I was expecting the four-day walk across the Chihuaha desert to El Paso to be an ordeal, and it was, but not in the way I'd expected. The big problem was the wind.

It started as I made the steep, 6,000-foot ascent of the Guadalupe mountains south of Carlsbad. Normally the stroller just rolls quietly and uncomplainingly along, and I hardly notice it's there. But with a powerful desert wind blowing in my face, and laden with four days' food and eleven litres of water, pushing it uphill was a Sisyphean task. I had to keep pausing for breath, and my pace slowed to a crawl.

At the summit, I dropped in on the Guadalupe mountains visitor centre, a haven of clean restrooms and piped classical music amid the wilderness. They had a little weather station, and I asked what the peak gust had been in the past twenty-four hours. They told me it was eighty miles an hour, which is hurricane force.

It went on like that for the next four days. It's still blowing here in El Paso, though not nearly so hard, and it will probably be a problem all the way across New Mexico and Arizona. As a result, instead of being pleasantly tired as I am at the end of most days, I was exhausted and dehydrated.

On the plus side, while this has been the most challenging section of the walk, it's also been easily the most spectacular: stark mountain outcrops, cactus-studded dunes, soft brown grass rippling like an ocean.


It's also been the most solitary few days since I started my walk. Drivers tend to set the cruise control at the 75-mph speed limit, surprisingly generous for a narrow two-lane road, and go into a trance - as witness the many sad little crosses heaped with plastic flowers I saw along the way, commemorating people who presumably fell asleep at the wheel.

Usually, I get a steady trickle of people stopping to chat and offer me rides, and this helps me to get through the day. But there were none this time, so I had to put my brain in the equivalent of cruise control and walk as long and as hard as I could to get it over and done with. Yesterday I covered thirty-two miles, which is a record for me.

I last came to El Paso in 1978, when it was a dusty border town, home to 600,000 people; today it's a huge sprawl with more than twice the population and some of the most high-density housing I've ever seen in this country.

El Paso and its sister town of Juarez in Mexico are really just one big conglomeration: two worlds separated by a fence, a bit like pre-1989 Berlin. I'm hoping to go and have a look at Juarez tomorrow.

That prolonged break came to you courtesy of 'Do No Evil' Google, which hosts this blog but doesn't bother replying to requests for technical support when things go wrong. My thanks to the team at AICR and CC Technology for fixing the problem.

Here are some of the highlights (and one lowlight) since my last entry.

South of Hobbs, the scenery took a much more dramatic turn as the road entered the Chihuahua desert and began skirting the foothills of the Rockies. Both the vegetation and the population have grown very sparse indeed; yucca and prickly pear are now the main forms of plant life, and it's 170 miles from Carlsbad, the last significant town I walked through, to El Paso, which is the next.

I dropped in on Carlsbad caverns, and I was stunned. They're not the world's deepest caves, nor the longest, but they're widely regarded as the most spectacular because of their countless stalactites, stalagmites and other formations.

I followed a long, winding path 750 feet down into the bowels of the earth, and it was as though time had stood still. The audio guide told me that the caves were formed from a fossil reef when the desert was a huge inland sea a quarter of a million years ago; the deep brown layer of fresh-looking bat droppings I passed was actually 45,000 years old; and the location of Lechugilla cave, the deepest limestone cave in the US at 489 metres, is kept secret to preserve its pristine state.

I continued my walk south from White's City, the tiny settlement at the entrance to the Carlsbad Caverns National Park. So straight was the road, and so clear the desert air, that even from a distance of eleven miles the town looked no more than a ten-minute stroll away.

It was warm and sunny, and I wore a t-shirt as I put up my tent that evening, but the next day another of those vicious cold fronts came rolling in. For the first time I was actually walking in snow, which grew heavier as the afternoon wore on. By 3 pm, when I decided to stop walking and hitch into El Paso for my flight to New Orleans, it was almost a blizzard, and the snow piled up on my stroller as fast as I could brush it off.

I stuck my thumb out. Although I rarely have to wait more than about an hour for a ride, and sometimes it's only five minutes, no one would stop. Maybe they thought there'd been some terrible tragedy involving frozen babies and didn't want to be involved, or perhaps they just didn't want snow in their cars, but I stood there cursing for two hours. I'd lost my gloves and not got round to replacing them, and the pair of smelly socks I'd wrapped round my hands was a poor substitute.

When a kind soul eventually stopped for me, I had to apologise and say I couldn't talk to her until the sensation had returned to my fingers. It was agony. Her car veered alarmingly to and fro on the snow-covered road, but I was just so glad to be somewhere warm that I didn't care.

I got my flight, I went to Mardi Gras, and it was unforgettable. There were two or three parades each day, most of them passing within one block of Pam's house, and on Tuesday we were part of what must surely be the world's biggest fancy dress party. I resurrected the Sergeant Pepper outfit I'd worn at Halloween, and she went with a large pair of carboard dice as a bra - it's a long story - and got her photograph taken about 150 times. We draped ourselves in some of the hundreds of tonnes of plastic beads that are thrown from the floats, drank ourselves silly, and enjoyed a really happy, overwhelmingly friendly day.



There's one bit of good news: I now know what I shall be doing after I finish the walk. Pam and I have rented a little house in the very bohemian Marigny district of New Orleans, a ten-minute stroll from the French Quarter. We're going to stay there till my visa runs out in November - after that, we don't know. It's a beautiful house, and the landlord, Steve (on the left of the picture below) has won an award for his sensitive preservation of one of the city's many architectural treasures.

I'm writing this in El Paso on Thursday night, and tomorrow I shall be hitching back to the point where I stopped walking. Hopefully it won't be snowing this time; either way, it's going to be a long, solitary trek to get back here. But before that, I have one thing to look forward to: I'm meeting up with Matt Gregory, the guy I mentioned who's walking coast to coast in the opposite direction, also to raise money for cancer research. We'll have a lot to talk about.

After walking due west across Texas for almost 500 miles, I turned south yesterday at a place called Arkansas Junction.

There was nothing there except a cafe which had just closed for the day, but when the owner saw my Coast to Coast banner she invited me in and gave me a drink. She also more or less ordered one of her staff to take me to the next town, Carlsbad, of caverns fame.

So I've established forward base camp there, and now have to catch up with myself by walking the 55-mile, three-day stretch between Arkansas Junction and Carlsbad.

I dislike using the word 'boring', but sometimes no other description fits the bill. The road cuts a dead-straight line through featureless semi-desert, the sun glares remorselessly and headache-inducingly off the white concrete surface, and the only indication of any progress on my part is the mileposts, something I've not seen before except on interstates.

I tried to relieve the monotony by timing myself between posts, but this only served to make the time pass even more slowly and remind me of how my pace flagged as the afternoon wore on.

I shall make sure I have several hours of BBC radio 4 podcasts with me tomorrow - they've saved my sanity more than once during this walk.

Meanwhile, the big news on everyone's lips here at the moment is cockfighting. After an eighteen-year battle, the New Mexico senate has passed a bill banning this dubious form of entertainment, leaving Louisiana as the only state where it's still allowed.

The sport's supporters fought a vigorous rearguard action. One argument they put forward was that the state's economy would be badly hit by the loss of $20 million a year in chicken-feed sales. Another was that cockfighting was simply harmless family entertainment. I enjoyed this response in the letters column of the local paper:

'I have to wonder about this one. I have a young granddaughter and granted we both agree that there is nothing better than enjoying a good blood bath in a air conditioned room with soft drinks, some ding dongs and a bag of popcorn. Oh, I forgot, a chilidog would be nice. But some of these luxuries aren't available at these events. So call us soft, but I guess we'll just stay at home and watch Rambo re-runs on TV.'

Talking of dead animals, I went to yet another excellent barbecue restaurant last night. One lipsmacking item on the menu immediately caught my eye. It read:

CATFISH FILLET
DEEP-FRIED IN CHOLESTEROL
FREE CANOLA OIL.

Saturday night's Krewe du Vieux parade was an absolute delight - there's no way you'd guess that post-Katrina New Orleans is a city on its knees, abandoned by half its population.

Sixteen sub-krewes (Pam's is the Krewe du Craps), each with its own float, marched through the packed streets of the French Quarter to a cacophony of battered old trombones and euphoniums. Every time the congestion brought us to a halt, an impromptu street party sprang into existence, stranger conversing with stranger.

I don't think I've ever seen such a huge outpouring of warmth, enthusiasm and friendliness on such a chilly night. I especially enjoyed the throws - in a time-honoured carnival tradition, the paraders hurl armfuls of cheap trinkets into the crowd. In our case it was strings of beads, and as well as throwing them we placed them round the necks of anyone who took our fancy, extracting a kiss and a 'Happy Mardi Gras' in return.

The overall theme of the parade was Habitat for Insanity, a pun on the international housing charity Habitat for Humanity, which has played a major part in rehabilitating houses since the hurricane.

Mardi Gras is an excuse for New Orleanians to let their hair down, but it also has a serious satirical intent - this theme was a reminder that many people were badly traumatised by Katrina and there's been a significant rise in the incidence of mental health problems. Our float was a covered wagon bearing the words 'Home, home and deranged' and with a box on the side supposedly dispensing free Prozac - though the hundreds of people who opened the lid were in for a big disappointment: it was empty.

Thanks to a dead camera battery, I don't have a single photo. Never mind.

I'm going back soon for the climax of Mardi Gras, but in the meantime I have some serious walking to do. I crossed the New Mexico state line today, and I'm now in Hobbs, a city of some 30,000 that sprawls eastwards into Texas. It was a hot day, and I ended up doing something I hadn't done for many months: I drank my water supply dry and had to approach a stranger for more.

This is still oil country, and the air was thick with its tarry, cloying smell; the locals probably don't even notice, but I found it almost unpleasantly intense.

Despite the small-town decay I've seen all across Texas, high oil prices mean that the local economy is booming: everyone has a shiny new car, and even the most expensive restaurants are full. It won't last for ever, though, because the state's onshore reserves are running out.

Apart from thousands of oil wells, the other very obvious feature of the landscape is irrigation. Much of the watering is done by pivots, enormously long wheeled arms which either traverse the fields lengthwise or rotate on their axis, creating a perfect circle of brilliant green in a square of strawy brown semi-desert. This area must look beautiful from the air.

I've been travelling for seven months now and met nothing but friendly, polite and helpful people. But just to keep me on my toes and stop me adopting too rose-tinted a view of humanity, someone stole my precious free Sprint phone last night.

I dropped it in the back of a taxi, and wasn't overly worried because I thought someone would hand it in. When I phoned my number this morning, it was answered by a woman who told me very politely that I'd dialled a number in Atlanta by mistake. She was so convincing that I apologised and hung up.

But it didn't take me long to realise that she was lying, and the next time we spoke she told me to go fuck myself. So if any of you have had a rather strange call from my number, my apologies, and normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

On a happier note, the Krewe du Vieux parade, in which I'm helping to pull a float, kicks off the Mardi Gras season tonight, Saturday. I'm really looking forward to it and Pam (who is a genius at making things) has created a mule headdress for me, complete with lifelike pointy ears and a yellow mane. She'll be looking stunning as a wild-west bar girl, in a costume she's made herself. So watch this space!