It's been a busy week for me in the tropics. I have been doing so much stuff that I just haven't had a chance to sit down and write about any of it. But I'll try to remedy that now.

So where was I? Ah yes, sitting in the foyer of my resort. Did I mention by the way that, given as it's called the Beringgis Beach Resort, I was a little surprised by the fact that there's a fence up to stop guests from actually going ON the beach? A little bit bizarre, I think.

I got the hotel transfer minivan into Kota Kinabalu (or KK as it's known by the locals) and shared the ride with a Serbian expat who teaches at the university here. He told me a little bit about the town, and so when I got out of the bus I didn't feel completely and utterly lost, just pretty much lost. Boy, it's a strange experience to be travelling without a Lonely Planet guide! Strange but somehow liberating. I'm having to talk to people to find out what's going on, rather than just ticking off the same attractions as everyone else who has their nose buried in LP.

I walked around a bit, my first stop being a Malaysian restaurant for some roti chanai and a teh tarek. O! how I love that stuff! The combination of bread and milky tea brings me back to my time in the jungles of Peninsular Malaysia last year with Nathan, Jo, Erik, Mike & Karina. The atmosphere was necessarily different - on this occasion I was sat in the basement food hall of a shopping centre rather than a wooden stilt hut on the banks of a tropical river - but the taste sensation was, well, sensational.

Next stop a mobile phone shop to grab a local SIM card and try to get in touch with Maggi & Jens, who are over from Germany and overlap with me in KK for a few days. The shopping centre had at least fifteen phone shops - and that's just on the ground floor! A tad excessive? There appears to be a huge advertising war going on between the two main mobile networks, X-Pax and Digi, but judging by the plethora of retail outlets they neither of them can be short of customers.

As I emerged from the shopping centre and walked towards the historic centre of town, the heavens decided to open once more. And this time I didn't have a minivan driver to rescue me. I got drenched even standing under the overhang of the shop fronts on the road. And I had a classic soaking from a passing motorist who sent a gutter's worth of water flying my way with his speedy cornering at the pedestrian crossing!

This was all so refreshingly not cold and miserable that I could feel every part of me smiling despite the wet. And once the rain eased off a little it was actually very pleasant to walk along the quiet streets of the semi-pedestrian area of town and soak up the Sunday afternoon atmosphere.

A lot of aimless milling about later (I had tried to visit the offices of Borneo Divers, to which I was given directions by a Californian girl who at one point was sheltering from the rain with me outside a Burger King, but lamentably they were closed), I headed to the minibus station at the western end of the centre of town. Here I had the pleasure of waiting about forty-five minutes for the driver to decide he had enough passengers to warrant setting off. I decided not to let this stress me however, because let's face it I wasn't in a hurry to be anywhere, and besides it was a good reminder of the need to adjust to "island time" here in tropical Borneo.

Back at the resort, I enjoyed a complimentary evening meal and drink (in silence; the only two other people in the restaurant were a bit miserable-looking so I didn't try to strike up a conversation) and then luxuriated in the fan-cooled expanse of my room.

My second full day in KK was pretty much a re-run of my first: I headed into town after breakfast, wandered around (this time armed with mini maps from the tourist office), found out about diving - Christ it's expensive! But hey it's world-class so I'm going to do it anyway - ate yummy Malaysian stuff for lunch, and then went online for a while. I managed to miss the worst of the day's rain by being indoors a lot of the time. Then I got a bus back out to the resort and spent a pleasant evening in my own company. Just to mix it up a little, this time I didn't just lie on my bed reading but instead went for a swim in the open-air pool.

It was a little bit scary getting into the dark waters; however often I told myself there was no way a huge sea monster could be lurking in the depths - for a start there ARE no depths - I've not done enough nighttime swimming to be completely comfortable with moonlight and the occasional underwater spotlight. But after a few lengths I got used to it and chilled out. The water was body temperature and it was delicious to have the pool to myself. Then a bunch of Dutch kids decided to join me and it was lovely to reminisce about my own childhood summer holiday swims as I watched them splashing about and generally having a good time.

On Tuesday the weather seemed to have taken a turn for the better. I packed my mask & snorkel and decided to head out to one of the small islands that sit opposite KK in the sea and together form a mini national park that is ideal for a day's R&R from the city. I made my way to the ferry terminal, then got completely confused as there were no signs to tell you how to go about getting across. After wandering about in a daze for a while, I found the ticket hall (it's huge; I don't actually know how I missed it) and was helped by friendly staff.

The way the ferries work here is very similar to the minibuses: once there are enough customers for a given island to fill a boat, a boat is duly despatched. Whilst I waited for the requisite number of travellers (as luck would have it, a boat had just left so I was Pax No 2 of 8) I got chatting with some other people who arrived just after me. There was a Dutch couple that wasn't a couple it was just a boy and a girl travelling together: Elisabeth and Marijn, and an Enlish guy called Tom who is leading an expedition of sixth-formers into the jungles. We all got along famously, and spent the rest of the day together.

In my day-to-day life I don't give much thought to higher concepts such as fate, but on Tuesday I felt the force of kismet. Let me explain: I had written an email to my schoolfriend Simon (the one who had been to Kinabalu when he was at Uni) saying how I was just here for a break from the cold of Melbourne and didn't plan on visiting Mount Kinabalu even though it's really famous (at just over 4000m it's the highest bit of ground between New Guinea and the Himalaya). But he wrote back immediately and told me I HAD to climb the mountain; he then proceeded to give such a vivid account of his trip ten years ago that I began to suspect there was indeed something special about it. Here's a taste of his email (hope you don't mind Simon!):

"You have to go up the mountain. I don't care what you say, it was the best couple of days I spent whilst out there, and you WILL regret it if you don't. You're driven up to 2000m, where the base camp is. That's in lower mountain forest which is quite different to the forest in the valleys and by the coast. We arrived at the base camp late morning and spent a leisurely afternoon walking some forested trails. We then spent the night at base camp and started climbing about 8:00 in a small group of people we had met in the base camp. You're soon above the weather, so any rain is not really a problem. There are loads of pitcher plants and orchids so we really did dawdle our way up to the summit camp at 3600m ish. We seemed to stop every few hundred meters for photos. You'll need loads of film, or memory. The views were magnificent. As you climb the forest changes quite dramatically. I found the cloud forest, which is in an almost permanent fog, the most spectacular. There were loads of pitcher plants at this level, some big enough to catch rats. Oh and there are these cute squirrel things that are only found on this mountain, no where else. They like crunch bars."

But, still not convinced that I wanted to climb to a very cold mountaintop on what was supposed to be a holiday all about heat, and also knowing that this was peak season and all accommodation on the mountain was booked out for the next few weeks (the lady in the dive shop had told me about the trouble she had had getting a bed at the mountain's overnight camp for a customer of hers) - and not to mention the fact that Simon is quite a lot fitter than I am so I was wary of taking at face value his descriptions of how not hard it was - I was quite happy to not bother.

Enter Marijn & Elisabeth. They had booked to climb but had cocked up the dates; Marijn was flying home a day sooner than he thought and so couldn't climb, and Elisabeth had no desire to do it on her own because she had read enough about how tough it is that she felt without the motivation of a close friend she would never do it. So did I want to take their booking? Which, by the way, was in the very sought-after heated building (the other three hostels are unheated with cold showers, which isn't that great when you're at 3000m on a windswept mountainside). And which, by the way, was for tomorrow, so you'd better make your mind up quick. Elisabeth even offered me her gloves, which she was otherwise going to throw away.

By now there was just too much shit happening that seemed to want me to do the climb, so I decided there and then to go for it. Yay for spontaneity! So when we got back to the mainland from our idyllic island getaway I had a mad dash round the shops for a raincoat and some high-energy mountain food (basically choccy, nuts and raisins). I looked high & low for waterproof trousers but to no avail, so a flimsy plastic poncho would have to do.

It was a mad dash mainly because I had been spontaneous a second time that day (I don't know what came over me) and agreed to go out for beers with Tom in town that night; he was worried that there would be no-one to help him celebrate his 28th birthday which happened to be today. So I had to do all my shopping, grab some food, head out to my resort, shower, retrieve my laundry, pack, check out, get back into town, and check in to Tom's backpackers - the bus to the mountain leaves early from the centre of town, so it made sense to be there plus then I wouldn't have to get an expensive taxi back out to Botany Bay I mean Beringgis Beach.

It was all quite exhausting coupled with the heat of the place, but somehow it all came together and by 10.30 I was sat in a bar with Tom and about twelve other revellers, some his students and some assorted backpacker dwellers. We had a fairly riotous time of it - particularly Tom, who had started drinking around 9 o'clock and was wasted by the time I arrived, but managed to go on with a hardcore band of drinkers until 4am - but I had to be a little bit sensible so I only had the four large bottles of Tiger - aah! Tiger! - then went home and was in bed by 3 o'clock. And the bus was leaving the next morning at 7...

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.