Since my last update Nick has had an operation, I’ve climbed a mountain, fallen off my bike, relaxed on a beach and made it to Kampala. I haven’t done much cycling though.Nick and I went our separate ways in Lilongwe with him recovering from an infected spider bite before attempting a big push to Kampala and with me going in completely the wrong direction – south. We had met the same Belgian couple a few times on the trip, first in Maun, Botswana, then in Lusaka, Zambia and then again in Lilongwe. They were planning on doing a bit of hiking on Mt Mulanje in the south of Malawi so I joined them. After five stunning days in the hills and a pretty exposed summit scramble we decided to go and see a tea estate. That’s when things stopped going to plan.

We had managed to invented a new way of keeping the economy growing – employing porters to carry pizza halfway up a mountain. The ultimate Pizza Hut.

We weren’t all able to fit in the same minibus so they went ahead with most of my bags and I waited for the next bus to fill up before following. Half an hour later I was finally on my way but then the conductor tried to charge me more than three times the price he should have done so I refused to pay. Then he started bluffing by saying he’d kick me out of the bus. I called his bluff. Turns out he wasn’t bluffing.

Since Cape Town we have been phenomenally lucky with the weather. Barely a cloud in nearly three months, let alone rain. Until today. The first rain in about eleven weeks and it’s the afternoon I get kicked out of a minibus with only my bike, 40km from anywhere with two very patient Belgians waiting for my arrival.

Within minutes my trousers were soaked (I hadn’t thought shorts would be appropriate on a tea estate – in hindsight neither was a bedraggled looking Englishman) and I was grumpy. So grumpy, in fact, that I stopped paying attention, strayed onto the (very wet and slippery) painted line and crashed. I eventually turned up an hour after the Belgians had in wet and now ripped and slightly bloodied trousers. Still, at least we’d arrived. Well we had after a 6km walk/push up a few hills.

It wasn’t a complete waste of time though as we did meet a very nice chap who put us up for a night in Blantyre before we got on a typically miserable bus to Monkey Bay. Somewhere in amongst this I managed to damage my heel making walking a very painful challenge. I’m still not entirely sure how I damaged it, nor indeed what exactly I injured. The only thing I did know was that a few days of relaxing on an island in the lake were probably in order.

When we finally dragged ourselves away from Cape Maclear the Belgians and a lovely Australian couple headed north to Nkhata Bay and I had a decision to make. Getting through Tanzania is tricky, as Nick found out (you can find out just how tricky on his blog www.nickjmiller.com), especially on a bicycle if you want to go north to Uganda. I had a few options. A) Try and cycle very fast with a bad foot and ride past a plethora of amazing places but not being able to stop and appreciate them. B) Get two thirty hour buses en route to Kampala via Dar es Salaam. C) Cheat and get a last minute flight from Lilongwe to Kampala via Nairobi. Unsurprisingly, I cheated.

Getting back to Lilongwe was amazingly easy if not entirely comfortable. Through an unparallelled feat of packing genius, we were able to fit five people, five peoples’ luggage and a bicycle into the Aussie’s Rav 4 and make it to Lilongwe where the other guys continued north to Nkhata Bay. I was able to buy two ‘suitcases’ in town and subtly disguise my bicycle as something not at all like a bicycle despite the sticky out cogs, pedals and weirdly wheel-looking things.

Kenya Airways got their shit together (most people probably don’t realise just how impressive that is…) and I made it to Kampala exactly three months after cycling out of Cape Town. Since then I’ve been relaxing (getting drunk), working out what to do next (working out how to earn money without doing anything), sorting things out (making excuses for why I can’t do anything, most of which revolve around not having a laptop) and planning my next trip (actually, that one’s true).

When I do get hold of my laptop in a week or so (see, I told you) I will be able to start editing the thousands of photos I have. Once that’s done I will definitely have to work out embarrassingly few number of miles I really cycled. And then I really do need to work out what to do next, any ideas?

Until then I’ll just keep drinking coffee. I’m sure it’s helping somehow.