Location: Nanning, Guanxi Province, China
Day 461
Miles on the clock: 16,265

Leaving Bangkok. Leaving crowds. Leaving chaotic streets. The small back roads to Cambodia were rutted and quiet. One last night in a Thai monastery. I was left to my own devices and shared a simple rice breakfast with the monks while two cats, both bald in patches, and one limping, stalked each other around a heap of laundry.

Day 400
Location: Bangkok, Thailand
Miles on the clock: 14,720
 

A few days at a friend’s house in Kuala Lumpur were passed predominantly by eating cereal and cowering from the soaring outdoor heat. However, I reluctantly allowed myself to be swept up with the stop-start traffic trickling out of the city and onto the road to Melaka which I reached after two days and a boring amount of punctures. The small port city was conquered by the Portuguese in 1511 and then again by the Dutch in 1641 before the Union Jack was planted in 1824. An arterial river snakes through it and is home to hundreds of monitor lizards. The largest I saw was only 5ft but they can grow up to an imposing 9ft and live off rats and the occasional unfortunate cat.

Day 328
Location: Kuala Lumpur
Miles on the clock: 13,180

I left the town of Luang Nam Tha (in northern Laos) during the Pii Mai (New Year) festival and rode west towards the Mekong. Evening celebrations struck up in the villages. People set off homemade fireworks, danced to loud Laotian music and drank plenty of Laolao (strong rice liquor). I was beckoned to a party and plied with food and drink for an hour. We ate from large communal plates of pork fat with spinach and bamboo shoots. Every few minutes a different person would work their way around the table pouring water down the back of each person's neck. This gesture is done slowly, and surprisingly tenderly, using the spare hand to gently pat the person’s chest while muttering the words "Sabaidee Pii Mai" (Happy New Year). The water is to wash away the demons of the old year.

Day 279
Location: Luang Nam Tha, Laos
Miles on the clock: 11,305

The train arrived in Kunming carrying a significantly heavier and healthier me than when I arrived in Beijing almost a fortnight before. I spend a couple of days in the calm, leafy provincial capital visiting a museum about the province’s numerous ethnic minorities, meeting other travellers, and tinkering with my bike which contracted its first snap in the frame while riding around the city. In a market I snacked on street food, trying not to be nauseated by the extensive tables of pig heads, pig tails, pig balls, pig penises, fatty sheep buttocks, buckets of squirming eels, eggs with half-developed foetuses and many other unidentifiable “delicacies”.