I have mixed feelings as we ride in a van to Kathmandu airport. I’m a bit bitter about being held to ransom by the Indian visa situation, I regret trusting that we would hear in good time and not just ignoring it and going off and cycling across Nepal, and I’m sad to leave this place without seeing the full extent of it. We are going to Thailand, which is a comfort since it’s so easy to travel there, and a regression since we’ve cycled there many times already.

It’s strange being inside a vehicle here. Cycling the streets gives full immersion into the noise, dust, smells and heat. Behind the glass of a van everything is muted, as though it’s happening underwater.

The bottom of one of the bike boxes falls through when we arrive at the airport. There isn’t a lot in the tiny building, and no one sells tape. The bag wrapping station refuses to wrap the box. We have some light ratchet straps for attaching rear bags to the bike racks, so we try putting those together and tying them round the box.  We’ve seen how the bikes were handled when we arrived here, so I’m not confident that the straps won’t just slide off, and if they do the bike frame and parts will just spill out. Richard leaves the airport and encounters a lot of helpful people who guide him to shops that sell tape so we can seal the box properly. Once that drama is done with, everything else goes more smoothly than for any other flight we’ve taken with the bikes. The check-in staff don’t even charge us the handling fee we were expecting, which softens the cost of flying out of here a bit. The flight is only a third full, we get unexpectedly fed, and the plane leaves and therefore arrives early.

In the early hours in Bangkok, the bikes are the first thing into the luggage area and a young Thai man sprints over to help me with them saying “These are bicycles? Oh wow, I hope you have an amazing time here!” And then walks off. I don’t even think he worked at the airport.

We took the following day off to put the bikes back together and allow time to fix anything before we head off again. We’re staying outside the city, but didn’t have the foresight to stay far enough away to avoid the expressways in the east. Now we just have to grit our teeth and get around those.

But back here in Thailand they have tarmac.

After some bum-clenching flyovers and highways we pick our way through some small roads, but eventually have to navigate the expressways. We end up at a partially flooded lorry terminal where a guard calls us over and insists we can’t go the way we’re trying to go. With a tiny GPS unit and no Thai, I can’t explain the route along service roads that we’re trying to take. After a couple of tries I finally managed to correctly pronounce the town we’re heading to. He radioed for another guard to come over, and that guard indicates with hand signals that we can use a road running alongside the expressway, which is what we had been trying to do. Then it’s all smiles and thumbs ups, and they stand and salute as we ride off and try to stay in the wake of a lorry where the water isn’t as deep.

The old bike GPS we’re using shows the ascent we can expect for each day’s riding we plan, but we realise that day that it doesn’t account for bridges. The day was supposed to be a ridiculously easy 80 feet of climbing, but turns out to be 10 times that thanks to the number of flyovers and waterways in the area and the high bridges which cross them.

We’re at the tail end of the wet season. It rains monumentally, though it usually does it in bursts in the late afternoon and evening. We take a long rural route to avoid the cityscape which seems never ending even after a day’s ride from Bangkok. At the very end of the road, near where we have no option but to join the highway, it is completely flooded. We pause and wait for a couple of cars to go through so we can gauge how high the water goes. It’s obvious it will get above the front panniers, so we take those off, balance them on our handlebars and go for it. The water gets above my ankles on each downward pedal stroke, but I’m wearing sandals so it’s not the end of the world, and Richard’s taller so his feet stay mostly dry. After that we can’t really risk small roads again, so ahead is a long monotonous grind on the busy highway along the coast.

It’s bloody hot. All the towns and cities from Bangkok and along the coast to the east just bleed into one. The highway is four or five lanes, and though it’s mostly safe thanks to a huge shoulder, it’s not great cycling and it’s not enjoyable.

Our second night we stay a bit off the highway at a little family run guesthouse. We’re so exhausted from the heat, which doesn’t abate at all until well after dark, that I’ve reactivated food ordering apps so we can just eat and sleep at the end of the day. The delivery guy gives me validation when he turns up and says “this weather must be very hot for you.”

Thai guest houses are such good value that it’s almost embarrassing when we get breakfast included for what we pay. The breakfast is in a large quaint room with a fake grass carpet, artificial flowers, an indoor pond, porcelain dogs everywhere on the floor, teddy bears everywhere else, and food laid out on fine china and tiered tea stands. Instead of scones and sandwiches there’s little portions of mango sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves, pandan jellies and other sweets, as well as jugs of iced chrysanthemum tea. There must be a term for this kind of aesthetic, we’ve seen it quite a lot in Thailand. The British equivalent would be a grandma who runs a B&B and fills it with her collection of plates on the walls, doilies on the tables and dolls in rocking chairs. Other people are brought pork fried rice and congee. We are brought fried eggs, salami and soup made with pasta instead of rice. I’d have been over the moon with what everyone else is having, but this kind of thoughtfulness is just so Thai.

The road to Pattaya is a death trap. We are going straight on, but there are four lanes of dense, fast traffic peeling off to turn left onto an expressway which we can’t use. There’s no way we can change the four lanes to our right without going under a truck. We pull over and wait in despair for a gap in the traffic, but it’s just too dangerous. In the end we accept we’ll have to turn off left onto the frontage road and take an enormous detour to get back on track. Not far along the road and out of the haze we can see a bridge across the expressway, and as we get closer see that it’s one designed for mopeds to use, so we can ride across on the slopes rather than the rigmarole of using steps. We can now get back onto the road we need on the other side of the junction. It’s a sad state of affairs when this is the highlight of our cycling for the foreseeable future.

Pattaya is horrible. It’s the worst of tourist Thailand epitomised. Loud bars, louder karaoke, crap overpriced food, packed beaches, sparkly high rise flats amongst fetid streets, ageing white men pursuing very young Thai women, all in the sickly, torrid heat. It’s all so grim, and we can’t wait to get out of the urban sprawl which seems like it goes on forever.

The next day is just a blur. It’s so, so hot. We both feel dizzy each time we get off the bikes and no amount of stopping in the shade mitigates it. We pull over near the end of the day at a half-built petrol station, the shop’s not open so we can’t get drinks, but we find a raised flower bed in the shade and sit there. One of the petrol station attendants comes over with bottles of water for us, and then comes back again with plastic chairs for us to sit on.

At the end of the day the guesthouse we find is a series of a few corrugated metal sheds. The material has made the room like a tin can boiled in water. It’s hotter inside than outside, though that seems impossible. The bathroom door handle is too hot to touch, and when I open it with a t shirt the inside is somehow even hotter than the room and I almost pass out. We sit in numbed silence, sweating the time away until the air con kicks in and wondering what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

We’ve worked outdoors in heatwaves in the UK. I went outside in the morning to unlock the bikes and it was already hotter than any of those days, and it’s not even 8am. But the woman running the guesthouse has packed two boxes of fried rice for us to take with us, which halts my woe in its tracks.

On the way back to the highway I almost run over a baby black spotted turtle, but stop in time and take it to the other side of the road. Later I screech to a halt when I see a small teddy lying on the ground, so obviously I have to take that with me. Richard might be able to power off into the distance, but I am back here saving lives.

Even though we’re still on the main road, traffic has eased a bit now. Thinking we’d have a better time of it because of that, I planned a route at the end of the day round a picturesque park when we arrived in town, but after 7 hours of cycling in 40 degree heat, to say that I really couldn’t care less about the park is putting it mildly.

Our final full day’s ride in Thailand and we only have to rush once to some facilities to deal with the effects of heat stroke.

The road to the relatively quiet border at Khlong Yai is almost deserted. It’s quite sharply undulating as it threads between the Cardamom Mountains of Cambodia and the Gulf of Thailand, and finally there is some green backdrop after the relentless concrete and asphalt.

There’s a queue of lorries as we approach the crossing, but it’s nothing like the pandemonium of the other more northerly border between Thailand and Cambodia. The Thai guard gently reminds Richard that he can’t return to Thailand by land, and to me he says “For you the same. No coming back.” Those words ring in my ears as I stand at the immigration window for entry into Cambodia and it starts to take far longer than it should. The woman behind the window directs me to go and sit down as she needs time to do more checks. Richard asks what will happen if we get refused entry and can neither go back to Thailand or into Cambodia. I speculate that we’d probably be escorted to the nearest Thai airport and made to board a flight somewhere else. “That sounds like a really good plan then. Let’s do that” he says. But then I get called over and my passport is stamped, and though Richard is made to go through the same wait, he gets in too.

We are now set loose into Cambodia, the wild west of the region. It has far, far less tarmac than its neighbour, but is equally as hot.

A playlist for the ride: