I’m sorry this first episode is so late! Some people have even emailed to check that I’m alright. Internet in Sipi is too weak and children have kept me TOO diverted. But here, at last, a month into my journey…

JANUARY 7th 2026

It’s difficult to write in constant company with children. I’m a month into my current safari, and the best I’ve been able to do is to write a simple journal entry each night. 

A prerequisite for travel in Uganda is a liking for children. It’s a country in which half the population is younger than 14 years old – an extraordinary statistic that is obvious every second of the day. In a country that has swelled from five million to fifty million in my lifetime, it’s frightening too. A land in which education has been ignored for years; where the average woman bears over six children, and many more than ten or a dozen; where half of girls are married by 18, and hundreds of thousands are mothers while still in school. Most families in this village have schoolgirl pregnancies and child mothers. 

I’m fortunate in my Ugandan family. Alex is educated and intelligent. This will be a family of two children. They’ll be well educated, kept healthy and well fed. And they are an absolute delight!

What a joy it is to be given such cheerful, affectionate, charming wonders in my ‘old’ age! I spend my days with two small children almost constantly at my side, curious chattering beings that keep a rather silly grin on my face all day long. Keilah is now nine and Jonathan Bean is seven. 

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I travelled up by the ten-hour bus from Nairobi to Kitale, high on shoulders of Mount Elgon, to my Kenyan family, Adelight and Maria, and Adelight’s sisters, Scovia and Marion. 

People often ask me, “What do you DO when you’re in Africa?” Few realise how much time I spend WAITING!

A few years ago, I broke down in Kenya’s tea region. Flagging down a pickup, we took the motorbike to Brooke, home of the Brooke Bond tea estates, where the driver said he knew a trustworthy mechanic, Nashon. 

Last visit, my Mosquito gave me a lot of trouble. I brought spare parts with me this year, Chinese but made for my motorbike, unlike the ones that the Ugandan mechanic used. “Original! Japanese!” he insisted in February, as he charged me premium prices and fitted cheap parts for Chinese and Indian bikes of half the capacity. 

Nashon agreed to travel to Kitale, about 100 miles, to fettle my motorbike. He would arrive next day, Wednesday. I waited. By Thursday, he wasn’t answering his phone. “I know these people!” said Adelight. “He’s not answering; he knows our numbers. I’ll borrow a phone and ring him.” Haha. Adelight DOES know how Africa works! “I had trouble with the transport. I am just leaving now,” confessed Nashon. I waited. That was Thursday morning. 

It was Friday, 9.00 at night, when he arrived. He spent all of Saturday working on the machine. I cancelled my plans to ride to Kessup to greet William, my Rift Valley hiking friend. 

However, Nashon DID fix my motorbike efficiently. I have my ‘wheels’ back, and my coveted independence. But I didn’t get to the Rift Valley yet. 

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Two days before Christmas, I rode to Sipi and the Ugandan family: a wonderful mountain ride in the sun on the new sweeping Chinese road. At the vast border post, that hardly anyone uses, I am well known. Few white haired mzungus ride motorbikes here. Despite the six windows for immigration, a huge customs hall and extensive brick plazas, there’s still only one immigration officer and little traffic will ever use this high route. The new road reaches over 8000 feet; no trucks will ever come this way. For whom is this vastly expensive border? It’s just hubris and a source of back-handers to Ugandan government officials. The crippling debts of this deeply corrupt government soar. China took the main international airport two years ago, in lieu of debt repayment… They will strip the land of resources, beggar the people, and buy influence from those at the top. It’s the hideousness of African politicians. The rich get obscenely richer. Not unlike conditions in the West I suppose, just more overtly corrupt. 

At Rock Gardens, the guest house that I have helped Alex to develop, my family wait excitedly. The children have been asking every day, “Will Uncle Jonathan come today?” 

With its six round ‘traditional’ thatched houses, decorated and largely conceived by me, we get congenial guests. For four or five years, we slowly built the business. The pandemic actually helped us to prepare for what’s become a flood-tide of visitors. A couple of months ago, Alex was awarded a young entrepreneur award as one of the ten best hotels in eastern Uganda! “Ha! They all think we are a BIG hotel!” he laughed from the award ceremony. We are, in fact, a glorified backpackers’ lodge, but one run on such professional lines that in its first two years it gained two international awards for best customer reviews, often 10/10. I’m proud of Alex’s achievements and his endless hard work. Precious is popular with guests, and the children are benefiting from exposure to so many foreign visitors. My grandchildren are smart, intelligent and aware. 

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In March this year, I was walking with Alex for a day. From constant phone calls I knew something was happening. It turned out that Alex and his ‘rich mzungu’ were being propositioned to purchase a tract of land, two miles from home. We went to view it, and I could see it was fertile land, with a running stream and a spectacular view – all in the richest coffee growing region on the slopes of Mt Elgon. I agreed to purchase – about £3300 for something over a couple of acres. Through the year, we added plots on all sides, investing in the rural village. It seems that the community – a friendly cooperative population – is enthused by having a ‘rich mzungu’ buy the land, believing it will bring development to their village. 

Alex bought 500 coffee bushes, which will crop in the third year. He rang me often from Chelel, from his coffee fields; he was there most days. What he was building was kept secret as a surprise, always turning his phone camera so that I saw only greenery and rampant growth. I got hints that caused me to imagine a modest thatched coffee house with a small restaurant for his international guests. 

On Christmas Day I was to receive my surprise… 

Every year, it takes time for me to adapt to this altitude. Twice in the past two weeks, we hiked 18 or 19 kilometres at 7000 feet plus. I puff and pant, these early weeks. On our second long hike, we climbed 936 stone steps about 650 feet straight up a mountainside! 

But the walk to Chelel is a bit more modest, just a two mile hike, the last 500 metres up what I call ‘Killer Hill’, steep as a ski jump. We’ve done that walk several times. By the fourth trek, I could walk up without stopping for a breather, the chatterbox children trotting along enthusiastically with Uncle Jonathan. We were a cheery group, taking a sort of Christmas picnic to the Chelel fields. 

Well, Alex achieved his surprise! I can understand his anxiety at my reaction. While I had images of family wealth established on coffee, he had an entirely different agenda. High on the steep slopes overlooking the amazing valley views, perhaps the best I’ve seen around Sipi, Alex has been building a two storey hotel. He had started even before I left Africa in early April! 

It’s a measure of the love and trust I’ve developed for my ‘son’ that I was excited rather than angry at his extravagant use of a good deal of my money (my entire state pension, plus..!) this past year and all the income from his guest house. He’s unusual in investing for the future, unlike the African default of living in the minute, with no plans for the next lean season. The first money I ever gave him, as I left for the border some years ago, was about £30 of remaining local currency. He used it to buy seed potatoes. Next season many people went hungry, but not Alex and family. 

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The half-built hotel stands on its new terraces, surprisingly well designed and constructed. There will be just four rooms, all with balcony views across mile upon mile of beauty to the hazed far-distant horizon. The foreground is of abundant growth and rocky precipices, over which fall delicate cascades of silvery water. It’s magnificent. 

The village council chairman and others joined our Christmas party. Many speeches were made, even Keilah and Jonathan persuaded to address the group, brave at their ages. The chairman, a close neighbour below the hotel plot, assured me that the rural dirt road is to be tarred as part of a marathon course from the national mountain stadium some miles away (We’ll see…). And the community welcomes the project for the potential development it can bring. Far from my embarrassment, they welcome that a ‘rich mzungu’ is a new member of their community. I am the new celebrity as I come and go. 

Looking at the sun-drenched view, I wondered about the night sky, here where there’s no light pollution. “I think we should call this place Chelel Starlight Hotel!” A name instantly adopted by the group, who then told me that, fittingly, Chelel means ‘bright’! 

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The future for my charming Ugandan family looks good. It’s an achievement of which I am proud. The children attend a school judged 17th in Uganda; the guest house is successful; Alex is adding plot after plot to his land; he’s developing farming as well as the more risky hospitality business. His new hotel venture will undoubtedly succeed, compete with, and be the jealous envy of the best smart hotels in the region. It will succeed from the warmth of welcome and going the extra mile in customer service. 

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Rock Gardens attracts some very empathetic visitors. It’s on websites for overland travellers, with whom I tend to bond. My stories of a different time bring respect and admiration. “You did it the REAL way!” says middle-aged Brandon from Idaho, riding the heaviest laden BMW 1200 I have EVER seen; his wife Katherine on another 1200, almost as mighty, travelling the world with their devices. They arrived shortly before younger Tom and Lauren from England, riding their 30th African country on Honda 125s, spending hours each day making and editing videos for social media sponsorship. Webcams bristle from their handlebars. 

“No internet, vague paper maps if you were lucky, no comfort of contact with home! I envy you. It’s so easy for us now,” says Brandon. ‘Easy’ isn’t a word I’d use for riding vast motorbikes the length and breadth of Africa and the world, but I admit I have NO regrets about being a traveller from the pre-internet age. The world was SO much bigger then. It all seemed more of an adventure. I formed my own opinions rather than reading the ‘reviews’ of others; I was not on a treadmill of ‘sights’ interpreted by guides and Wikipedia, (or godforbid Tripadvisor). I made my own stories; suffered from my own mistakes; had no instant comfort from home, no money transfers, no credit card payments; I didn’t spend half my time ‘sharing’ exotic locations with social media ‘friends’ and getting ‘likes’ as reward. I was THERE, in the moment, making of it the very best I could. My stories are now of a distant time to Tom and Lauren: before they were born. But I do bask in a certain respect that I did it then – and am still doing it now! 

Fernando from Mexico is a congenial forty-odd year old with the travel obsession: a globetrotter, a rolling stone, curious about life, a likeable fellow. I tell him stories of Mexico City from over fifty years ago, a decade before he was born. As we clamber those 936 steps and struggle up semi-vertical green slopes, we are a generation apart, but satisfyingly equal. 

And sharing the moment for real. 

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But now it’s chatterbox grandchildren that bring the smiles to my face. The riding about is just a way to be independent as I travel between families. This is my old age. What a wonder to discover such love from my seven year old namesake and nine year old Keilah, my favourite small people. To have hugs and chatter, questions and stories, to have them fall asleep over my knees by the fire pit; to laugh at Jonathan using my beard trimmer back and forth across his shorn head, shiny as a chestnut, as I relax on my bed after a day’s work; then to find him experimenting with shaving the Chinese blanket when I’m not looking; to hear a loud proclamatory childish voice as I am washing down, having ejected Jonathan from my room, then to look out and chuckle that he is solemnly reading out the guest house sign, word by word, requesting that visitors be patient in their demands here in rural Uganda, where nothing works the way it does in Europe. We eat breakfast and supper together. They hug me as they go off to bed and run to hug when I open my morning door. I realise that I love these two small people. 

If I’ve achieved nothing else in my peripatetic life, I’ve secured a future for two utterly delightful African children, one of whom is named Jonathan Bean Cheptai.