THE FOOT still isn't right. I felt better this morning but it's obviously not right. We are going home. It's a shame but I think we're right. Apart from anything else, we'd have to cross the Atlas mountains again. This time it would be on a pass to 2 700m and nobody can tell us if the road has been finished. The last people who went that way said there were long stretches of rubble.

Well, the idea of walking is bad enough. Walking and pushing a loaded bike uphill at the same time makes me wince just at the thought. It was bad enough walking to the restaurant yesterday. The stabs of pain were... well, they were stabs of pain.

Just over a gentle rise that starts outside the hotel is Ouarzazate's little airport. It has two flights a day to Casablanca, or "Casa" as everyone here calls it, and between them it gets back to being a military airfield.

We were up at five to be there in time. Steph packed the bags last night because I couldn't stand and because, as she said, I was "too groggy to do it properly." It's astonishing. I felt detached from the world and clearly shock from yesterday's walk has had more effect than I realised.

Steph carried the bags down to the lobby and the hotel owner, who'd got up early for us and couldn't have been more sympathetic, helped retrieve our bikes from his basement.

The airport is so small that it has just one check-in desk. The loaders stand behind it, chatting, waiting for someone to turn up with cases to take out to the plane. Royal Air Maroc didn't even ask that we pack the bikes. Just bring them into the airport and we'll wheel them out to the plane, they said. We took off the pedals to be sociable and we wrapped the chain and gears in plastic to save other people's luggage. But that was it. Never been simpler.

"Thank you," the head loader said as he took the first bike. "That'll make it easier to get home this afternoon..."

We have a short flight across the mountains, a six-hour wait at "Casa" and then a couple of hours to Toulouse. It's a relief that the arrangements have gone so smoothly, right down to booking a car at Toulouse - we planned originally to ride home from the airport - but it's disappointing that it's ended like this.

It's 50 years now since I went on my first bike tour. Nothing worse has ever happened than the occasional flat tyre. But just these past four years I've twice been halted on rides across the United States - the second on the very first morning - and now I've been forced out of a ride home from Morocco. And to think that I hadn't even been stung by a wasp until I was 40!

Grrr!