My bones ache to their core. I can hold down neither food nor drink. A rash covers my torso. My white blood cell count is perilously low and I am hours away from a blood transfusion. I weigh sixty-seven kilograms — fifteen kilos less than I did last October. From my hospital bed I can see a main road leading south out of town, snaking through uninterrupted jungle before climbing up and over a high ridge, out of sight towards the Burmese border. I should have ridden that road nearly two weeks ago but the past few months have pushed me to mental and physical breaking point. I have finally cracked.

A week ago I was found unconscious in a flower bed. After six days in my room with worsening flu I suffered a blackout trying to find water in my hostel. I fell, first into a large stone Buddha (knocking his head off, apparently), then down a rogue step and head-first into a stone ledge overhanging a cactus-filled flower bed. ‘You must go hospital,’ the hostel cleaner told me as I came round. Now it is three days until my thirtieth birthday and I am alone in northern Thailand, on an intravenous drip with breakbone, or dengue, fever and a black eye.

Thailand was supposed to be one of the more straightforward legs of my journey. After the cold of Turkey, the heat of Sudan and the ordeal of the Indian subcontinent, I had been looking forward to a fresh start in my nineteenth country; to pedalling hard, eating well, enjoying beautiful jungle and coastline in a country I had never visited before. On the ride into Chiang Mai I got a welcome shock to the system when I noted order and cleanliness on the streets. Drivers used their brains and occasionally their vehicles’ brakes and indicators; no one spat in my direction. An Australian expat directed me to a hostel that turned out to have bed-bug-free beds; it even had a small swimming pool. Thailand had promised much.

Now the doctors tell me it will take at least three months to recover. In three months’ time I am supposed to be on the boat to Australia to complete the final leg of my journey; a journey that has already provided me with enough ups and downs to last a lifetime, but one that I desperately want to finish.

I am more than two hundred bicycle days and ten thousand miles from home. I have not spoken more than a sentence to another soul in days; not to a friend for weeks. I am lonely. Since leaving London I have often felt strong, occasionally brave; now I am ill, weak and lacking an ounce of motivation. I want to fall into the arms of a loved one and tell them to take me home. Right now, quitting is the only option, which means the road has come to an end, and I have failed.

This is the first chapter of my first book, Cycling to the Ashes: A Cricketing Odyssey from London to Brisbane (Random House, July 2013)