Who should I meet on the bus to Mount Kinabalu but Elisabeth, the Dutch girl?! She had been allocated the seat next to me; she was going on to Sandakan to visit the orang utan sanctuary there. It was nice to have a familiar face to talk to. Pity I wasn't up for much conversation: three hours' sleep and a banana sandwich weren't really enough to combat the effects of several pints of lager the night before, and I slept most of the time in the bus.

Just an aside about the KK bus terminal: I feel really bad when I have been suspicious of someone's intentions, only to discover they weren't planning to mug and kill me but were in fact just being helpful. This happened again that morning. I was walking (admittedly in a bit of a daze) toward the buses, when a dishevelled-looking Malaysian stepped out in front of me and asked me where I was going. Warily I told him I was taking the bus to Mount Kinabalu. He then proceeded to walk me to the right bus and even pointed out the dishevelled-looking Malaysian I had to buy a ticket off of. So it turns out he was an integral part of the bus service, not some dodgy geezer after my money.

It occurred to me that if people in that sort of job wore uniforms I might have more faith in them; then it occurred to me that any old conman can wear a uniform and lead tourists astray. There really is no answer, except to do as I do anyway which is be polite but noncommittal until you can decide whether someone is on the level.

A couple of hours of snoozing later, the bus pulled up outside the entrance to the Mount Kinabalu National Park. I got off, along with a bunch of other people all planning to do the walk that day. In a seemingly random way I ended up in a group of five with an Aussie called Matt, a Belgian called Sebastien, and a Swedish couple Martin & Jana. We agreed to share a guide, which saved us a little bit of money. I warned them that I would be walking slowly, but they were cool with that. Matt had turned up without a booking for accommodation; it occurred to me that perhaps it was his fate that had brought me to the mountain, because of course I had a double reservation and so he could be the second person.

I was very ready for a second and more substantial breakfast at this point, but we got bustled along and before I knew it we had begun the climb. Not a great start to the day's toils. I soon had to crack open my energy food stores, but a handful of nuts is no substitute for a proper meal, and I really hadn't slept enough at all. I soon fell behind the rest of the group, but our guide stayed behind me. Pity he wasn't talkative; his English was very limited (and my Bahasa even more so) so I trudged along in silence.

The walk up Kinabalu, as every guide book assures you, is not technically challenging. In fact, it's rated for novices. I think that's a bit rich. It might not be difficult but it's bloody hard. Relentless is the perfect word to describe the ascent. You are walking for hour after hour, going forward 6000m and up over 1000m, and in all that time there are perhaps three stretches which don't go uphill, which perhaps amount to 250m in total. And you're high up even at the start, so breathing is not easy. Very soon I was breathing in on one step and out on the next, and some hours later I was having to breathe in and out with every step.

At the half-way point I had a mini panic attack. I was not enjoying this at all. I couldn't appreciate the view because I was too knackered to turn my head and look around; the guide was mute and only pointed out one thing all day (it was a pitcher plant, you know, those flowers that eat insects by attracting them with a pool of sweet juice and then having unclimbable walls, the juice turning out to be a weak acid solution that dissolves the helplessly trapped flies and other wee beasties); I gave up on catching up with the other guys; and I was soaked to the skin thanks to a sudden downpour that hit us early on with such speed that by the time my poncho was out of its wrapper I was already sodden.

I was sorely tempted to turn around and walk right back down again: after all, I was only half way, so it would be no further for me to go down than to go on up. I was gasping for breath, my contact lens kept hurting, and I was feeling very sorry for myself. My breathing went a bit erratic and I was on the verge of tears. It took all my willpower to make me go on, coupled with the memory that my only ever previous panic attack (back in Sydney, at a bikram yoga session where the heat just got to me and I wanted to run away) had passed by just forcing myself to be calm. So on I went.

At one point I thought there was a jet aeroplane flying low overhead. When the sound didn't go away I suddenly realised it must be the vicious howl of the wind as it rounded the mountain. After all, there's nothing else in the way of the trade winds in this corner of the world. It was ferociously loud, and I was glad to be under the cover of trees, even gnarled and stunted as they were getting by now.

Things got psychologically a lot better for me about two-thirds of the way up, when I encountered a young couple from Yorkshire who were walking even slower than me. We teamed up (our guides taking the opportunity to have a proper natter all the rest of the way up) and, as Elisabeth had predicted, mutual motivation made the ascent less horrendous. We took plenty of breaks - literally every 50 metres or so - and I could finally look around me and take in some of the scenery. Despite the hazy air and the cloudy skies it was delightful to look across at the rolling hills of virgin jungle fading to blue at the horizon, and to see in the far distance the coast and the flat ocean.

We finally reached Laban Ratan, the overnight camp, and with joy in our hearts sat down at a table. Laban Ratan was almost a welcoming ski lodge: there was food, warmth and the genial hubbub of tired but happy people in conversation. But it lacked the charm (and the open fire) of what for me constitutes a true mountainside haven. The building was shabby and the food tasteless although extremely welcome nonetheless; this was my first proper meal since breakfast the day before, because somehow lunch & dinner didn't really happen properly, and breakfast that day was minimal.

The rooms, although warm, were spartan in the extreme. Plus our room was infested with a variety of insectoid populations. Some of them looked like earwigs, while others were clearly from the cockroach family. But d'you know what was the grossest thing? The fact that I was so knackered I just didn't give a shit. I crept under my rough blanket and tried to get warm. Thank God the room was heated; it took a good hour to thaw my butt cheeks, let alone my feet, and I dread to think how I would have coped in one of the unheated blocks.

Sleep was very shallow; I didn't have an altitude headache, but I certainly was aware of the thinness of the air and for the whole day I had had annoying tunes running through my head, the way I sometimes do when I'm feverish and try as I might I can't shake that four bars of tinny pop music.

I got up again, went down and had some more food but didn't enjoy it. Everyone was exhausted so we all went to bed by 7.30pm. I had decided not to even attempt the summit climb the next morning, but I got peer group pressured into it by the Swedes and Matt & Sebastien. So at 2am on Thursday I got up with the others (including the Malaysian couple Teh and May from KL who were in the other bunk bed in our room), pulled on lots of layers of clothes, ate some more energy food and headed outside.

I really hadn't slept well, and was still sleep deprived from the night before. Add to that exhaustion and altitude difficulties, and it's not difficult to see why after some 500 metres of the torchlit walk up wet slippery rocks & wooden stairways I finally gave up and turned around. There was just no way I was going to get to the top AND back down to the bottom again in one piece. The weather was unpromising for a good view of the sunrise from the top anyway, and the wind hadn't let up all night, so I wasn't even too disappointed in myself at throwing in the towel.

Of course, as soon as I started down the clouds cleared and I got a glimpse of a marvellous starry sky, but I couldn't look up too long because I felt so dizzy and faint and queasy when I put my head back. I took it to be a sign that I was right to turn back and head down, and so I did just that.

I think I must have reached a psychological acceptance of my defeat by the time I got back to the accommodation, because this time when I lay down (taking no notice of the cockroach that scurried out from under my pillow) I fell into a deep sleep that mercifully erased the tightness in my chest and the throbbing pain in my teeth. Four hours later, when the others got back from the summit and told me how cold & windy it had been and how the sunrise had been basically invisible, I was almost happy that I hadn't gone up. And my extra hours of sleep meant that I was quite capable of keeping pace with them all the way down.

The walk down was no less demanding on the muscles, but it was a lot less demanding on the lungs. Once again the slope was relentless, but this time I didn't mind so much. Somehow I had managed to get away with having no muscle pain in my legs (although my arms were a bit sore from carrying a heavy rucksack all day), so I was in good spirits on the way down. The weather was much nicer too, and I was reminded of (much less demanding) walks in the foothills of the Austrian Alps as a child.

At the bottom, we managed to flag down a minivan to take us back to KK. Our mountain adventure was over, and the hulking pile of granite that is Mount Kinabalu receded into the distance through the back window of the bus.

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...