In Germany the climbing ramps up a bit, but the last few weeks has paid off and we manage them well. I have stopped mentioning how painful my saddle is to Richard; he purses his lips and rolls his eyes, and is on the verge of reminding me how much this thing cost and how many of them I’ve gone through, so better just to leave it. Anyway the word for bum in German is “miserabel”, fittingly.

The public holiday now in the past, we have no trouble finding campsites for our short final stint criss-crossing Germany and Switzerland. Without time to do much else, we are taking the most direct route we can safely ride on to get to Zurich for a flight out of Europe.

It is shockingly hot. While we went south for warmer weather, we were not expecting Switzerland to be 36 degrees. We pass a woman who yells out that my t shirt is amazing, which is nice, and also true. Not long after, while rumbling along a small road, we encounter Karin and Sarah, who have a business selling very fancy vacuums among other things. They flag us down and offer us coffee, and we all get chatting about our travels. Karin tells us that her parents have a vineyard nearby, so offers some white wine spritzers. Well, if we have to! Refreshed and rejuvenated, we head off into the heat and hills.

We find a (relatively) cheap hotel not far from the airport. In trying to avoid staying there more than one night, we contacted several bike shops in advance to try and get boxes as soon as we arrive, but the only ones who reply don’t have any. All options exhausted, we have to buy boxes from a packing service, which cost more than the price of a hotel room in most countries.

And it’s probably a good job we don’t have time to stay in Switzerland. We go on the hunt for cheap food and find a Turkish kebab place, where it’s £30 for two simple doner wraps, no chips.

We have a nightmare journey leaving Zurich. We are only a few miles from the airport, but are quoted £83 for a taxi. We opt to get the tram. It takes a couple of trips to transport all our stuff, but it’s worth it. The temperature is still in the mid thirties, but there’s no air conditioning in the airport, so it feels like we’re in Swaziland, not Switzerland. The bike boxes don’t fit on the airport trolleys. Given Swiss Airlines themselves offer boxes and bike packing, and so does another company inside the airport, not being able to transport them around is stupid and infuriating. We have to tag team carrying 40 kilos of boxes and the trolley with the bags. We try to check in but they won’t let us without an onward ticket out of Malaysia. It’s our fourth time travelling there and explaining we’re using land borders on bikes has always been fine. But those are the rules, so we have to go away and buy flight tickets before we can check in.

While we’re waiting at the gate to board, the flight keeps getting delayed, and after a couple of hours it’s cancelled. Now we have to go back through Swiss immigration, collect all our luggage and boxes before trying to find out what other flights we can get and checking in again. We’re lucky here; the prospect of transporting everything in shifts again to the other side of the airport motivates us to ask for help, and one of the porters kindly takes all our stuff on a massive flatbed. She also knows where we need to go, so we arrive before most of the other couple of hundred people who are also desperate to get on another flight. We get put on a flight to Abu Dhabi that night. Richard’s extreme anxiety about being late works in our favour. We had planned such a long stopover in Abu Dhabi to stop him worrying, that we are still just about able to make the original connection onward to Kuala Lumpur.

We’re shattered when we arrive. It’s been over thirty hours since we got the tram in Zurich, and it’s past midnight in Kuala Lumpur, but we’re buzzing to be here and the night markets are in full swing, so we walk around the streets munching on bao buns, curried squid and coconut shakes before finally going to bed.

We have some admin stuff and chores to get done here, mostly vaccinations which we were too disorganised to sort out before we left the UK. Richard, for reasons known only to himself, instead of bringing with him his record of travel vaccinations while he is actually travelling, has packed it “somewhere” in a storage unit in the UK. Luckily for him the medical clinic here gives him a new little certificate and accepts that he has had the same jabs at the same times as I have.

We visit the Batu Caves, which are fine, and I make time for all the food on my hit list. At a Pakistani self-serve restaurant, I turn round from the biryani and see Richard’s happy little face and his plate piled high with a bit of everything that he could find. He thinks it’s a buffet, and I feel a bit bad explaining to him that you pay per item, not a set price to help yourself, but otherwise he’ll get a shock when we come to pay.

Our last task is putting the bikes back together, one of my least favourite parts of our travels. Even though they mean well, people trying to help but getting in the way is one of the reasons it’s always such a pain. In this edition, a security guard mostly wants to use our penknife to open the boxes, but quickly disappears when parts from my bike spill all over the pavement.

I’ve done my homework on the route out of here, spending hours on streetviews and mapping apps. We’ve cycled out of Kuala Lumpur before, and it was one of the worst cycling experiences of my life. I’m determined that this time will be safe and straightforward, but there’s still the usual trepidation as we set off into the heat.