This summer was fleeting, in a vastly different way to that of last year’s. This year felt a lot like treading water, taking things one day, one step at a time. Before I knew it, it was mid-July, and my backcountry trip to Berg Lake was fast approaching. All the glamorous ideas I had about training for the trip went out the window while I focused on working and applying for permanent residency.

A memorable day for many a reason, although I find myself wishing that one of those reasons was not that my bear spray accidentally went off as I was putting my pack on. Thankfully, it only mostly affected my hands and we carried on.

At the start of October, Martin's mother, uncle and brother visited us and the Rockies. Apart from showing them some of my favourite hikes around Banff & Canmore, we were lucky enough to join them up north in Jasper for a few days.

It's going to be hard for me to put into words the depth of my love for the mountains. The unexplained affinity I have for these tall piles of ancient rock and how it is that I'm drawn to them in the first place, as a woman born in an archipelago of 7,000 islands who spent her entire life in countries surrounded by the ocean (amongst zero mountains).

Every week in summer had me asking the same question: “which trail should I try this weekend?”. Cue messaging all my friends to see who was free to join, and behold, a plan would emerge. Tent Ridge in Kananaskis Country will forever remain one of the best hikes I've ever done.

The week before I left for my trip to the Indian Ocean for LUX* Resorts (more on that soon) was an...interesting one. We moved from our house, our first home in Canmore where we made many a great friend, to a condo deeper into the forests and mountains, further from town, but closer to the wild and the wildlife.

I wasn't always an outdoorswoman. It honestly wasn't until I started yoga that my relationship to that which I used to avoid changed—rather than judging myself harshly for not being able to break a “bad” habit, I began to observe the discord at an arm's length, and approach it with a process of enquiry.

In this last post, we travel from Putussibau to Pontianak, Pontianak to Jakarta, and Jakarta to Sydney before I finally fly back home to Brisbane in the early hours of Monday morning.

This post covers the very last Friday of our trip; our journey back to the cities. We travelled from Bukit Peninjau Wildlife Research Station back to Meliau longhouse to say goodbye to the villagers and wait for our boats back to Lanjak—but Borneo wasn't done surprising us yet.

Our last two days in the jungle would be spent at Bukit Peninjau Wildlife Research Station, about a half an hour boat ride from Meliau longhouse.

Today we would leave our beautiful campground in Betung Kerihun National Park for another day of travelling and little else.

On that Monday, we woke up in our beautiful jungle home. Our office would be the trees, and we didn't know it yet, but today we were going to have the best (and most challenging) fun ever.

After two full days of travelling by air, our third day would be a full of travelling by land and by sea.

It was a week yesterday since I landed home after 10 days in Indonesian Borneo. It's just as surreal to me now as it was when I was leaving that this trip even happened.