I'm back in Tucson, but this time I've got here under my own steam rather than by hitching.

The last few days haven't always been easy, because there's often been no alternative to walking on the freeway, which gives me no pleasure at all. I just put my head down and try to get it over with as quickly as possible.

Four police cars have passed without stopping to tell me off, but I do get tooted at by drivers every now and then, and I'm sure they're 'Get the hell off the freeway' toots rather than 'Good on you buddy' ones.

But there have been compensations, and the dry riverbed where I camped on Sunday night was one, another really idyllic spot just half a mile from the interstate. I was mindful of the two things they always tell you about desert camping - watch out for flash floods and check your boots for scorpions in the morning - but neither has been in evidence so far, though I could see the river had been flowing in the past few days.



Trees that until now were just wizened bundles of sticks are bursting into leaf, and the desert is carpeted with wildflowers; these are fairyduster, Calliandra eriophylla.

I never thought waterproof boots could be so much of an asset in the desert, but mine have come into their own in the last couple of days.

As I began walking again on Thursday, heading west out of Bowie, the first drops of rain started to fall. Spikes of forked lightning struck all around me, and thunder boomed endlessly into the distance.

It rained almost solidly for the next thirty-six hours, turning the path beside the railroad tracks into a quagmire, creating deep ponds and rushing streams overnight, and reminding me how much of this normally arid landscape is shaped by water.

The railroad struck boldly out through the middle of another huge ephemeral lake, Willcox Playa, and then began a long, painfully slow, 5,000-foot ascent into the Dragoon mountains.

It was here that I encountered the loveliest scenery of anywhere on this walk. I followed a dirt track running parallel to I-10 through Texas Canyon, a spectacular cascade of granite boulders the size of houses.

Few of the drivers speeding by on the interstate at 75 mph could have dreamed that a five-mile garden of Eden lay just a few hundred yards to their left: shady groves of broadleaf trees in all their springtime glory, cacti and yucca nestling in the cracks between the rocks, and the air filled with birdsong.

If I owned this land, I thought, I'd be tempted to put labels on all the trees and plants, open a cafe, call it The Living Desert, put a sign on the interstate and charge $5 admission to this major tourist attraction. I'd be a millionaire overnight, but thankfully the owners had not succumbed to temptation and the track was deserted.


I had a nice surprise today. A few weeks ago I was listening to a podcast of BBC Radio 4's popular Sunday morning news programme Broadcasting House, and they asked people to email them if they were doing anything unusual or interesting as they listened. So I told them what I was up to.

This week, the presenter began the programme as follows: "Before we start, I've just heard from Phil Goddard, who's doing a 3,000-mile walk across the United States raising money for cancer. He says he was listening as he did the toughest section of his journey across the Chihuahua desert of western Texas, and Broadcasting House and other Radio 4 programmes help to keep him sane. Let's hope today's programme has the same effect."

I can be a pretty irritating person when I put my mind to it, but today even I found myself annoying.

The plan was to leave my hotel in Tucson bright and early, hitch the hundred miles or so back to Bowie, and start walking again. The problem is, bright and early is not my strong suit. If I had the willpower to get out of bed at 7 am and be walking by 8 every day I'd have been basking on the beach in Los Angeles weeks ago, but often I don't manage to drag myself away until checkout time at 11.

Today, to make matters worse, I realised that I was nearing the end of another book. I have a phobia about being in my tent with nothing to read, so I paid an emergency visit to Barnes and Noble. That was another couple of hours down the drain, and by the time I started hitching it was 1 pm.

Usually, I've found this a very quick way of getting from A to B. I nearly always get a ride within an hour, and sometimes it takes only minutes, but today, for some reason, Lady Luck was not smiling upon me. I stood there for five hours and ten minutes, trying to look cheerful but inwardly cursing. There's no rhyme or reason to hitchhiking; it was a perfectly good place to hitch from, and I was looking quite respectable, but thousands of cars sped by without stopping.

In the end I gave up. I'm now in a motel only a couple of miles from where I started, and all I have to show for the past twenty-four hours is a shiny new paperback novel. It had better be good.

Every day of this journey is surreally unpredictable, but on Saturday it was more apparent than usual.

Friends of Pam's came over for the traditional St Patrick's day dinner of corned beef, potatoes, cabbage and carrots. We bought the meat but the vegetables came free, thrown to us from the floats in one of the parades, together with yet more beads.

In the evening another parade passed the end of our street, a wacky, ill-assorted cavalcade of souped-up dune buggies and miniature vintage cars driven by fat men.

The crowning glory was a perfect replica of an Irish pub, on wheels and towed by a Hummer. It came complete with smiling barmaid, chattering customers, draught beer and price lists in euros, and sat stalled outside our house for half an hour, stuck in traffic congestion. So we danced in the street to the strains of the Benny Hill theme tune blaring from its massively powerful sound system.

We got into conversation with a couple of police officers escorting the parade, and shared our food with them. They expressed an interest in our house, so we gave them a guided tour, and in return they insisted that I sit at the wheel of their car in a peaked cap and make sure the horn, siren and flashing lights were functioning properly. I felt the same childish excitement as I did when the train drivers tooted at me back in Arizona.

As a parting gift, the two presented me with a New Orleans Police Department pen and officially declared me to be an FOP, friend of the police.

I feel hugely privileged to be living in New Orleans, and the Marigny in particular. It's friendly and colourful, with its own rich fabric of smells, sounds and tastes.

This afternoon we picked oranges and kumquats from the garden of a derelict house at the end of the street, and I'm now making marmalade. Meanwhile, next door's banana trees hang enticingly over our fence and are about to bear fruit.

Twice a day, morning and evening, the delightful strains of the calliope waft across the rooftops from the Mississippi, summoning tourists to steamboat cruises. It sounds like a children's recorder ensemble playing out-of-tune, out-of-synch popular hits, and it always brings a smile to my face.

And then there's the fruit and vegetable man, who cruises the streets singing an incantatory list of his wares: I have apples, I have oranges, I have mirletons...

We've made our own contribution to this cacophony, and I hope the neighbours aren't too fed up with us. After last night's siren-testing session, tonight our next-door landlord's burglar alarm went off for no particular reason and wailed deafeningly for half an hour or more.

Back home this would have been met with complete indifference from the forces of law and order, but here three national guardsmen came screeching to a halt outside the house in a camouflage-painted Hummer.

In one way and another I've wasted an enormous amount of police time on this walk, but they never seem to begrudge it.

I hitched a ride here yesterday, and I'm waiting for my flight to New Orleans.

The journey was really useful, because it was like a reconnaissance mission for my walk: I sat there, notebook in hand, and wrote down every source of food, water and accommodation for the next hundred miles. It took an hour and forty minutes, but it will take me around five days on foot.

The temperature is sizzling here; it's supposed to be 92F (33C) today, which is close to the March record.

I've been looking back through all the messages you've sent me on this blog, and I've been struck by the diversity of places they've come from.

They represent seventeen states (FL, OH, IL, KY, IN, MD, NM, TN, VA, LA, AR, TX, PA, MS, WA, NY and AZ) and eight countries (UK, US, Peru, Australia, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Belgium and Poland).

If you're reading this and your state or country is not listed, why not click on 'Leave a Message' and say hi?

I cheekily asked Kat if I could stay another night, and she immediately and generously said yes.

It's beautiful up here in the hills, silent but for the birdsong and the wind in my ears. In the evening, after a very satisfying seventeen miles with no backpack, I sat on the terrace as the last rays of the sun set the mountaintops aglow and had one of my interminable daily phone conversations with Pam.

We were deep in debate about which item of furniture should go where in the new apartment (which she's now moved into) when I looked up and saw a bizarre creature staring at me straight in the eye from about twenty feet away. It looked a bit like a wild boar that someone had disassembled and put the bits back in the wrong order.

I interrupted Pam and described what I was looking at. 'Oh yes, that's a javelina,' she said promptly. All those hours spent watching Animal Planet on cable when she should be dealing with the mountain of washing up in the sink had paid off at last.

Then the rest of the family appeared: five adults and a baby. I went indoors to get my camera, but by the time I returned they'd vanished as silently as they'd arrived. And to think I'd never heard of javelinas before.

Talking of Pam, I'm off for another long weekend in New Orleans on Friday. The city enthusiastically seizes on any pretext to throw a huge fancy-dress party, and this Saturday thousands of New Orleanians will be taking to the streets to celebrate their non-existent Irish roots on St Patrick's day.

I crossed another state line on Tuesday morning. It's always an exciting experience, but this was especially so, since Arizona is the last but one state I have to cross. Assuming I continue to follow I-10 all the way, it's about 650 miles to Venice Beach.

The desert remains full of surprises. As I walked out of Lordsburg on Monday, I saw a blue shimmer of water at the foot of the distant hills to the west; of course it couldn't be a lake, so it must be yet another mirage.

But as the sultry afternoon wore on, I realised that a lake was precisely what it was: Lordsburg Playa, several square miles of brown soupy water stretching almost to the horizon and gradually evaporating away to nothing as summer approaches. So I went for my first swim of the year, though swim is hardly the right word because the water was nowhere more than a couple of feet deep.



It's now Tuesday night, and I'm staying with Kat Ehrhorn and her sons Grail and Zeleigh at Diamond Mountain, a thousand-acre Buddhist retreat site twelve miles south of Bowie.

The setting is stunning: high in the silent hills, prayer flags fluttering in the breeze, looking out across a flat, empty plain. The interstate is clearly visible in the far distance, a line of tiny white trucks plodding back and forth like termites.

I'm very grateful for a wonderful evening of warm hospitality, and also for the invaluable hints on something that every American kid does, but which I've so far failed to achieve: flattening pennies on railroad tracks.

Sometimes I leave the coin there and wait for ages, but no train comes. Or I put it on one track, and the train speeds by on the other. Once I got it right, but the train sent the penny flying and I never found it.

I have this vision of 25th-century archeologists penning lengthy theses on the high prevalence of coins found near railroad tracks, and concluding that they were some kind of votive offering.

I have a feeling that much of the rest of the walk will be dominated by trains, which suits me just fine.

I love American trains. These are real trains, mile-long cavalcades of a hundred or more freight wagons bearing evocative names from all over North America like Canadian National, Southern Pacific, and Marinette Tomahawk and Western, and hauled by up to half a dozen big beefy diesels.

These are no weedy little twelve-car electrical multiple units transporting pasty-faced commuters from Orpington to London Bridge. In the land of the SUV and the pickup, passenger trains are for wimps.

For the last few days, I've been walking along a very dusty service road wedged between the I-10 interstate and the Union Pacific railroad, both of which go all the way to Los Angeles.

It's pretty tedious, but the monotony is relieved by the trains that pass every fifteen or twenty minutes. I've been doing something I haven't done since I was a kid: I wave at every one that passes. Sometimes the driver ignores me; usually he waves back, and often he toots twice in what is obviously the regulation greeting for train drivers encountering cross-country walkers.

Once, two shiny objects came sailing out of the window of the driver's cab. They were bottles of water, and this quick-thinking gesture by an anonymous stranger made my day.

This route is also very useful because it means that by Monday evening I'll have crossed the whole of New Mexico and only walked on a single eleven-mile stretch of the interstate.

It's very empty, and once I went for 36 hours without a single car passing me. But yesterday I bumped into a group of workers building new metal bridges to replace the old wooden ones. One told me he'd actually helped to make the road I was walking on, just a year or so ago, so I thanked him. It's not often you get a chance to express your gratitude to the person who built the road.

Meanwhile, I'm not exactly a paragon of fitness at the moment. I'm suffering from a multitude of ailments:

• Blisters from the new boots, which have slowed me down to around two miles an hour and forced me to take a day off on Sunday
• Chronic dehydration
• A windblasted face and cracked lips
• A constant runny nose from all the dust in the air - I've noticed a lot of people have it round here.

The weather is starting to get hot too, which doesn't help. But I'm still making good progress; all being well I should be in Arizona, my penultimate state, on Tuesday. And I've just crossed another symbolic landmark: the continental divide.


Finally, I've been guilty of an act of unwitting environmental vandalism. My green credentials are impeccable: I haven't dropped a single piece of litter in 2,435 miles, and I always pee on plants so it doesn't go to waste; I imagine a few square feet of the desert blooming in spectacular fashion as I disappear into the distance.

But this is the home of one of the world's rarest creatures: Ranus motilis novo-mexicanus, the New Mexican movable-point frog, an amphibian that changes the pattern of spots on its back to blend in with its surroundings. There are only two known individuals left, and so befuddled was I by the heat and dust that I failed to notice the warning sign and trod on one of them. Oops!

I made a couple of decisions while I was in El Paso.

One was to dump the stroller - I figured that if Matt could get across the deserts of California, Arizona and New Mexico with just the pack on his back, then so could I. Also, I'd be following the interstate, where food and water are never very far away.

The stroller had been something of a luxury ever since I found it in the street between Dallas and Fort Worth, though on one stretch, the four-day journey into El Paso, it had been a real lifesaver.

As a bonus, the people Matt and I stayed with in El Paso were involved with all kinds of women's and immigrants' associations, and said they should easily be able to find a home for one slightly dusty and travelworn but still perfectly usable stroller. That tipped the balance for me; I hate waste, and I didn't want to just abandon it.

The weight of the backpack took a lot of getting used to, and for a couple of painful and uncomfortable days I wondered whether I'd made the right decision.

But I also noticed people were reacting to me differently; before, I was a rather well-dressed vagrant pushing a backpack for an unspecified distance, but now it's more obvious that I'm a long-distance traveller, and more people come up to me and ask questions.

The other decision was to buy my third pair of boots. The second had served me well, carrying me 1,108 miles from Memphis, Tennessee, but the constant battering had left the heels literally hollow, with huge holes in them.

They also made me nervous whenever I took them off and put them in one of those grey plastic crates in airport security on my way to and from New Orleans: the last Brit to fly with hidden cavities in his size 10s is now serving life in a maximum-security jail in Colorado. But the staff never noticed, except once when I drew the problem to their attention, and then they took them away and dusted them for explosives.

Last time I said farewell to a much-loved item of footwear, Pam and I drank their health with a newly devised cocktail called Boots in the River and then hurled them into the Mississippi. This time inspiration deserted me, and I quietly dropped them in the trash.

I bought another pair of exactly the same size and make, in the hope of fooling my feet into believing they were the same pair. But no sirree Bob, these are clever feet, and they saw through this cheap ruse straight away, so for the past week I've been experiencing symptoms I thought I'd seen the last of: blisters, sore feet, ankle rashes.

I enjoyed the 42-mile walk north from El Paso to Las Cruces, NM. The area is densely populated, so for once I didn't have to worry about food and water. It reminded me very much of southern Spain: a succession of dusty little villages with names like Vado, Berino and San Miguel, each with a store providing a central focus for its social life; a high wall of purple mountains to the east; whitewashed houses hiding from the blazing sun behind screens of tall, prim cypress and blowsily extravagant pine; and endless neat rows of pecans.

Then I headed west, and rather nervously began walking along the I-10 interstate, which stretches all the way from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Florida. It's one of the country's main arteries, yet it was less crowded with traffic than many of the roads I've walked along.

Once a state trooper sped by without stopping, and another time I had to go through a border patrol checkpoint. Instead of saying excuse me sir, did you know it's illegal to walk on the interstate, they gave me a teddy bear and asked after Matt.

I couldn't help thinking that if I'd begun trudging north up the M1 motorway back home I'd have been in the back seat of a police car faster than you could say 'Closed-circuit TV camera'.

The desert climate is taking some getting used to. In the small hours of yesterday morning the temperature was 22F (-6C). When I got up at 9 am there was ice in the water bottle I'd left outside my tent, but the weather was already warm enough for a t-shirt. And by afternoon it was 73F (23C) and I was wearing my shorts for the first time this year.

Finally, a couple of people have said that there aren't enough photos on my blog. 'They don't have to be great works of art,' Matt told me the other day. 'People just want to know where you've been'.

So on Monday, I tried an experiment: I took a photograph every hour, on the hour, wherever I was. It was actually a short day, because I walked only 12 miles from downtown Las Cruces to the airport, and not all the pictures are that interesting. But here is the result: half a day in the life of Phil.



11 am: Jack Lay Nissan, Main St



Noon: Picacho Avenue and Armijo Street



1 pm: Picacho Mexican Grill



1.30 pm: the Rio Grande, one of the world's great rivers. It originates in the southern Rockies of Colorado, flows the entire length of New Mexico, and then forms the boundary between Texas and Mexico before spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. More than 1,800 miles long, it once provided sustenance for peoples all along its length, but has now been channeled and dammed. In Las Cruces it's not much more than a trickle.



2 pm: Picacho Hills



3 pm: Looking back at Las Cruces from the airport road


4 pm: The airport

A true story

Today I received my biggest-ever individual donation.

A guy drove past as I headed north out of El Paso, and handed me a brown paper Starbucks bag containing two bottles of drink and a bible. This was tucked inside the bible:



Normally I would keep this for my expenses and make an online donation of the same amount from my own money. This time, however, I can't afford the donation and I'm having terrible trouble getting change for the note. Any suggestions?

I finally met Matt Gregory yesterday. He's walking coast to coast in the opposite direction, from his hown town of Bellingham, WA to Miami, and has been very kindly waiting in El Paso for me to arrive.

The long-awaited Dr Livingstone handshake took place in front of two TV crews outside a house in downtown El Paso.

I'd like to express my very heartfelt thanks and apologies to West Cosgrove and the residents of 1009 North Florence Street, who quite unexpectedly found their living room full of cameras, lights and cables. 'Mommy, why is all this happening in our house?' I overheard one of the kids asking.

I met West through Warmshowers.com, which lists people willing to play host to long-distance cyclists. He was warm and generous in his welcome, and also a fund of information about El Paso and Juarez, since he runs 'immersion trips' for groups wanting to see the social and economic realities of the border region for themselves.

The whole border issue is a fascinating and controversial one, and it's been a subject of much passionate debate among many of the people I've met in the southwest.

There's a huge paradox at work here, in that while the US goes to such great efforts to keep Mexican workers out, large numbers crisscross the border illegally every day, and are welcomed by employers when they arrive.

Many argue that US immigration policy has failed, and Mexicans should be allowed to enter the country as freely as Canadians do. If this happened, the US would not suddenly be swamped by millions of migrants desperate to escape the poverty of Latin America. Economic migration is a self-regulating process; once all the jobs have been filled, people stop coming.

Back home in the UK, there's been a big influx of east European workers since the European Union expanded its borders, but the doom-laden predictions of mass unemployment have largely failed to materialise; these people are simply filling a vacuum, doing jobs in agriculture and elsewhere that middle-class people don't want to do.

In the afternoon, Matt and I went for a stroll around Juarez to see the reality for ourselves. West pointed out that when viewed from a distance, El Paso and Juarez look like two districts of the same city. People on both sides read the same newspapers, watch the same TV stations, and cross the border in their thousands to shop or work. And yet from close up the two could not be more divided, separated by a deep scar of barbed wire and concrete.

I got on like a house on fire with Matt. I have a great deal of admiration for him, since he's doing the walk on a much lower budget (well, zero basically) and sleeping in his tent a lot more. He'll also have walked more than a thousand miles further than me by the time he arrives in Florida, having taken a much more circuitous route.

We lunched in Juarez, and as a change from tacos and burritos I ordered goat's head. When it arrived, complete with open mouth and neat rows of teeth, I couldn't find much meat on it. 'You need to dig around inside,' the waiter explained helpfully. 'The tongue and the eyes and the brains are a real delicacy'. So I dutifully did, but it wasn't one of the culinary highlights of my walk.



Talking to Matt has also resolved a lot of my concerns about the remainder of my journey, because I'll be following more or less the same route.

Much of it will be through desert, but he says it's not as tough as it looks: the longest he ever went without supplies of food and water was thirty-four miles. And I'll have to walk illegally on the interstate for quite a bit of the way; Matt has too, but has found that the forces of law and order turn a blind eye.