on Thursday night. We had Italian and then went to Double Happiness, a favourite haunt of Claire's. It's a classic Melbourne bar: small, dark, hidden away down an alleyway, and decked out in a unique style. The theme of this bar is Chinese Socialist Realism - there are statues of Chairman Mao and posters exhorting the workers to achieve greatness with slabs of concrete and shit. Nice bar staff and great drinks - the Amaro they served us was just the right digestif for the piles of pasta we had eaten.

Friday night was also wonderful. Claire works in a posh vegetarian restaurant called Shakahari, just off Lygon. Rainnie had never been to see her working, and I had never been full stop. We dragged along Kate from my house and James from Rainnie's house, and had a no-holds-barred hum-dinger of a veggie meal. The food was spectacular!! And our service was pretty damn good - well, it helps to know the waitress, I guess! Fabulous wine, wonderful conversation. Good times. We finished off with a drink in the Carlton Yacht Club, a boating-themed cool Melbourne bar on Lygon just near my house. Ah, I'm already looking forward to coming back to Melbourne, bronzed and full of sunshine vitamins!