DAY 78 MONDAY 5th FEBRUARY 2017. HOIMA, UGANDA

Ugandan pop music has to be the worst in the world. I write that as I have been bugged by it since I arrived at this hotel soon after lunch. Soon, I shall have to address the management about it, certainly before I go to my early bed. It just goes on and on, the same beat, the same ‘music’ made by engineers, not musicians. To create this stuff, all you have to do is push buttons, not have any creative skill with instruments. The speaker broadcasts to an empty garden in probably the town’s best hotel. (Where, again, I got a room reduced from £35 to £16). As always, it’s causing me to sink into irritability… Africans put up with so much noise and appear terrified of silence.

*

Hoima has little or nothing to recommend it. It is dusty and scruffy, but I was forced to stop here as I have another 100 miles of dirt roads to cover tomorrow on a 150 mile journey to my next destination. There’s one tar road into this town, direct from Kampala, but every other road in the region is dusty earth. It’s called murram, and is packed red earth, as hard as tarmac, but with a surface of dust and the ability to hide dips and holes with the sun so high above. This whole region is beyond tar roads, it seems. Within moments of leaving Masindi, the town’s tar surfaces disappear, and the same goes for this town. The main street is tarred but all side roads are of unhealthy red dust. Of my 100 mile ride today, 75 were dusty, the rest round the two towns. I arrived in Hoima with my usual deep red beard, but everyone here must be used to it. Pretty Constance, of the Masindi Hotel, insisted on taking my photo this morning, after I had captured her delightful smile for another book of photos. My photo should really be entitled, ‘Would you let a man as scruffy as this into your hotel?’…

There’s something unsettling about this area. My instincts are pretty well refined by now as I ride along. I am missing the customary effervescent smiles and greetings. People here seem to stare rather blankly at me with few smiles. Perhaps this is a different tribal region? Maybe it’s too remote to see so many mzungus?

I rode off my route to ride down the Albertine Escarpment to see Lake Albert. It’s over 1500 feet lower than Masindi, the road curling down towards the almost invisible lake in the haze. Certainly, there’s nothing to see of the Blue Mountains of Congo on the other side, I doubt visibility was a mile. Butiaba is a small, straggly fishing village at the heel of a sandy promontory that protrudes into the lake with palm trees and dense with sand flies. The lake proved to be filled with floating one-use plastic bottles, the scourge of the planet. No one is safe from this pollution, even in the centre of Africa; maybe especially in the centre of Africa, for at least we in the West are becoming aware of the dangers to the environment; no one here is. Try asking for tap water here and you are looked at as if crazy. It’s such a clever marketing con by cynical corporations: most of the world’s water is as safe as the stuff peddled as ‘from mountain springs’ etc (some of it probably from taps in Kampala). All you are purchasing is advertising and a plastic bottle/ pollution. The cleverest trick of salesmen of the last century. Selling the insecurity of ill health to those who consequently reduce their immunity. My rule has always been to drink tap water except where the locals won’t – so far Afghanistan 1977 and China 1984…

*

Appearances can be deceptive. This is a smart hotel set in large well kept gardens, with pretensions to grandeur. I just ate a most unremarkable curry of ‘fresh’ vegetables that were every one of them from a frozen packet. Oh well, I have cheered up a bit having dealt with the noise pollution. I asked the barman, with a big smile, if we could lose the outdoor speaker? A tip of all of 60 pence sealed the deal! Unusually, I turned on the air conditioning to cool my room before going for supper at the terrace restaurant with its thatched roofs. I’ve come back and it’s warmed up the room nicely! I guess it’s my inexperience. I’m usually fighting to turn OFF the AC… I’ll open the window behind the insect screens, and hope I get a good night. I am surprisingly tired after two days of murram roads, and another LONG one to come tomorrow.

*

There are millions of small motorbikes afflicting African roads and towns these days. It’s an astonishing thing, so much so that I nearly hit a pothole in my shock this morning: I passed a woman rider. So what, you may ask. But she is the FIRST woman I have seen riding a moped on this side of Africa. It is an exclusively male occupation. Oddly, in Ghana, at least half the riders are women, but Ghana isn’t quite so conservative as these countries and women are much more emancipated (for Africa). Here, you see a few women allowed on bicycles but not ONE in trousers and very few driving any vehicles, most sitting side-saddle on boda-bodas. A few miles later, I passed a second ‘liberated’ Ugandan woman on a moped. I wondered if they could be teachers and thus relatively independent, for schools seem to have finally gone back today, a month after Kenya.

*

So an unexciting day today. Well, I suppose they can’t all be significant from parking on lion footprints!

DAY 79 TUESDAY 6th FEBRUARY 2017. FORT PORTAL, UGANDA

For sheer filth, hard work and disgusting conditions, today gets the prize. The words “oh, they’re working on the road…” strikes doom in my heart. Today’s ride was a trial of physical and mental persistence. The Suam to Sipi road is more serious trail riding, but it’s also almost half the distance and has the incredible beauty of those views to lift the spirits from contemplation of the effort and why the hell I am putting myself through all this.

This was the third day that I have wrestled with dire murram tracks, all day for three days! Now at last I am back on the tar roads. I must have ridden 250 miles on corrugated, pitted, dusty roads.

Last night I went to bed at 8.37! That’s almost mid-afternoon for me. The next thing I knew it was 7.19 and the sun was up. If, as I firmly believe, stress is the main contributor to ill health and short lives, and if healthy physical exercise, out of doors, is a key to good health, then I have discovered the key to longevity verging on immortality! My only stresses are self-induced when I get irritated, and that’s usually dispelled by a few moments of rational thought, and often a bit of self criticism. As for exercise, well, I reckon 250 miles of trail riding uses just about every muscle available – not sure that the dust does much for my health, but that’s fairly transitory. And eleven hours sleep a night can’t be bad: the satisfaction of a weary body and a well-stimulated brain.

*

“They’re working on the road…” What that means is that all the old established murram, that has been packed down by the years – OK, with ruts and holes from the rainy season, and corrugations from the bouncing lorries – is ploughed up by vast Chinese bulldozers and replaced by deep quantities of newly quarried rock and millions of truck loads of new red earth, dumped, rolled, water sprayed, and crunched into a mess almost a hundred miles long. I must lock my arms and thread my way through the muck, the diversions, the as yet non-existent bridges; the piles of rock and earth, the dust-belching trucks, the Chinamen in straw hats, gesticulating; the Ugandans peering through theodolites, the sudden inexplicable diversions through fields, the tantalisingly short stretches of new tar that build so much confidence as I watch over each hill, dreading the muck that surely follows again. I have to share the ‘road’ with the worst drivers I have found in the fifty-odd countries in which I have ridden, with a million shitty little boda-bodas ridden by lunatics, loaded with tables, vast sacks of charcoal, five schoolchildren, bicycles laid across the pillion seat, other Chinese motorbikes carried in a similar fashion, strapped on their side behind a rider with his balls pressed to the tank. I have seen many a settee and chair on the pillion; piles of plastic stacking chairs dwarfing the rider; trussed pigs carried across the pillion passenger’s knees; chickens draped by the dozen, heads hanging forlornly; complete wooden beds; festoons of milk-churns; multiple passengers; three full sized sheets if quarter ply flapping on the passenger’s head (imagine the turbulence!); bundles of steel rods dragged in the dust; plastic pipes held like lances by passengers; riders texting and checking their phones (with three passengers behind them); beer crates piled six feet high on the pillion seat, wavering on the rutted tracks. But best yet; the ultimate prize winner for load on a small Chinese 100cc motorbike (so far) was to see a ten foot steel ladder strapped to the off-side of the bike – vertically. This on roads where the foliage can be thick and encroaching!

*

Last night I noted that perhaps I was riding through a region of different people: I missed the smiles and laughter, the waves and irrepressible gaiety. It was also very noticeable just how small were the people I passed in the last few hundred miles of filth. These were people of the smallest stature. Ugandans are known for their shortness, but many people today were under five feet, tiny-seeming people. I know that I am now in the region of Africa from which come the Batwa (or, less PC: pigmy) people, so these seemed like a sort of preparatory race! But they didn’t smile much, just watched me pass with a faint scowl that seems the natural feature. Now, in Fort Portal, the biggest town down this way, I appear to be back amongst the cheerful, out-going Ugandans I expect.

Maybe the reaction of the people and their apparent antipathy towards my presence has a bit to do with the fact that some days I see the ‘romance’ of being here, riding through equatorial Africa, and other days – today – I just see the squalor and thank my stars that I wasn’t born to this life in the roadside dust and stained buildings that will never be completed because no one has resources to finish once the structure fulfils its basic purpose, and certainly not to decorate or beautify anything. It all looked so sordid today, with even the greenery coated in dust; the villages collections of dingy stained brick and concrete; roadsides broken and shambolic, rubbish abounding. Even the views weren’t worth writing home about (so I won’t).

I stopped for two huge mugs of sweet milky tea, which is really warm milk that a tea bag of the cheapest variety was waved over, in one of the filthy, scruffy strip villages. The Ugandan population being one of the fastest expanding in Africa, there are people everywhere. My ride through the empty Murchison National Park emphasised the density of population here. Never, for a moment, today, did I leave humanity behind, out of sight, to enjoy some virgin nature. Unless it is protected by law, every inch is used, cultivated, abused and degraded. You see, I said that all I saw today was squalor…

Imagine my chagrin, when I finally arrived back on the tarmac road, that I remember from last year being a bit potholed, to find that it too was being ‘worked on’ too. Virtually my whole journey today – 200 kilometres – was undertaken on broken, dusty, stony surfaces. It’s been quite a day. I may well be back in bed by 8.37.

*

Last year I stayed in Fort Portal for a few days, a busy, untidy but pleasant enough town. Finding a bed was easy as a result. I came back to the same hotel, and it might even be the same room but memory fails me; I have slept in SO many cheap hotels rooms round the world. I often wonder just how many?

“For goodness sake, don’t bring me a white towel!” I am embarrassed by the trail of dust-stained towels I am leaving across East Africa. There was a knock at my door. The receptionist stood there with a large orange towel. It’s so nice to be able to joke in English with Ugandans. There’s a full length mirror on the hotel stairs: it was the first time I saw my sorry state, so sorry that a laughing guest insisted he took my camera and made a photo of me outside my first floor room, overlooking the rather noisy town. ‘Would you let this man in your hotel?’, indeed. But of course, people here understand the state of the roads; they’re only astonished that a man whose beard turns out to be white when washed, has the ridiculous notion of riding this way to Fort Portal.

Sometimes, so do I.

DAY 80 WEDNESDAY 7th FEBRUARY 2017. IBANDA, UGANDA

It was a mistake to go back to the hotel in Fort Portal, for all it is cheap and adequate. I had forgotten that the businesses next door run an unsilenced generator in the backyard of their building right beneath the rooms of the hotel. And when that finally stopped at ten, the pounding of music and the grinding of lorries on the hill outside took over. Looking back at my notes, I see I said it was ‘OK but noisy. Friendly’ last year. But none of the friendly people are still working there and the noise had increased such that it was like living next to an airport runway. I had a disturbed night, just when I needed a sound sleep. So now, at six in the evening in a sad hotel in Ibanda, I am irritable and in need of someone to talk to to dispel the gloom. Oh well, it doesn’t often happen this way and I will just have to make do and hope tomorrow improves!

This bizarre £12.50 hotel, modern, spread around huge expanses of lawn (that’s what attracted me) is sad through lack of imagination, lack of management and lack of maintenance. Those are the three main failings of most business ventures in Africa. With minimal imagination, the rooms could be pleasant – as it is, they are basic to a point of asceticism and austerity. The management seems to be one woman, who appears to be doing everything and has the personal skills and charm of… and I spent half an hour trying to think of a suitable personality with minimal personality and could only come up with Theresa May!! Her English comprehension is wilfully poor to boot. As for maintenance, why not tighten up the taps that spin in the basin so they leak directly to the floor? Why not put a handle back on the bathroom door? Why not repair the hot water system? You could probably charge more if there was a hot shower. Why not rehang the curtain rail instead of tugging a piece of cloth over the security screens? For imagination, why not put more than a Chinese plastic chair, a school table and a bed in a room ten feet by fifteen? How much would a mat cost? This is so typical (he said, irritably, reflecting the thankfully rare mood) of African business. It has cost a fortune in investment to construct this hotel (owned by the town mayor) with its 50 or more rooms spread pleasantly round the gardens and lawns, but few owners will employ qualified staff or understand that regular money must be spent to keep businesses fresh and profitable… Why not produce a dish other than ******* chicken and chips and ******* fried cabbage for once?! Bahhhh!!!

Sorry, these moods get me now and again. It’s inevitable on a journey as long as this. I suspect I am tired.

*

And in parts, it’s been a fine day. Last year one of my favourite discoveries was a short mountain pass north of Fort Portal. There’s a sweeping highway, virtually empty of traffic, that curls and swoops through the mountains and down to the lower equatorial forest that spreads into Congo and on, most of the way across the continent. The new road loops right round the end of the mountain range in a huge U shape, and eventually enters Congo at a small border much of the way back to being level with Fort Portal. The old road cut that short by turning and winding over the range for just ten miles on a shelf cut from the steep mountain slopes. It’s still there, now covered in grass and unused, except by the likes of me. Before turning south, I decided to take that track again, riding in the opposite direction, so that much of it seemed new. It was as magical and calming as I remembered, winding through silent realms of creeper-hung trees beside yawning drops into deep forest below. Ten lovely miles.

Dropping slowly down to the Congolese side of the mountains – still 10 miles inside Uganda – I came upon a rudimentary mud and thatch army encampment. It wasn’t there last year. Soldiers, little more than youths, came gesticulating, hitching their guns over their shoulders, to interview me. I just smile and comply with their requests, extracting my passport so that, as usual, they can read the long expired Mozambique visa, which contains my photo and looks far more official than the rather insignificant plastic-shrouded identification page that the Passport Office in London put there. I soon rode on, and was far more alarmed by an aggressive baboon half a mile on down the leafy track. They are nasty animals of little charm, to be treated respectfully. Common enough to see on the roads, they always run off, bums flashing red and rather disgustingly. This one old male didn’t run. He sat there as I passed and lunged out frighteningly and gave brief chase. A blip of my throttle soon got me away, but baboons are animals I don’t trust, and one glance into that mouth of vicious teeth was enough to shake me a little. You do not want a baboon bite in this life. It could be the last!

“Oh, yes, they can be aggressive,” agreed a policeman, back on the tar road, stopping me more out of bored curiosity than any wish to check my credentials. “But if you stop, they will always run away!” Hmmmm… It was advice that I doubt I will put to the test. Those teeth did it for me.

*

It was grand to be away from habitation and dusty roadside development for a while. This region is more sparsely inhabited as I wind back into the foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains. The afternoon ride, having passed back through noisy, bustling Fort Portal, and a forested stretch of national park, was into fine scenery: high rolling mountainsides, dry and with low trees, backed by the high mountains. It had an air of Spain; perhaps a quality of the light, perhaps the washed out colours of the soil and vegetation. I had selected Ibanda somewhat randomly on my map, as it would make a ride of about 230 kilometres, and I try to limit my days to around 200. It’s a small departmental town with local courts and government offices. It has little to recommend it for a longer stay than to sleep the night in my austere room. I’d have liked to find a place to sleep in the magnificently named Bugarama, up the road, but there was nowhere. I got this buggerama instead.

*

When I tried to order supper, the one-woman manager/ cook/ receptionist/ dogsbody, Maybot impersonator, told me that ‘your friends have ordered for you!’ Stupidly, I argued that I’d never seen them before. Maybe I should have just turned on the British charm, for they are a pale brown group of eleven obvious African Americans, probably on some sort of ‘roots’ tour. If I couldn’t hear the deep Southern accents, I’d know they were African American. They are VAST! Every one of them like giant lardy puddings. I often remember, when I see African Americans coming back to their ‘roots’, the black American who spent time in Navrongo tracing his ancestry. I met him a few times at Chief’s palace over supper. The poor man would have been mortified to know that everybody in town referred to us both as ‘the two white men’!

One of the wobbly mountains just greeted me. It turns out they are building and supporting an orphanage (applause) and running a college for ‘pastors’ (Grrrrrrhhhhh! Fake pastors. Grrrrhhhh!). Their translator (“People don’t understand their accents…”) came and sat with me as I ate my fried bloody chicken and fried bloody cabbage. He reckons he saw me in Jinja. I haven’t been in Jinja for over a year. All white men look the same… Even if they are black!

*

My god, I hate fried ******** cabbage. Oh well, I’ve cheered up a bit for something to eat and a couple of bad beers. Time for bed. I’m feeling a bit pissed on two beers. I think I must be exhausted!

*

8.30, as I am going to bed, and my phone flashes (so inexperienced that I seem to have lost the ringtone!). It’s Precious and Alex, concerned for my welfare. And all my irritation dissolves with a warm, caring gesture… THAT’S what makes it worthwhile, after all.

DAY 81 THURSDAY 8th FEBRUARY 2017. KABALE, UGANDA

The White Horse Inn at Kabale! I ask you, how colonial can you get? It’s so funny: a smart hotel surrounded by wonderfully green clipped lawns, lilies and irises in flower everywhere, such a tonic for the eyes after all the dust and dry vegetation of the last week; uniformed staff, who are all so friendly; a tennis court; a proper dining room with waiters with bow ties, and a delightful bar with a roaring log fire if the temperature drops. What’s so funny? Well, me. Here. When I think how my travelling has changed over the years, that’s what’s funny! And how I do enjoy the contrasts. When I think back to the shitty (sometimes literally) hovels in which I used to stay, and now this.

And a few hours ago I was drinking African tea outside the dirtiest little ‘hoteli’ you can picture, sweating and dusty. That’s what I love about this travelling life: contrast and that feeling of being IN the moment.

*

It’s been a grand day on the whole. From breakfast beside mammoth Baptists in that hapless hotel in Ibanda, to a cool beer in a long glass in a civilised bar in the highest town in Uganda, with an aromatic log fire just kindling in the grate. Harlene, from Maryland, one of the billowing and bulging Baptists, enveloped in enough shiny gold fabric to sew a marquee, insisted on holding my hand and saying a prayer for my day as I loaded the Mosquito. Why is it the fervently devout overbearingly assume you share their convictions? Oh well, I suppose it gave her comfort even if it didn’t convince or inconvenience me much. “These are our friends, they’re pastors! Do you know about pastors?” They were a group of astonishingly glossily dressed young men, in the shiniest of suits more appropriate for the Mafia than church. Pastors do have a recognisable dress code in Africa: incredibly bad taste is the most salient feature. You can see them coming from the glare of their suiting fabrics and the ill taste of their ties. I quickly assured Harlene that, yes, I was aware of pastors – and hurriedly asked about her day. She was a kindly behemoth. Her gesture was well meant.

My breakfast table was shared with the Ugandan ‘translator’ again, whose name I unfortunately forgot to get. “Yes,” he agreed, “the people of the regions you’ve been passing through are quite different from the rest of Uganda. They are secretive and troublesome. The government has never really been able to control them. Bad stuff happens there, but they won’t tell. It’s why Kony had so much power there (the terrible, sadistic, quasi-religious leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a horrible episode in Ugandan history): they would never cooperate with the government. That’s why they don’t have many roads, the government makes them suffer first, to try to gain control. Independent people; they even wanted to be a separate country. They will say one thing to your face, but think something else…”

The translator was not a government supporter. Ironically, 30-odd years ago, the president, Museveni, came to power to calm the country and on a promise to stamp out corruption. Like so many African presidents, he started well, with respect. Now, the apparent life-president (what is it about power corrupting these Africans?), who has just bought his way to changing the constitution so that he could possibly remain in office until he dies, is considered one of the MOST corrupt, richest presidents in the history of Africa. “Ho, I was watching a documentary on television,” my companion said, “children in school were standing for election to various posts within the school. They showed them buying sweets for their fellow students to get their votes!” I wonder where they got that idea? Is there hope for African politics? From the president to schoolchildren; but what example do those children have? Each African looks at the person above him in the pecking order and thinks,’if my boss is corrupt, then I need to be too.’

*

Riding south, the scenery was handsome: upland, rolling mountainsides now becoming greener, with dairy farming and well spaced villages and towns. The road was excellent, sometimes quite new, sweeping through the hills attractively. Only the quality of the driving spoils the rides in Uganda, for these are the world’s most inconsiderate, uncaringly dangerous drivers, especially in their contempt for boda-bodas – for which, of course, I am often mistaken, despite my slightly extra speed.

Around one, baked by the overhead sun (I crossed the Equator again a few miles back up the road yesterday; so commonplace has it become that I didn’t even notice), and weary from three hours in the saddle, thankfully the wide single seat that Rico so kindly brought back from Congo for me, I stopped for tea…

The scrappy village, no more than two rows of untidy, decrepit, lock-up booths with sightless, steel shutter doors, was called Rwambondo, but could have been any one of the hundreds of such shabby habitations through which I have passed these past days. There was a very odd quality to my pause. Pulling aside a dirty net curtain that disguised the ‘hotel’ shack interior, several people looked up from their broken goat and matoke meals, fingers pausing for a moment in the stews in their plastic bowls. There was no immediate greeting, just a rather unsettling silence. I smiled broadly, but it didn’t elicit the happy smiles of other parts of this country. I am downgrading my observations of Ugandans being the friendliest Africans: SOME Ugandans are…

I asked for tea and took a ubiquitous Chinese plastic chair onto the space outside the door. I wanted to watch the world go by, not wrinkle my nose at the sour smell of tough goat meat. All the eaters and passers-by regarded me with little reaction. They greeted when I greeted, but little more. I reckon very few spoke much English, odd in a country that communicates amongst its varied tribes in English. It is the chief language for business, media, and government.

The smallest of women – she reached the middle of my chest – brought my tea in a large flask and a chipped mug. She kneeled respectfully, as is the old way before older men, and poured the tea. I attempted to make her smile. No reaction. People came and went as I sat for forty minutes drinking two mugs of ‘tea’ (warm milk really). Then, suddenly, from over my shoulder, a young man thrust a delicious chapati, freshly cooked at his stall a few feet away, into my hand. No word passed. It appeared that almost no one spoke English, or if they did, hadn’t the confidence to talk. Maybe they were just completely unused to seeing a mzungu up so close. Most pass on that road behind the closed windows of safari company vehicles, racing past in a flash; they don’t sit in the dust outside the locals’ eating place. Perhaps this is the reaction that would have been seen if a short, black Ugandan had walked into the Church House Inn 150 years ago? I felt no antipathy, just an unsettling lack of curiosity. In fact, that’s what I’ve missed these last four days in this part of Uganda. Africans are naturally curious, but not there.

But I am back amongst curious, smiling and warm-hearted Ugandans again, thank goodness, in this, probably the most beautiful district of the country. Kabale sits at about 2000 metres with high green mountains dissolving into the western horizon. It’s a fine ride, the last 40 kilometres, to get up here, on a broad, sweeping highway curling up into the hills. And the best is beyond! Last year I loved the road west from here so much that I rode it a total of five times. It’s the reason I returned.

*

I knew my way straight back to the White Horse Inn on its hill beside the golf course (!). As I rode through the gate, Ezra, the elderly gateman, instantly recognised me. When I rode into the yard last year, I took one look and decided the hotel was way out of my budget range, so I turned round and began to ride away. “Where are you going?” asked Ezra.

“Oh, I can’t afford to stay here!”

“But you haven’t asked yet…”

It made me laugh so much that I turned round and went in to the reception with my usual, ‘I probably can’t afford to stay here, but I won’t know if I don’t ask!’ line. I bargained a reduction from 102,000 Uganda shillings to 72,000 that time.

So, brazen as you like, I returned. Ezra laughed to see me again and I removed my utterly disgusting dust covered, faded jacket and approached reception. The manager of last year, a short, gentlemanly fellow called Sam, has retired and his replacement, a large, tall, confident woman, was standing my side of the desk. The receptionist, Jackson recognised me.

The new manager offered 85,000. I pointed out that her predecessor had asked 72,000. “Yes, that was last year!” she quipped, toughly amused. I negotiated as if I was buying mangoes in the market and got in for 80,000 shillings (£16). Since last year there’s been some maintenance and I have (the same) nice room with a vast bed and working hot water – plus all the rather civilised resources of a real hotel. The fire’s dying down in the grate – it’s mild out tonight – and I ate a very good curry for a change. There’s even a lily in a bowl on the table in my room. This is living! Haha. I love the contrasts: a goat-smelling roadside cafe, to supper served by a waiter in a tartan waistcoat.

DAY 82 FRIDAY 9th FEBRUARY 2017. KABALE, UGANDA

This is perhaps Uganda’s most beautiful corner, and what could be better than a gentle ride on a sunny day through the green mountains, on a fine road and with wonderful views? I don’t know how high the road climbs, but it must be considerable, since Kabale is at 2000 metres and the top of the road is considerably higher. The road itself is quite a piece of engineering, winding its way, starting 22 kilometres out of the town, up and up, then over and down to Kisoro, fifty miles away in the farthest corner of the country. It’s not much used, so relaxing to ride for a change.

Stopping to take a photo of Lake Bunyonyi far below, curled amongst the steep green slopes, I suddenly became aware that I was the focus of at least 100 schoolchildren on an embankment high above me, waving and gesticulating from the hill. It’s good to be back in the waving, greeting Uganda again, after the last days of dull reaction. Sadly, some of the children I pass – and quite a few of the adults – are unable to resist asking for money, as do so many in nearby Rwanda. Generally, in Kenya and Uganda, it’s not common, but as soon as I get into – or in this case – near to, the old French-influenced countries, it becomes endemic. Still, in Uganda many people are happy to see me for my own sake.

The semi-vertical landscape is intensely cultivated, the fields making an intricate patchwork pattern on the slopes. The hard work that is represented by these tiny patches is mind-boggling – and probably ancient. From the depths of the valleys to the peaks of the hillsides the tiny terraces and steeply sloping fields are productive. It’s obviously onion season, and various villages smelled strongly of small red onions, being harvested, packed in sacks and traded to middle men in nose-wrinkling lorry loads.

Way up at the top of the hills, the road passes for a few miles through a lovely protected forest, thick with tall trees and waving roadside bamboo trees. The green was so refreshing as I swept along in the high, clean air, the dust and dead landscapes of the past few days behind me. It’s luxuriant up there: deep greens and rustling growth. Then comes the Kanaba Gap, the top of the pass, where some earth and zinc shacks line the road, and men and women shovelled small onions into more sacks. Around the corner is an astonishing view of the high volcanoes where Uganda, Rwanda and Congo meet, towering above sun-bleached hills and valleys filled with shimmering zinc roofs and an endless confusion of tiny enclosures. I rode this way last year two or three times, but was never aware quite how imposing is Mount Muhayura, a giant shape on the horizon, towering up to 4127 metres (over 17,500 feet), a respectable mountain. Behind it are the other peaks of the range, one of them a classic volcano in profile. This time last year, the peaks must have been hidden by a bank of haze and cloud. Not so now.

It’s a magnificent ride, worth coming back to enjoy it again. I rode as far as the Congo border before turning round and starting back to Kabale. As I passed the end of the long, sinuous lake, I stopped where young men wash their boda-bodas and paid Moses a pound (good money) to wash the Mosquito, probably the cleanest it’s been for the whole time I have owned it. The usual conversation, that I have a hundred times, took place amongst a gathering group of young people as Moses threw lake water over the dusty bike and sloshed Omo suds about the place. They all want to go to America or England, where they will become instantly rich from the money trees. I try to impress upon them that we also have to work for our money; many people are poor, even beggars – and how much more serious it is to be in poverty in a place without extended families and with inclement conditions; of the loneliness of so many in nations that have to dwell indoors; of how a pint of beer costs me four times as much at home as it does in Uganda; of how we mzungus appear rich in this economy but may well struggle to make ends meet in our own. It probably falls on deaf ears…

“Oh, I want to find an English wife!” declared one young fellow, more articulate than the rest.

“Huh, my friend, you’d have a shock! She wouldn’t bear you eight children. You’d have to fetch your own water, wash the babies, carry your own firewood! She’d be independent! Equal! You couldn’t treat her the way you treat Ugandan women!”

I might as well save my breath about the population explosion here in Uganda. No one connects their poverty with the fact that half the country is aged under fifteen… African men leave you despairing of the future.

*

Meanwhile, an email just arrived from young Dennis in Ghana, to tell me his (rented) multiple-occupancy house burned to the ground early on Tuesday morning, taking every possession except their nightwear, in which they escaped. He, Emmanuella and Hezekiah, got out unharmed, although one occupant was killed in the blaze. Oh dear… Dennis does have difficult trials. Emmanuella is, unsurprisingly, traumatised; they’ve had to scurry, with nothing, to his parents’ home. Oh, what a tangled web. What a mess. And not a lot I can do (except the inevitable…) from Uganda… Oh dear. I await more news.

DAY 83 SATURDAY 10th FEBRUARY 2017. KABALE, UGANDA

It’s funny, but just when I begin to wonder (as inevitably sometimes happens) what I am doing riding aimlessly about Africa, and begin to consider that I should just face facts and accept the regularities and boredom of damp, dark, cold winter at home, because I am bored and need someone to talk to here – just as that despondency wears away at me, I have a wonderful ride full of delights; bright sun dazzles from African skies; warmth wraps itself around me and I decide not to face the reality of English winter after all!

Long journeys on your own are occasionally difficult. I have so many superficial conversations and spend most of the day on my own. I interact with waiters, hotel guests and people I pass on the road: answering the same questions day in, day out. But I can’t share the experience or my thoughts with anyone. Fortunately, I am generally content with my own company, but I do miss conversation with my peers and equals. The bike doesn’t help, for I don’t even meet other travellers as I would in buses and matatus. So sometimes it all gets a bit much. But then comes an experience that lifts my journey; an experience I would not miss; an experience that I will remember when I AM back in the tedium of everyday life on dull wet days in Harberton, (fitting lavatory seats as an odd job man!). After all, it can’t ALL be wonderful, entertaining and diverting. Life isn’t like that.

A ride through part if the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest saved the day. It’s a World Heritage Site and absolutely magnificent. So fine that when a couple of safari vehicles passed I felt sorry for the mzungus sitting watching all that glory and natural majesty through the dusty rear windows of a Land Cruiser. I was IN it, the smells, the air, the sun – even the dust they threw up as they passed. I could stop at will to gaze into the luxurious green depths beside the well maintained gravel track, cut dramatically from the steepest mountainsides; I could stop and listen to the wind in the high, lush profusion about me; I could stand and stare into the distance – while they drove by, enclosed, at the whim of their driver, detached and remote. Birds of exquisite coloured plumage flitted about on the warm breeze; a few monkeys scampered away, white tails flicking; butterflies floated and danced in the warm air. It was one of the best rides in East Africa.

Bwindi Impenetrable Forest is famous for being the last home of the great African gorillas, a species close to man, but almost extinct; made famous by the late Diane Fossey and ‘Gorillas in the Mist’. They only survive in these mountains that spread over the meeting place of Uganda, Rwanda and Congo – and only in small, remote groups far from the easily accessible corner in which I was riding. They have retreated to the far depths of the forest – and become a HUGE money-spinner for the governments of the three countries. It’s difficult to book visits to the gorilla families and costs are about £450 to £600 for the half day trip, to get up close to the gorillas, habituated to visits from inquisitive humans. Tourist numbers are sensibly limited so costs rise. Well, I’m not going to visit gorillas – or pigmies: I don’t really like the falseness of such cultural voyeurism. You aren’t seeing NATURAL Batwa people any more than you are really seeing the gorillas in a natural state, not if they are visited every day by a dozen humans… I suppose the money does help them to be protected from inevitable poachers and without it, there would be no more mountain gorillas.

Ten miles off the tar road; the lovely one over to Kisoro that I have taken so many times, through small villages and heavily cultivated slopes and wide views to the distance-hazed hills, I bumped up to a National Park gate and assumed that I would have to turn round or pay a large fee. But no, said Edson, the guard, all I needed was to sign his book, for this was a public road that went through this section of the park towards the higher park where live the gorillas. I was welcome to ride through and return, or to go on and return by a long route across the high hills. It was already lunchtime, so I opted to ride through to a small village on the other side, another eight miles on, and return. What a great ride! The day became memorable.

*

The White Horse Inn (what a colonial joke!) is peaceful, not to say silent. Tonight – Saturday – I appear to be just about the only guest in the old place, built in 1927. It is surrounded by an acre or two of clipped lawns, colourful flower beds and tidy pathways. I spotted a fellow pushing a hand-mower this morning… Lillian, the manager with whom I bargained, is just about polite to me, but the rest of the uniformed, well trained staff are cheerful and welcoming in their Scottish plaid waistcoats and bow ties! Haha! White Horse Inn, indeed!

DAY 84 SUNDAY 11th FEBRUARY 2017. KABALE, UGANDA

I’m so glad I came back to Kabale. I hadn’t seen the best of the area at all, merely a taste of its delights in the three days I spent here last February. Today has been magnificent, another great ride.

In Nairobi I was able to buy a decent map of Uganda. I’d have liked a larger scale, but have to make do with this one, with its tantalising wriggles of thin red ink that denote some of the country tracks. In fact, the one I took today is marked as a road but is one of the least road-like of all the trails I have ridden these past weeks. Often, it seemed little more than a sinuous path scratched along the mountainsides with dramatic plunging slopes to the side. On the map, it follows the border between Uganda and Rwanda for much of the way, and frequently I was looking across the deep valleys at the hilltops that define the border. Fortunately, I took the road in an anticlockwise direction; if I’d started off on the appalling bouncy, slippery dust of the last seven or eight miles, I might well have turned back – and missed the wonders I saw in the middle part of my trail ride.

I set off on these rides nervously. I have no idea what I am going to face; how the conditions will be, how hard it will be, whether my Mosquito will hold up until I get back to ‘civilisation’… And I am on my own, far from help. But of course, I am by now in fairly confident control of my little bike, which has turned out to be just perfect for the sort of hard trail I followed today, and I’ve been doing all this long enough to know that the best rewards often come when I am most anxious at the outset.

Just past the end of the lake, where the boda-boda washing boys waved excitedly as I passed and Moses chucked buckets of lake water over the cab of a lorry he was washing, I turned left through a scruffy village centre and headed onto a dirt lane that twisted and turned around the intricate hillsides. The lake is contorted, with many inlets and arms, and my track had to wind its way past them all. Slowly I climbed the hillsides, people waving and calling excitedly as I rode. I don’t think, from the reactions, that many mzungus come this way at all. Faces split in welcoming smiles, old ladies waved, children shouted and people hidden way up and down the hillsides were aware that a stranger was passing. I become a celebrity on such a day, the smile spread over my own face as I bounce and shudder over the track, through tiny villages and past endless shambas. On Sunday, there are people everywhere, dressed in their best, walking the paths from church – for there are churches of every crazy denomination in even the tiniest of hamlets. Glimpses of the lake could be caught, increasingly far below, amongst the convoluted hillsides. The views were large and the slopes intricately patterned with tiny fields. My road climbed and curled upwards, until at last I turned my back on the lake, breasted the ridge and saw a long, deep valley beneath me, the other side presumably Rwanda. Every acre of the valleys was cultivated in complex patterns. Pale paths twisted between the fields, up and down the steepness, between homesteads; people everywhere – smiling and waving.

Remarkably few people asked for money; almost everyone was just pleased, and a bit astonished, to see a muzungu riding his piki-piki through their isolated villages. I fell to thinking about the automatic importuning of some of the lesser-educated people I travel amongst. I suppose that many Africans’ exposure to white men is to those who indeed bring and disseminate aid, so my skin colour becomes a symbol of gifts and alms. And what do you lose by making that irritating palm-up greeting to a passing white man? His respect? Big deal… He may throw you a coin. The French do! I shall have to get used to that greeting in Rwanda again. I shall try to understand that it’s the way white men are seen in countries that have received so much aid in the past – although Rwanda is now one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, but probably little of that wealth trickles down to the peasants who will beg endlessly from me next week…

*

I dislike the concept of what I call cultural voyeurism – I mean, it would be in pretty bad taste to go and look at a community of people with only one leg, or everyone in wheelchairs, say. So what’s the difference in showing up in an expensive safari vehicle to look at very small people for twenty minutes, who then perform a pastiche of their traditional dances in order to make some money? But I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t admit to a deep curiosity to meet some Batwa (pigmy) people. Imagine, then, my excitement when I passed through a whole village of them, waving at me as I passed! This was how I had imagined, and hoped, to see them – just chance on my journey somewhere, and here they were, on this very remote country track at the back of beyond: the perfect way to find them. Ugandans themselves are pretty small, often I tower above them, but the Batwa are extremely small, probably no more than 4’6, just small people, looking just like everyone else, but smaller. I was, I admit, thrilled. All I could do, of course, was wave and smile and ride on by – stopping to gawp being against my principles! But it made my day – an already pretty good one.

Putting two and two together – I’d seen a sign, ‘Batwa Resettlement Project’ a mile back up the road – these people represented a perfect challenge, and had been removed from their indigenous forest homes and ‘modernised’ by teaching them 2000 year old myths of the White Man’s God to replace the probably much more ecologically sound beliefs of their own forest gods. These Batwa were not dressed in the barks and skins of the forests but in rather small Sunday Best like everyone else, probably on their way home from church…

*

Catching the eye of a fellow sitting with his small child on a motorbike at a dusty Y junction in remote village, I stopped, initially just to ask which of the two forks would eventually bring me to Gatuna, my destination where the tar road started again. We began a conversation, so I paused. The right fork went to an informal border crossing into Rwanda half a mile away, Valentine said, the left one was for me. He is a teacher in a Rwandan school, there being so little employment in Uganda for educated people. Soon a crowd gathered around us, and everyone wanted to ask the mzungu (all the usual) questions. (“Are you catholic or protestant?” Then, sensing a pause as I bit back the retort, ‘does it matter?’ “…or heathen?” My tacit smile opted for the latter.) I decided to stop and get a mug of tea to settle some of the dust. The crowd came with me to a roadside bench and a woman brought a flask of tea and an old plastic mug. It was the most lovely hour of my journey today. I love this sort of interaction. I am amongst friendly, enquiring folk, whose exposure to mzungus is small, but whose eager curiosity is large. It’s a privilege to be received so openly, in complete safety and respect. It’s pretty much why I am here. Another gold star for my day. One young man was articulate and urbane, above the others, but he is no more than a boda-boda rider. Sandy Alex was educated through senior high school. “But there’s no work, so I’m a boda-boda rider!” No compliant, just a fact. The straggling village was called Kagogo, and I left with many invitations to return, and all the usual offers of marriage!

My map gave the distance from tar road to tar road as 53 kilometres (33 miles) but it turned out to be 65 kilometres (41 miles) of very hard riding. Tonight I am weary but deeply satisfied. Back on the tar road – finally: I had begun to think it would never come on those last awful miles – I found myself actually inside the restricted area of immigration and customs at the Uganda/ Rwanda border. Explaining that I had come from Muko, far away at the other end if Lake Bunyonyi, rather to everyone’s surprise, I set off back to Kabale, just fifteen more miles away.

In the last two miles I got soaked to the skin! Without any warning, I found myself riding into town in the midst of a sudden thunderstorm, high winds and scything rain. With a mile to go to the White Horse Inn, there was nothing for it but to carry on and warm up under the shower. It washed the deep white dust off the Mosquito and pushed the deep white dust even further into my filthy jacket and trousers. At the end of my journey last year, Scovia kindly volunteered to wash my riding jacket. She told me later that it took eight changes of water to remove the dust.

It’s been another great day. The best of these travels is just to go out and see what occurs, without plan or expectation.

 

 

DAY 70 SUNDAY 28th JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

My journeys have taken on a very different form to the old days, when I raced from one place to another, always on the move, urgent to see as much as I could while I could, with the little money I had. Now, on the recent African journeys, southern and eastern, I have had ‘bases’ from which to start; places I could leave my extra luggage; places to relax with warm friends; places to leave my motorbikes when I went away. It makes these journeys satisfying, more in depth – and a lot more relaxed. This safari seems to be going in short bursts: journeys out from Kitale, so far. From here, I guess I will take a longer trip away from base, starting on Tuesday…

*

We spent Sunday quietly, before going to a place in town in the afternoon, with Cor, Rico’s old friend and other Dutch neighbour. There, as we downed a few beers in the warm afternoon, the staff barbecued two whole ribs of excellent lamb, served with delicious crispy baked potatoes – our Sunday meal. “You do really well for a vegetarian, Jonathan!” joked Rico, as I tucked in. I must admit, though, that I will be glad to get away from all the meat meals in Africa. It makes for such heavy eating and I look forwards to eight months of being basically veggie again.

This is also my time to wash and repair clothes, maintain the Mosquito and, really, just enjoy my old friend Rico’s company, here in the cheerful family atmosphere. Old friendships, with people who share values and stories, are times to be enjoyed, even if you have to travel half the world to keep them live – maybe especially when you have to travel so far!

DAY 71 MONDAY 29th JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

A quiet day not achieving much. We wanted to fix the Mosquito headlight, which has very loose connections (Chinese made…) but were scuppered by the power being off for most of the day. It wasn’t until we found that the neighbours were all enjoying power that Rico found a loose wire in the incoming supply to the fuse box. Kenya Power is known for pretty shoddy workmanship! By then it was too late: we had our beers in hand. The light will wait until the morning, before I set off for Uganda. Still, other small maintenance did get done ready for the next part of my East African safari…

DAY 72 TUESDAY 30th JANUARY 2017. SIPI, UGANDA

Back to waving Uganda. I was going to take the more southerly route around the south of Mount Elgon, but decided at the last minute to come by the appalling Suam River border as before. It’s a good deal shorter, and the remote southerly route is quite difficult to find, although the tracks aren’t so punishing. So I arrived at Sipi absolutely exhausted! Either the road is getting far worse or I am getting older. Since I am resolutely still 38, it can’t be the latter, so I reckon the road IS getting even more punishing. It’s just about the hardest exercise I know, these five hours bucketing and bouncing, balancing and fighting the Mosquito’s desire to lie down flat at every new obstacle: every yard or two. It really does use every muscle, plus a lot of concentration and a resistance to be diverted by excited children, waving old ladies and thumbs-upping young men. Only 21 non-local vehicles have registered at Suam border this year (you may recollect, I was the fourth on January 9th, and I read only African names today), so a mzungu dancing about on the rocks, ruts and shambles of their unfrequented track in a thick pother of dirt, causes a lot of animation in the dust-covered shack villages through which the diabolical trail passes. It’s hard, but it’s satisfying too, especially when I reach the end of the ride and can metaphorically pat myself on the back – there being no energy left to waste in trying to do so physically!

The ride sort of splits into four quarters: the first, from Kitale to Suam is initially tarred, then a reasonably passable red hard earth road to the border; some bumps and potholes, and broken here and there. A few miles after the border, begins the section that makes all the effort worthwhile, for here I climb through the mountain ridges of lower Mount Elgon, up a serpentine, rocky hill and through a few villages and, early on, the only town en route, Bukwo. It is the scenes off to my right that are so wonderful, and today especially so for the clouding veil had dissipated a bit and I could see for tens of miles down into the great plains of central Uganda, dotted with giant volcanic pimples, washing away into a blue haze of distance. It’s just lovely, between banana fronds, past conical thatch dwellings. It’s difficult to keep my eyes on the ‘road’ here, often a shelf carved from the mountainside.

Then comes the forest section – the worst for dust and danger of falling, for the track climbs amongst graceful, tall trees, the road becoming deep with red dust that slithers and slides beneath my wheels. Ruts and rocks are disguised and it’s vile going, up and down some steep, slippery hills in drifts of fine dust.

By now of course, I am blathered in dust, a huge trail billowing behind. I am in that cloud, and whenever I pass any other vehicle, from boda-boda to panting lorry, I am engrossed in dust. Almost no one but me has eye protection as they ride, and eye and respiratory problems are a major concern in African older age. Imagine too, living alongside these tracks, daily breathing in this dense, lung and eye-clogging filth, as many do, all their rather short lives.

The final section is more densely populated and a little faster, but it also has the longest, most broken dust slide hills, dangerous now that I am so physically tired, with more traffic and bigger consequent clouds. At last, after sixty ghastly – but often beautiful – miles, I reach Kapchorwa and blessed tarmac. I can forgive the sandy potholes from here on; I need just a few inches of continuous surface. Now, as I head for the first ATM in this part of the country, where the security
guards laugh at my condition, I can untense muscles and enjoy the last ten miles to what I know will be the warmest welcome.

*

I’d texted Alex from Suam: ‘your mzungu is approaching Coffeeland sometime this afternoon’, so Precious had prepared the old thatch hut for my arrival. Precious’s creative skills with some simple fabric is worthy of great hotels, not a run down, shoe-string rural Ugandan guest house. It was charming, the preparations she had made. She had hung lengths of Nottingham lace to cover the broken bamboo lining of the walls (perhaps the only situation in which I can find the revolting stuff acceptable!) and made the bed look luxurious (if unironed) by folding colourful towels into rosettes and putting bright yellow flowers in their centres and around the bed! A couple of mats disguised the crumbling cement of the floor. These young people deserve so much, and struggle for everything. I transferred Alex £100 two weeks ago, which will build about one third of the first ‘traditional’ round thatched house (‘banda’, here) for the renovation of his ‘resort’. I am so impressed: he has already bought the majority of the materials and instructed a local builder in what he wants in his design. “The grass for the roof will arrive tomorrow. I went to that village where you went to the funeral and looked at the houses you saw, and I took your picture of the round house in Lesotho that we like, and I said to the builder, ‘I want like this…’. I went there to buy plants with your money too.” For I had suggested that we mzungus like to see a well kept compound with colourful shrubs and flowers. “I just have to buy a toilet. I am going to make the house self-contained, just like I told you!” He has determination, drive, ambition and imagination, and an amusing, supportive wife with her own hospitality skills.

My welcome was warm and generous and supper customarily over-sized and well cooked and presented. “Oh,” says Alex proudly, “I tell people now I even have a family member in Europe!”

“Yes, you are our firstborn!” jokes 22 year old Precious, laughing.

More like their bloody great grandfather, the way I am feeling by now! It’s high time for bed; every bit of me is aching and it’s difficult to keep awake.

DAY 73 WEDNESDAY 31st JANUARY 2017. SIPI, UGANDA

A quiet day was called for after yesterday’s extreme exertions. I didn’t even get up until almost nine – eleven and a half hours in bed! Considering that most of Africa rises at dawn or before, this was like mid-morning.

Sadly, these days Alex has to spend most of his time at work in the hotel in Kapchorwa; he is my best guide to this area. Precious is herself an incomer, so the walk we took was shorter and less congenial for characters met along the way. She does her best to entertain me though, this warm-hearted young woman.

Talking this evening with a local girl, intelligent and pretty 18 year old Sumaiya, she was full of questions about life in Europe. I’m often the focus of groups of children and young people like this. The subject of family size is often raised. “How many brothers and sisters do you have, Sumaiya?” I asked. She smiled. “Oh, my father he has three wives. With my mother, the first, he has three girls and a boy; with the next one two boys and a girl; and with the third one, there are three more at the moment!”

“Wow!” I exclaimed? “Ten!”

“Oh, and there are the ones outside too..!”

And there you have the African problem in a nutshell. While competitive male virility continues to cause so much suffering to the women of this continent and the rest of us, there is no hope for change. There are already too many of us on board this planet. I fear we are doomed as a species through our own (male) selfishness and pride, and it’s too late. African travelling does not give you a good view of the future for mankind’s survival beyond the next few – increasingly troubled – centuries.

*

I found out a good deal more about Alex’s invidious position in relation to the ownership of this resort. It’s the usual story, so common in Africa, of family jealousy. His grandfather, who liked Alex better than most of his own sons, gave Alex a share in this resort, in partnership with one of the sons.

“They are interested in money only! They come and say, ‘Alex, we want money!’, and I say I DON’T have money! Look at the resort!” They live in Canada and want Alex to do all the work while they take a lion’s share of the income. If he could buy them out, he might have a chance, but land is all important in Africa, and they will have an inflated value for this clifftop, despite the fact it is worth nothing for farming and worth little without investment as a resort. Sadly, Alex hasn’t any trust in them honouring his grandfather’s wishes; he has never seen the gift of ownership document with his own eyes, although verbal witnesses exist. “But here in Uganda everything is corruption: they can just go to the courts and pay. I can’t beat them; I haven’t any money to fight them. The lawyer who has the document is one of their friends…”

So Alex’s choice is to develop a parallel resort on his own land a quarter of a mile away. But that doesn’t have the million dollar sunset view. He will have to rely on his own hospitality skills to make it pay. Maybe he will; maybe he’ll continue to struggle. It’s a shame to see such enterprise and decency thwarted by corrupt, jealous relatives – but not uncommon.

*

Tonight there was a so-called ‘super moon’, combined with a couple of other lunar features not witnessed since 1866. Certainly, the moon rose large and well defined. This was quite a place to watch the full, extra bright moon.

DAY 74 THURSDAY 1st FEBRUARY 2017. SOROTI, UGANDA

The temperature has risen! It’s much hotter on the vast central plain of Uganda after the time I have spent at higher altitudes. I am in Soroti, a not unattractive town heading to the middle of Uganda. I am making a loop through the centre of the country: up north is still inadvisable by its proximity to Southern Sudan and its tendency to tribal upheaval.

My ride was not very scenically interesting once I descended from the slopes of Mount Elgon, curving down for forty miles from Sipi after I said goodbye to Precious and Alex, complete with a promise to return. I shall try.

The views are fine as you wind down the foothills towards the heat haze-shrouded plains; the road’s good now too, all but a few kilometres completed since last year, when I rode miles and miles round heaps of stones on a slippery gravel base. But on my Mosquito, I see Africa at 40mph most of the time; in Uganda watching behind as much as in front. In this country I trust NO driver at all! Once on the plain, though still well over 3000 feet above sea level – but the sea now several hundred miles away – the road becomes flat, wandering through hot bush lands and small strip villages and towns – one of them very bizarrely named ‘Television’. There’s plenty of cultivation – sweet potatoes seem to be popular to judge by the women sitting at the roadside behind piled displays – and the Ugandan population growth ensures that there is little virgin countryside at all outside nationally protected parks and reserves. As the day progressed – I only rode 100 miles today – the scenery became even flatter and I began to cross the huge swampy central lands, reeds and shallow lakes, all of which feed into the Nile, closing in on the road.

*

Sometimes I ride along and slip into reverie (while keeping attention on the mirror and road ahead, I hasten to add; not a moment’s slip of concentration here, in Africa’s worst driving standards!). I fell to wondering… Just what would it be like to be born to this life? To sit at the roadside in searing heat hoping to sell fifty penn’orth of sweet potatoes to support your (average) eight children; to walk mile upon mile with a pile of folded fabric on your head, hoping to sell a couple of yards to a poverty-stricken rural Ugandan; to wait endlessly with your boda-boda, hoping to a find a 20 pence fare; to hoe a field by hand and water the crops from a distant puddle; born to live – and give birth to eight children – in a thatch-covered mud oven, to tend a few goats, a patch of maize, cassava and some matoke; to live in a country riddled from top to bottom by corruption, where your every aspiration is denied? Not to have – even know of – books, music, opera; the freedom to ride motorbikes around foreign lands; not to be able to wander to the Church House Inn for some (usually) civilised conversation; not to have all the facets of culture that make life intriguing? Just to stand and stare, day after day, into the heat on an African mountain; to sit at a roadside watching your cow; to become a security guard standing day after day at the same post outside a business with so little to do; to be an askari, watching through the night, staring at nothing; to be at the beck and call of another, fetching water, weeding fields, carrying firewood up mountainsides; to sit your life at a sewing machine by a city street; to beg for alms; to be frequently hungry; to live with regimes that periodically erupt and enable arbitrary killing sprees of tens of thousands; to ride those dangerous matatus to get where you are going; to sleep on the beaten ground; well, you must understand my thoughts… What would it be like? Here I am, stimulated and fascinated – but able to go home to comfortable Harberton where I can turn a tap and drinkable water comes out, flick a switch and I have light, throw my clothes in a washing machine and I don’t have to go to the river or carry water. Is it just enough to ‘know no better, to know nothing else’? I offer no answers; but sometimes it’s worth asking the question, just to realise how privileged I am, how comfortable and how stimulated the lives we live…

*

Soroti has a mild charm, improved now that I have found a restaurant that can make me a coconut chicken curry instead of the bloody tough old goat and rice that was all the guest house could offer. I am sitting at a balcony on a modern building above the hectic main street, with petrol tankers lumbering by amongst the fleas of small motorbikes. It has, or had, pre Idi Amin, a reasonably strong Asian community. There are a few Hindu and Sikh temples, looking the worse for wear, but on a wander along the length of the arcaded main street, I spotted only two Asian faces. The power-crazed Idi Amin expelled all the 70,000 Asians, the bedrock of Ugandan economy, in 1972, giving them 90 days to get out of the country, nationalising all their assets and confiscating a thousand million US dollars worth of their property. Of course, it backfired: he squandered it on military toys and high living. Then he nationalised and stole about half that value of British investments in tea plantations and the like; that too was wasted effort and inflation hit eye-watering 1000% levels as the Ugandan currency became basket-case. Years later, post Amin, many Asians were encouraged to return, and their property restored where possible, and the economy briefly boomed again, but not many seem to have percolated back to Soroti. This was just one of those phases of Ugandan history that people had to live through. Intellectuals, leaders, military officers and anyone even thought to be possibly subversive to the unhinged dictator were mercilessly tortured and slaughtered. Yet now, fifty years on, there is no reminder of the horrors: just friendly, cheerful people whose memory seems short and anger overcome. I suppose that in a county that has 50% of its population under 15 years, and in which only 2% live to be my age, memory is – literally – short, and history soon wiped clean. Africans live in the moment; they don’t look forward – or back. History is just something that happened; usually to other people.

But Soroti has a few colonial buildings along the colourful main street, with the services of a medium sized town. How, though, can any business make money selling mobile phones and their endless accessories in a town where there are perhaps forty phone shops in the one main street, even in one of these phone-obsessed East Africa countries? I’m sure the ‘phone clutch’ will become a physiological trait in due course, for at least half the people walking the pavements (yes, Soroti has pavements!) is clutching a phone in their palm, thumb curled protectively if, that is, they don’t have it clapped to their ear – even as they ride their motorbikes.

A distinctive volcanic plug of bare rock rises on the edge of town, visible from miles away. It appears to hold the water tanks for the town’s supply. Off the main street, with its bustle and colour, the side streets soon deteriorate into dust, but then meander quite attractively amongst trees and shrubby suburbs. It’s not a bad town at all, despite the thousands and thousands – and I do not exaggerate – of smelly, whirring boda-bodas, for these are the way that so many Ugandans can scratch a meagre living. When I say thousands, I REALLY don’t exaggerate! Every corner, every junction, every destination, every shop, virtually, has men standing outside with their small Chinese motorbikes hoping for that twenty pence fare. There are bicycle taxis too in Soroti, a padded, often fringed, seat on the carrier of old upright bicycles, on which the womenfolk ride side-saddle. Where people walked (and I still do!) half a mile for supper, the staff at my guest house were aghast at the very idea. I suppose they don’t comprehend that I sat all day on a motorbike – and have little faith in the boda-boda boys’ safety anyway! On the whole, my own two feet are preferable, so long as I avoid the gutters and many pitfalls of a dark Uganda street…

*

By riding round and round (I often clock up several kilometres on this task) I found a half-decent hotel off the main street, where a room with a bathroom and a small balcony – I do like to have a view of some sort – on the first floor, costs a non budget-breaking £7.50! My Mosquito can reside in the internal yard safely and the extravagance of £7.50 includes breakfast! What I get in USA in those faceless chain hotels is really little more than this: and they cost £100 upwards… Actually, it’s difficult to think what I DO get that’s better than this: I loathe the air conditioning and have it turned off; I hate the TV and never turn it on (in fact, there’s a TV in my room tonight); I throw all those ridiculous seventeen pillows into a corner; I despise the exploitation of the Hispanic staff and greet them in Spanish; I don’t need a towel for every different part of my anatomy… In fact, I reckon the People’s Guest House in Soroti is just as acceptable as any horrid, snob-named Hampton Inn, Fairfield Suite or Hilton Inn I ever stayed in in USA!

And after that peroration on my privileged status just now: my curry on a street-side balcony, watching the Soroti world go by – frenetically – from above, cost me £3.95 – and that INCLUDED a bottle of beer. Few Ugandan’s can afford such ‘luxury’. Life isn’t fair. These are such decent, generous, friendly people around me – yet they cannot have a fraction of what I have. It makes you think…

DAY  75 FRIDAY 2nd FEBRUARY 2017. KARUMA, UGANDA

Today’s was a tedious, sweaty ride. I am two and a quarter degrees north of the Equator, and the sun as I ride beats down directly on my helmet and neck and the back of my jacket. It can be unbearably hot when I stop moving. There’s no shade: the Uganda Roads Authority administers a strip about twenty feet deep at each side of the road and no development encroaches, not even trees. All there is to do is to count down the kilometres and if I didn’t know that in a few days I will reach much more interesting areas, including Africa’s highest range of mountains, I would be dispirited.

The scenery of central Uganda is flat. It is hot and dry – bushland as far as I can see, with mangoes and acacias, and miles of tall dead grasses, dotted with small habitations of round mud and thatch houses, where the people grow their staples, maize and cassava. Lying away to the south are expansive lakes and swamps; sometimes I pass impressive signs identifying rivers that just do not exist at this season, a muddy puddle limited by the raised road the only evidence. The road is new and in good condition much of the way, carving through the countryside and bypassing several of the smaller towns. There’s light traffic, mainly matatus and numerous Kenyan registered petrol tankers hammering back to Mombassa, hundreds of long miles away – a constant shuttle to bring fuel to the continent’s interior.

Somewhere along the way, shortly after the straggling, ugly town of Lira, I spotted a sign for a coffee shop. It’s the first one since north of Mount Kenya a couple of weeks ago. Run by some religious orphanage institution, half an hour of Jesus music was forgivable for the pleasure of a strong latte and a cinnamon bun! A pair of German tourists were driving all the way from Sipi to my tomorrow’s destination in one day.

*

Sniffing and sneezing, nose water-falling, as my – obviously weak – nasal tubes try again to adjust to a new climate, as they do in Ghana and every time I reenter these humid, hot as hell climates, I pounded on and on. I had decided on Karuma as a sensible destination for tonight: a 200 kilometre run in this heat is quite enough.

It’s always a little thrilling to pass great landmarks. I am now a mile from a bridge across the mighty Nile: a bridge that crosses the Karuma Falls, white water tumbling and rushing down a series of rapids as the, here, Victoria Nile, heads towards Lake Edward and on into the Albert Nile that becomes the White Nile, on its way to feed the Mediterranean, far far to the north.

*

Finding somewhere to sleep wasn’t so easy tonight. I am now on a main thoroughfare from Kampala to the north, and approaching the biggest national park, at Murchison Falls. I’m on a tourist circuit for a day or two, with prices rising and fewer hotels. Tonight finds me in a new hotel and a room more than twice as expensive as last night’s: a mighty £16.25 – £1.25 above budget! Oh well, it includes breakfast and is a half-decent place.

Last night, in that room in Soroti, I was HOT! “Oh, it will get cold in the night, though!” declared Clare, the round, friendly receptionist. There was even a centimetre-thick synthetic Chinese blanket, wild with roses, spread on the bed for the eventuality. Around dawn, I did need to pull the cotton sheet over my naked, sweating body; that’s how ‘cold’ it got, and this with the balcony door open to try to temper the furnace heat. Somehow, it’s cooler here tonight. I wonder why, for I am at about the same 3500 foot altitude. Maybe the huge expanse of the Murchison Falls National Park to the west tempers the heat a bit? Sitting writing by the hotel, a beer by my iPad, the temperature is just right, especially when I consider that this is early February, the dingiest time to be at home in Devon!

DAY 76 SATURDAY 3rd FEBRUARY 2017. PAKWACH, UGANDA

The beginning of the Albert Nile is bridged at the entrance to Pakwach, a steaming hot town most of the way across Uganda to the west, 70 miles or so from Maruma, this morning. The town lies at the head of Lake Albert, and my reason for coming is that the Murchison Falls National Park, the largest in the country, spreads in a vast area to the south, bordered on the west by the lake, across which is Congo. I can ride through this park on my motorbike, an unusual concession that I thought I should use. But the irony is that I have seen many more elephants and various antelopes and strange huge birds outside the park than inside, after I paid my expensive £32 entry fee – that lasts for 24 hours. And, my goodness, elephants are big when you pass twenty yards away on a chugging little blue motorbike. Big and very ragged and tattered. It’s always a thrill, even though I have so little interest in big game animals, to be close to such giant, ponderous old animals. At one point today, a pair of them, enjoying the shade of a thorn tree, effectively blocked off access to the park gate. On the Mosquito I was able to take a very rough bypass!

Murchison Falls Park is probably Uganda’s number one attraction and I have seen more muzungus today than I have since November. But all accommodation in the park (all of it, even the most meagre, probably way exceeding my budget anyway) is full. It’s a weekend in high season. Some of these lodges charge in the hundreds of pounds a night. I was quoted $50 for a simple hut the other side of the park over the phone. I always distrust places that quote me in dollars or euros… Instead, I turned about and rode back across the nearby river to Pakwach and found a very decent, quiet single bungalow room for £15. I dropped my bags and returned to the park gate, paid my fees and rode into the park. I have until 2.00pm tomorrow to get out again. I rode the dusty track 15 kilometres to the ferry crossing across the Victoria Nile and found that you don’t spot much from a piki-piki, even if you ARE allowed to ride through game parks: watching the sandy, slippery track takes most of my concentration. I saw a lot more antelopes, the smallest ones not even rising from the side of the track as I passed; a few ugly warthogs and I did see a giraffe, which always pleases me. At the Nile, a herd of elephants grazed 100 yards away by the water. Tomorrow morning I will return and cross on the ferry, hope to ride up to see Murchison Falls, and exit the park before 2.00pm, when another £32 comes due.

My enemy today was the heat – and lack of sleep. I described last night’s hotel as ‘half-decent’. Sadly, I was wrong! It was incredibly hot, with no fan: “Oh, we are going to put them!” Fine, then don’t charge those rates until you do. It was incredibly noisy, the base thump of the Friday bar, playing to almost no one, permeating my ear plugs, and later the rant of some TV pastor taking over in the early hours. The cook took hours to get my meal ready and I ate too late. I got irritable – and then, through the night, I suffered an odd episode of vertigo, my head spinning sickeningly at the slightest movement. Perhaps all the activity in my struggling nasal areas had affected my inner ear? It’s a horrible affliction I’ve only suffered once before. The result was a lacklustre day and feeling wiped out as I write tonight. It’s been at least 37-40 degrees today, with the humidity high from the proximity of these lakes and Niles. In helmet, jacket, boots, gloves – protective gear that I won’t ride without – it’s not far from unbearable with this humidity, worse than that 50 degree ride in the Namibian desert. It’s not often I take a cold shower, but I did this evening! It didn’t last… I could do with another before bed. And bed tonight is going to be about 8.15! I’m wiped out and have a long day ahead. Over and out for today.

DAY 77 SUNDAY 4th FEBRUARY 2017. MASINDI, UGANDA

A most enjoyable day. Again. I rode right through the country’s biggest national park and saw the very impressive Murchison Falls: the ride was worth it for that alone, for here, in what’s said to be the most dramatic thing that happens to the Nile in its 4258 mile journey, almost the entire river – and this is the Victoria Nile that flows out of the enormous inland sea of Lake Victoria, is poured through a crack in the rocks said by some sources to be six metres wide, and at the most extravagant source, only eight metres wide. It plunges 45 metres in a wonderful, rain-bowed maelstrom, surging and frothing into the wide, forest-fringed river below for its short journey to Lake Albert. It’s quite a sight!

There are thousands of elephants, giraffes and other big game in Murchison, but the closest I came, apart from several dozen antelopes of different varieties, a few ugly warthogs and some fine birds, was when I stopped to look at a vast bird standing perhaps five feet high in a small waterhole by the track. The closest I came, I say, and perhaps the closest I want to come in this circumstance, was that as I put out my leg to lower the side stand, I automatically glanced at the soft edge of the track where the stand would lean. I was putting my foot right down into a line of distinct lion tracks! It did add a gloss of excitement to my day, to know that within the few hours before I stood there, a fully grown lion had passed this way, right where I stood. That’s a thrill. There are quite a lot of lions, leopards and other exciting species here in Murchison. I saw a whole lot of termite mounds masquerading as distant elephants, three buffalo – known as the widow-makers in Africa; one of the most deadly species that kill about 200 humans a year. There’s always that buzz of knowing those animals are there, though, even if I can’t see them from my buzzing motorbike; they are hidden and perhaps watching me…

*

My night was ghastly! Mosquitoes, that I didn’t know were INSIDE the net, ate me alive as I sweated into the pillow. At two, I even got up and took a cold shower to ease the itching, still not realising – until about five, when I made a sweep of the inside of the net and managed the last couple of hours in more comfort. So I was weary again when I got up early. I had decided that I should forego a couple of hours of sleep and make the best use of my expensive park fees. I was at the park gate at 8.15 and rode to catch the nine o’clock pontoon ferry across the Nile to the southern park.

Perched on the rear loading ramp of the yellow pontoon, with half a dozen 4 wheel drive safari vehicles taking the rest of the space, the Mosquito and I were chugged across in a few minutes. Here, where the Victoria Nile opens into Lake Albert, the crossing is only four or five hundred yards. I was soon up the other dusty roads and rolling southwards through the empty bush. It’s a relief, I discovered, to get away from people and homes, shambas and scruffy business shacks for a hundred miles. Here there is only nature, a bit managed, of course, but natural. Baboons lolloped away in their astonishing ugliness, bums looking like appalling injuries, and birds flitted through the dry trees, with the woodland kingfishers making me gasp at the fantastic blue of their plumage – brighter by far than the most dazzling gas flame, with red beaks to boot. Here and there fresh, delicate pink blossom covered trees, a delightful contrast to the dullness of the dry landscape.

I turned north again onto a lesser track for twelve kilometres to the top of the falls, weaving its way through thick bush. As often in Africa, I enjoyed the scarcity of warning signs and organisation: no more than a knee high metal rail to keep me (or trip me?) from plunging into instant wet oblivion. It’s certainly an impressive sight, the world’s longest river compressed into a twenty foot cleft.

*

My park pass lasted until 2.00, so I headed south again on the rolling gravel road. For these few days I will be away from tarmac for several hundred miles; it just doesn’t seem to reach this part of the country, but the gravel roads are good enough. For a few miles I was delighted to pass through the Bukongo forest, a refreshing stretch of equatorial forest, where shade and a sudden profusion of flittering butterflies made a sort of magic after the miles of dry bush and beating sun. Then I was back at the southern park barrier and the shambas, stained hand made brick and tin lock ups and thatched homes started at a line that marks the preserved government property. Back to Sunday people, boda-bodas, mess and chaos. It was only twenty kilometres to Masindi, and although it was only soon after lunch I had decided to stop and find accommodation here. I need to rest!

*

Shameless and cheeky, I did it again. It’s always worth a try. I spotted the Masindi Hotel and the challenge rose before me in an instant. It’s an old colonial relic, set in expansive gardens, with old rooms with metal four posters, hardwood floors, easy chairs on the arcaded balconies and all the old charm of 1923 East Africa (for the privileged of the day, of course).

My line that seldom fails is, “I don’t suppose I can afford to stay here, but if I don’t ask, I won’t know! You know, as an Englishman I love your gardens! I saw this hotel and thought I would LOVE to stay here…” Rooms, it seems, are usually £35 (not a bad price, actually!) but, “Oh, what a shame! My budget’s only £15. I’m travelling for a long time you see, four months, so I have to keep to a budget!”

“Four months? On a piki-piki! Let me see what I can do…”

I have a charming room back in the rear gardens – quiet from the road in front of the more expensive rooms. Constance showed me some of the other rooms. There’s so little difference for the extra £20! “We call this the Hemingway Suite. He stayed here.” It seems he had two plane crashes in a week around here and recovered at the Masindi Hotel. Katherine Hepburn (surely the most beautiful screen star of all cinematic history?) and Humphrey Bogart stayed here during the filming of The African Queen. So for £15, I am staying where Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Hepburn slept. Haha! It’s such fun blagging my way into these places in Africa! I’m glad I travelled in the cheapest squalor all those years: it makes me appreciate the difference so well! It makes me smile tonight, feeling a bit of a fraud in this comfort.

 

 

 

I’ve been trying to get this quite long episode up all day, but we’ve had a power cut for most of it! I’ll try to get some pictures up tomorrow, which takes a lot of time and power on the internet, before I head off to Uganda…

DAY 58 TUESDAY 16th JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

I find myself very contented here in Kitale with my old, comfortable friend, Rico, and now with Adelight too. They make me feel very welcome and Rico and I enjoy our couple of hours drinking beer and sorting out life on the porch of an evening, when Adelight comes cheerily home from her work in her tailoring shop. Baby Maria, quite the most delightful, happy baby I have ever known, chortles and sings beside us, ever smiling. It’s very relaxing.

The bike is now ready for a longer journey: oil topped up, chain tightened, washed, new spark plug and clean air filter. My clothes and equipment are washed from the Suam to Sipi road and I am ready to set off. Some of the day, though, was spent researching Ethiopian visas online. It appears to be quite a trial, and quite a chance to even get one here in Nairobi… I may have to change my plans drastically in the coming days. Visas are given VERY grudgingly in Nairobi. Well, the best thing is to go and try first, and be prepared for a trip in Uganda and Tanzania instead! Wherever I go in these ‘shithole countries’, as the despicable Trump has called them – a description I have enjoyed in emailing my American colleagues today (!) – I shall meet people so much more worthy than anything in American politics that I will make the best of it and have an interesting time, no doubt.

The Mosquito needed a new spark plug, so I went to the Honda dealer in the town. “I need a spark plug, a D8EA… for my little Suzuki piki-piki.”

“We only sell spark plugs for Hondas,” said the woman in the shop. I wonder how anyone ever does any business here sometimes! (Just in case you don’t see the humour: spark plugs of the right size fit any machine, from generators to buses…).

So, new horizons from tomorrow. Doubtless, I will find places to go and people to meet, wherever I end up. That’s the joy of travelling: never knowing what tomorrow will bring!

DAY 59 WEDNESDAY 17th JANUARY 2017. KAPTAGAT, KENYA

Twenty miles north of the Equator, I am sitting beside an aromatic log fire in my bedroom tonight in an old colonial style guest house set in the most delightful long-established gardens. I LOVE the fact…

…and here I was called by a gentle tap to my door, with its upside down handle and lock. Outside was Ellen and one of the askaris. “Oh… I want to disturb you…” said with quiet embarrassment. “I have forgotten your name!” It’s often so charming, the way that almost no one is trained in service here. Were I staying in a much fancier hotel, I’d just be a room number – anonymous, faceless, characterless to everyone. Here I am a guest, to be cared for and about. “Jonathan, the mzungu!” I suggested, to chuckles. Just then two fellows, presumably watchmen, carefully pushed my Mosquito from the parking place and left it right outside my door. It’s very engaging, this respect, politeness and innocence of any knowledge of formal ‘customer relations’ – just human interaction and warmth…

…where was I? Loving the fact that such serendipitous things occur on my travels. I was whirring along a road, not sure which way I was pointing, so I stopped to ask a bunch of boda-boda boys if I was on the correct road. The boda-boda boys love to see my ‘big’ piki-piki (which at all of 200ccs, is a quarter the capacity of my Elephant and one sixth of my big BMW at home – but double theirs). They were stationed at the end of a red dust track to the Kaptagat Hotel. After satisfying their curiosity, I decided to investigate for a cup of tea at least. I found this delightful old colonial hotel amidst lovely greenery; had a flask of chai and enquired about rooms. It was only 3pm, early to stop, but the opportunity had just ‘happened’ and these days I follow instinct.

Ellen showed me a series of different rooms and I chose Room 2. “Everyone chooses Room 2!” For £14.70 I have a spacious room with a polished hardwood floor, a big bed with a candlewick bedspread that probably also dates from colonial times, a brick fireplace flanked by a couple of easy chairs, a bathroom and bay window. So what, there’s no running water, and it’s all just a bit faded, but a large container of hot water, heated over logs, materialised shortly after I moved in. There’s a bar – rather busy tonight, round a HUGE kind of inglenook fireplace, with boozed men, and the pungency of some very unclean bodies, presumably from the local community. It’s the usual African problem: cane spirit at 40%ABV is cheaper than beer. So I have brought my beer to my fireside. The chicken, chips and ketchup wasn’t inspired, but you can forgive a great deal for gardens and peace like this. A happy chance.

*

The second half of my winter safari has begun. I am on my way down to Nairobi to try my charm on the Ethiopian embassy and on the MD of Olerai Limited, who has SAID he will personally see to the reissue of a logbook for the Mosquito. It’s Wednesday and I could arrive in Nairobi tomorrow, but then I would have only Friday to try to achieve business and I know Africa well enough to know that you can’t hope to do two things in any one day, so I’ve decided to enjoy the trip and arrive on Sunday.

This part of Kenya is very fine. I rode the familiar road almost back to Kessup, that I’ve taken several times now, avoiding the extremely dangerous Nairobi to Kampala highway on which hundreds die every year, often in ghastly multiple accidents that kill busloads at a time (30-some in early December in one accident and another 40-odd in one accident just before Christmas). I rode on quiet side roads, turning right onto a dust road at Iten town and negotiating a soon to be tarred road through highlands with tall trees and small, scruffy roadside villages coated in red dust. Then I was onto a brand new road through more fine scenery, up here perhaps 7000 or 8000 feet above sea level. These roads aren’t much used: everyone slavishly sticks to the lethal highway. But I am here to enjoy and there’s no hurry. I breeze along on my small bike, seldom more than 50mph, watched by thousands; the equatorial sun beating down on my helmet and dust turning my beard red again. I leave a trail of stained towels across East Africa, because however thoroughly I wash, it’s never enough.

Tonight I’ll sleep with the embers of the sweet smelling fire dying in the wide grate. Didn’t expect THAT this morning…

DAY 60 THURSDAY 18th JANUARY 2017. KAPTAGAT, KENYA

How do I even begin to describe what I have seen today: 200 kilometres of the most remarkable landscapes; one of the most dramatic, exciting roads I have found on the continent and some of Kenya’s best scenery? The Rift Valley is one of Earth’s most impressive natural features, and it’s here on my doorstep today.

It’s not often that I find such pleasant, silent, old hotels, so I decided to stay another night in this quaint place. Pity about the food, but what the hell, the calm gardens, the deep peace of the night, the aromatic wood fire in my room, even the quirky nostalgia of a candlewick bedspread: they all said ‘stay’. I picked a round trip on my map and rode off to investigate, leaving it until 10.30 for the sun to warm these altitudes.

There’s something strange about my map. It is from National Geographic and boasts frequent updates. It suggests that a road leaves Kaptagat and drops down the steep escarpment immediately. I was surprised that such an insignificant road should be tarred, but people told me, yes, this big tar road was the way to Tenges, a small scruffy community on the other side of the Kerio Valley, a branch of the Rift Valley: the head of the same valley I view from ‘my’ room in Kessup. Oddly, the road across the valley began 15 kilometres from Kaptagat – and it certainly wasn’t tarred… Asking the boda-boda boys at an insignificant junction – onto a red gravel and rock road – they assured me THIS was the way to Tenges. But what still mystified me (wonderfully as it turned out, for all was explained six hours later), was that I STILL hadn’t seen the Rift Valley opening below me. I had ridden fifteen kilometres already. I KNEW one of Earth’s biggest natural phenomena was there somewhere, but it didn’t appear. Oh well, the boda-boda boys assured me I was going the right way, so the great valley must be somewhere ahead. I started down the rocky track.

Less than a quarter of a mile later I was thrilled by the surprise! THERE was the Rift Valley! Huge, expansive, vast, dramatic, theatrically revealed before me – and far far below me to the left. Wow! It was one of those moments that make it all worthwhile: the discomfort, the bad beer, the ughali and chicken, the latrines, the margarine, the effort, the mosquitoes, the lack of Radio Three, even the constant worry about mechanical ineptness. The Kerio Valley exploded to my left; as big a vista as you can imagine, stretching miles away to distant blue ridges on the other side, a drop of about 1500 metres plunging below me. That’s almost 4900 FEET! Almost a MILE deep! It’s staggering – and very exciting! For the next ten miles I serpentined, curled and shuddered down one of the most thrilling trails I have been privileged to find.

I could take a hundred photos – but not ONE can express the reality; the sheer exultant JOY of being there – the brilliant sun, the freshness of the air, the scents of wayside flowers, the freedom, the view, the greetings, the waves, the smiles – not least my own, spread not just across my face, but somehow through my whole body it seemed: a flow of thrill and happiness to be here, doing this, doing it NOW!

*

Much of the descent I undertook at not more than 15 miles an hour, a speed at which I could revel in the experience, watch the track AND the views, and just indulge in the immediate experience of dropping into the famous African Rift Valley, the colossal fracture in the earth’s crust that stretches up most of the continent (from Israel to Mozambique, they say). And here was I, inching my way down, the temperature rising with every metre I dropped, the vegetation changing, greens giving way to browns, the smile stuck to my face. People waved and gave me thumbs-up, grinned or sometimes just looked astonished and bemused at the ‘old’ daddy riding the bucking little blue bike.

In the valley bottom: by now bush country had replaced the conifers and flowers, sit the scars of a fluorspar mine, a product used in cement and construction. I passed a barrier, where a friendly guard laughed at my exclamations as he raised the steel pole. Yes, I was still on the correct road for Tenges. He pointed to a pale stripe far above on the eastern flank of the soaring escarpment. That, he said, was Tenges.

The ride up the other flank of the valley wasn’t as fine as the descent. The views were obscured by dusty undergrowth and the road harder: thick dust and pitted rockiness. It was thirty miles, twisting and turning, shaking and juddering from one rim to the other. But what a ride! I wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved to reach the tarmac at Tenges, on a road I used twice last year and enjoyed – without knowing the wonders in the valley below. I turned into the straggling village and found a ‘hoteli’ for over-sweet tea and half an hour’s relaxation, watching the parochial Tenges world go by: matatus filling, boda-boda boys waiting for customers, not many of them passing through this sleepy town; being cheerfully greeted by so many and still smiling from my invigorating ride. Now all I had was many miles of tar roads, most of which I had ridden last year.

There’s a grey, potholed road, with huge almost cliched views across the distant blues of the Rift Valley, framed by that image of Africa from a million Safari brochures: the flat topped acacias, to Eldama Ravine, where I had the misfortune to stay in the noisiest hotel in Africa (and THAT’S saying something!) last January. It was Friday night and it was disco night – until 4.00am and the hotel – and my bed – literally throbbed. It’s an unattractive town, but the road back into the forested hills is one of the finest I found last safari. It sweeps through tree-covered uplands and dark coniferous forests. It’s less populated by scruffy tin and firewood villages than most roads and there are long vistas of receding hills into the distance-haze. The sun was lowering now, shadows extending: I’d been on the road a long time.

But perhaps the best was kept until last. Overtaking grinding lorries, their drivers waving at the mzungu, my road began a final climb back to the highland tops. I was approaching full circle now, to where I turned off the tarmac this morning, still then deprived of the valley I knew must be there. But now, as I climbed, the valley was magically revealed, in all its glory; my route across the valley floor visible as a curling white line. Sometimes nature can act as conjuror: now, with a breathtaking flourish, there was the aerial view I had been denied – just two kilometres further on, past my turn this morning. But how glad I was that I hadn’t seen this magnificence until the end of the day! The best kept till last.

*

My mechanical ineptness causes concern most of the days I am riding. I listen, unconfident, to my engine and I dread punctures. However, when I diagnose a problem correctly, I am disproportionately pleased. The Mosquito has been slightly unhappy for much of the day: I can tell instinctively now. When I stopped, the engine would cut out with a cough, and when starting, there’d be a hesitation, and the sound hasn’t been quite right. I fiddled with the tick-over screw and checked for leaks; checked the air supply wasn’t blocked… It seemed to me, in my partial ignorance, that the petrol/air mix was wrong. Stopping outside my room tonight, I got on my knees for another check – and found the choke slightly on. It hadn’t sprung back, maybe as long ago as this morning! Well, at least my diagnosis was correct.

*

I am back by my log fire now, pleasantly weary from an exhilarating day. They just keep coming.

DAY 61 FRIDAY 19th JANUARY 2017. NYERI, KENYA

From the characterful Kaptagat Hotel to a totally joyless guest house in Nyeri. That’s what happens when I get tired and ride too far. By the time I get to my destination, I am too weary and out of sorts to spend time looking for a place with appeal. So I find myself in a reasonably decent, clean but faceless guest house in a suburb, surrounded by residences and not very interesting. The view from the front window is of a zinc-sheet fence; from the back a concrete block wall. I should have stopped back in Nyahururu, one of the highest towns in Kenya, except that I know the accommodation options aren’t very good there either, as I searched for some time last year before finding a place with little more character than this in Nyeri… Oh well, it’s the luck of the draw: I can’t have old colonial hotels with lovely gardens every night.

It’s a mistake to ride too far: I rode almost 200 miles today, much too much on the little Mosquito. The last ride, the one from high Nyahururu, seemed to go on for ever, across high plains and rolling hills, past the Aberdares Mountains and forests off to the south. I passed ‘Treetops’, one of the most exclusive game reserve hotels, famous, of course, for the accession of Princess Elizabeth to Queen, while she was there on a state visit when her father died. These game reserves and parks are accessible from Nairobi within less than a day, so see some of the more upmarket safari guests. In the other direction, lost today in haze, squats Mount Kenya, second highest African peak. This is a lovely area: a mixture of heavy agriculture, forest and large reservations. The road from Nyahururu is big and fast – unless you have a mere 200ccs of engine to power you up the long hills, even more so when you climb up again from the Rift Valley at chaotic Nakuru, a busy town where I met the ghastly highway from Nairobi to Kampala – fortunately only for two miles of roadwork madness and traffic anarchy and free for all lawlessness, before I turned north again onto the steep climb to Nyahururu’s 2370 metres (7700 feet or so).

*

My day began slowly. The organisation of the kitchen at the oddly attractive Kaptagat Hotel is not the best. The first night I ordered chicken, chips and vegetables – no vegetables; the next night I ordered chicken and rice and vegetables – and got chips again, although I DID get the vegetables; this morning I asked for eggs, sausage and toast (as I had yesterday morning) – no eggs and soggy bread! But it was pleasant sitting in the warmth of the sun as I waited for the air to lose the chill of the morning when I rode away. But one of today’s problems was that I was just slightly chilled for the entire ride. As afternoon lengthened clouds gathered, and a few moments ago, to my surprise, began a thunderstorm and rain, only the second I have known since arriving in Africa 61 days ago. Oddly enough, the other shower that soaked me was on the Equator, an unseen line I have crossed and recrossed throughout the ride today. I’m about twenty miles into the southern hemisphere tonight.

And here comes a downpour. It never just ‘rains’ in Africa, it seems: it downpours, torrents, cascades, roars on the roof. It will clear the air. Maybe that’s why I was a bit down today? Ah well, it’ll clear the dust off the Mosquito too.

I am staying – in this two bedroom faceless chalet (with kitchen and bathroom, and a total of two plug sockets) on Baden Powell Road, for it was here in Nyeri that Robert, Lord BP last lived – and died. I don’t think Nyeri has many other claims to fame: it’s just a frenetic trading centre, full of unruly traffic, as I found to my cost this Friday evening, already a bit down and tired.

Wow! This is fire-hose, water cannon rain. Nothing by halves on this continent. Pity I ordered my supper for 7.00… It’s now 7.30, so, this being an African kitchen, it’ll be ready soon – and I’ll get soaked going as far as the characterless dining room. But Susan, who seems to be in charge, and with whom I bargained my room down to my budget (there being no other guests, it’s not a difficult challenge!) is friendly and smiling enough, as I come to expect from social interaction in Kenya.

DAY 62 SATURDAY 20th JANUARY 2017. CHOGORIA, KENYA

Funny, some days – yesterday – just go badly for no rational reason, but others, equally irrationally, go happily. I woke this morning with no plan at all, except that I’d rather reach Nairobi on Sunday: easier traffic, easier finding a place to stay, and I have no great love of that city: not enough to relish a weekend there.

On the spur of the moment I decided I’d ride the circular road around Mount Kenya. That’s actually quite and undertaking: it’ll be 200 miles or so. It turned into a contented day.

The National Geographic map still gives me cause for doubt. A very few roads are outlined in green, the customary symbolic indication of beautiful scenery. But MY most beautiful roads: the one from Eldama Ravine to Kaptagat for instance, are left boringly insignificant. I wonder who recommends beauty to the map maker? The whole ring of Mount Kenya is edged in green – but it takes a long time for the beauty to become apparent. I was riding clockwise round Africa’s second highest mountain, but it was utterly invisible, its lower flanks merging into the mists and clouds. I rode an hour before I began to believe the map, climbing all the time – rather slowly on my Mosquito; climbing into a sort of Altiplano scenery (only half as high as the Andean Altiplano though) – vast airy plains and grasslands sloping down and away to the rest of Kenya; the Aberdare range and distant mountains of the western highlands. There was a wonderful sense of space and a washed-out quality to the light, perhaps the ultraviolet of the altitude in which I was riding. As I climbed higher, Mount Kenya began to clear, and eventually I was able to see many of its jagged peaks, some of them patched with high snow, something you don’t expect on the Equator in summer – but Mount Kenya is 5200 metres high, the best part of 17,000 feet.

The scenery improved as I dipped back into the northern hemisphere: pineapple farms (sadly of the unpleasant Del Monte multinational corporation), and sisal fields giving way, as I rose, to giant fields of wheat, newly turned red soil, acres of plastic hot houses growing flowers for European winter and at last to the most vibrant yellow of rape seed, with its rich, buttery smell, carpeting the slopes with the rest of northern Kenya, a vast desert, in washy shades dematerialising into the limitless distance. Swallows swooped and darted over the rapeseed; the same swallows that will be back in Devon in a few months. Mount Kenya withdrew into cloud once more (I am promised I will see it in the early morning) and my road descended and turned southwards again; once again rose through deep forests, interspersed with small, thriving towns filled with speed humps. It was a lovely journey, well deserving of National Geographic’s green edged accolade now.

Somewhere not far past Nanyuki, I couldn’t believe my eyes to see a sign advertising a farm shop with cappuccino and home made cakes! I have been in Africa for nine weeks, and I haven’t had a home made cake for all that time, let alone a latte with a decorated top! I turned around, and found a trinkety souvenir shop with a coffee machine out the back and cakes under glass domes. Wow! Sometimes, a taste of things familiar is like manna from heaven! I indulged. Far more expensive, of course, than local dried up, so accurately named, ‘rock cakes’ and over-sweetened, milky chai – but this was a luxury. I fell into conversation with Lucy, one of the waitresses. It’s the business of a Kenyan-resident English woman and caters to the British Army who, I had forgotten, have a large training outpost in Nanyuki. Why is the British army here still, 55 years, or whatever it is, after independence? “Well, they pay…” says Luke, the hotel manager tonight, with an ironic smile. “Good money – to our government…”

*

Sweeping up and down, curling this way and that, views of distant deserts between the trees, riding through clouds of flittering white butterflies, I began to feel it was time to look for a place to stay. It’s always the worst part of my day. I turned into a smart hotel and knew it wasn’t for me, even before the haughty, unsmiling (I guess I don’t look my best after six hours on the road, now dressed in my faded, filthy jacket that I pensioned off four years ago at home, a jersey, a red dust-edged fleece body warmer, my dusty boots and red face) told me the price: three times my budget. I wasn’t sorry. Ten miles on I investigated a dull roadside place. The room was acceptable; the view over a building site, and the ‘gardens’ had seen much better days. The receptionist was friendly: “we are renovating…” but I wanted a view and some light, not a dull, half renovated concrete hotel with tarpaulins for a roof. I’d seen a sign at a nearby junction. And here, a couple of kilometres off the road, I found a quirky hotel facing (now more distant) Mount Kenya. Sadly, the view takes in a lorry park over the road, but the hotel has a roof terrace bar and my room is basic but with a small balcony looking west at the mountain range. The staff are helpful and the price £12.50. Hardly sophisticated, but fine by me.

So my unplanned day has been satisfying after all. Funny how it goes. The joy of travelling.

DAY 63 SUNDAY 21st JANUARY 2017. NAIROBI, KENYA

Reluctantly, I find myself in Nairobi oncebagain. I don’t want to be in a big city but I have to stay until Wednesday, when I will get out as quickly as I can. On Wednesday morning, I will meet the MD of Olerai Ltd, previous owners of the Mosquito. And tomorrow I will brace myself to visit the Ethiopian embassy. Otherwise, I have no wish to be here.

And, god, did I witness some bad driving to get here! It was terrifying to see the dangerous, thoughtless, aggressive behaviour of some of the drivers on the main road from the north. The final 30 miles wasn’t so bad, on a motorway: at least all the traffic on my side of the barrier was heading in roughly the same direction, even if lane discipline was non existent, despite all the signs: ‘keep left unless overtaking’. Worst was the fifty miles before that, when a single carriageway road was used as a race track by untrained drivers. I cannot believe there was a single driving lesson shared between all the multitude of drivers. I wonder how much they paid for their licenses?

Arriving on Sunday was probably a good idea once I got to the city centre for traffic was relatively light and well controlled and I was able to ride about in a fairly relaxed manner, even downtown. In the end I copped out and returned to the guest house Rico prefers, despite the expense and the fact that it’s rather isolated from the services I want – namely a place to get some beer and food. It blows my budget sky high, costing just about double my accommodation budget, but finding places within my £15 budget here in the capital city would mean staying right in the centre in pretty squalid conditions and without much security.

DAY 64 MONDAY 22nd JANUARY 2017. NAIROBI, KENYA

I can tell, from my somewhat terse account of yesterday that I wasn’t ‘in the mood’. Well, today was EVEN MORE frustrating – but at least I have ended it with decisions.

Just as well I make no real plans when I am travelling thus, but go as instinct and whim dictate. Making plans and itineraries in Africa is a vain operation, never more so than when bureaucracy and bureaucrats are involved.

It was my desire to visit Kenya and Ethiopia on this winter visit, with a couple of sorties over the Uganda border, mainly to see Alex and Precious. As of this morning, Ethiopia is off the menu entirely. I’ve had a lot of experience of embassies and consulates, but seldom the brick wall of the Ethiopian embassy, Nairobi.

This morning I rode to the Ethiopian embassy. It’s beside the State House in a pleasant part of the city on one of the hills. Around the State House are gardens and an arboretum. At its altitude (around 5000 feet) Nairobi is a green city: trees and shrubs grow well here where there’s plenty of sun and enough rainfall. If you don’t look too closely, it’s quite an attractive city, certainly for Africa. Look a bit closer and a lot of it’s rather run down; city parks threadbare, the pedallos, splashing about on a turgid pond spanned by rather rough rusting girder bridges; the traffic medians dusty and parched; ugly hoardings abounding and the streets pitted with potholes – but at that glance, not bad! Big moves forward have been made since the banning of plastic bags and the city is largely litter-free; traffic quiet even if it follows no perceptible rules and few traffic lights work, but drivers are basically cooperative and calm and everything moves. It’s a far far cry from cities like Accra, for instance. The infrastructure is old but evident. On a motorbike, happily trained in European traffic density, I can ride with an enjoyable freedom from control – as the boda-boda riders do: ignoring the lights (within reason), ignoring ‘no right turns’, traffic islands and turning in the road when required, so long as I keep an eye open for policemen. It’s quite liberating! As I am trained to know what’s around me, including behind – a direction with which very few African drivers concern themselves – it can be fun.

Anyway, I rode to the Ethiopian embassy and parked the bike on a flowerbed across the street. I had to sign in, be checked for security and leave my bag in the lobby. Then I pushed open a big polished door to the Consular Section. I hovered a moment, then saw a man at a ‘reception’ desk. Big smile, nicest charm offensive… “I’ve come to apply for a visa!”

“Have you got the letter of introduction from your embassy? No? Well, if you get it we can issue a visa, with $40, a photograph and a copy of your passport. I had all those. This sounded positive – except I knew from the internet that the British High Commission does not issue that letter…

Passing between bollards put to prevent U turns on the main Kenyatta Avenue, I raced across town to the British High Commission, a tidy spread of grey marbled buildings behind trees and generous security of soldiers behind huge sandbags. It took some time to actually get inside, but the security personnel were polite, took away my filthy jacket, helmet and bag, and finally let me in to the holy of holies through an impressive security turnstile.

Within a few minutes, I was in possession of a letter, complete with British High Commission stamp: ‘To whom it may concern. The British High Commission no longer issues letters of introduction for visa purposes. In case of any further enquiries please contact: Jackie Brook, Consul’

I had to be content with that. There was just time to race back through the traffic before the Ethiopian embassy closed at noon.

The bike back in the flower bed. All the security again. The same man. “We can’t issue a visa with THIS! We need a letter of introduction. THIS is NOT a letter of introduction!”

“No, but my embassy DOES NOT ISSUE letters of introduction! What can I do?”

“Go to our embassy, round the corner.”

So I did. As I approached the gates, a window opened in the wall. I had to leap over a low hedge and stand on the dusty verge to talk to the security guard. “Show me your papers,” she demanded. I passed my passport and the letter through the casement.

“You can’t get a visa with THIS!” Remember, I am now talking to a security guard employed by G4S! A mere SECURITY GUARD of a private company! I was taking none of THAT shit! “I want to speak to an official!”

The SECURITY GUARD! Huh! made a call. A phone receiver was passed through the steel-framed casement to where I stood on the trampled flower bed. A disinterested voice told me they would not issue a visa without a letter of introduction from my embassy. “But my embassy DOES NOT ISSUE letters of introduction! How can I break this loop?”

The phone went dead… She’d hung up on me.

This NONSENSE goes round and round, and we pay our taxes to keep the shit circulating.

*

Embassy life… I have been to many. It seems to me that the main requirement for embassy employment is a TOTAL lack of understanding of the country in which you are working; total arrogance about your own country; stony-faced superiority and the ability to be rude without even opening your mouth; the ability to work for about ten minutes a day – consulates open for three hour days; they get all the holidays of the host country – and THEIR OWN country too! I once found a British embassy closed, after considerable trouble getting there – for the Queen’s birthday. The queen of bloody England! – and I was in some foreign corner of the world… Visa interviews in Ghana, to take an example, are no longer even carried out by British people, but have been franchised out to Lebanese (!!!) and application fees are non-refundable and there is no right of appeal – even if the reason given for refusal of a visa to visit me in England, for which I have written every proviso of responsibility possible, is given as, and I quote, as I can never forget it: ‘the applicant comes of humble origins and as such will have no incentive to return to Ghana’. The cultural arrogance! I pay my taxes for this. I took that one up with my MP, who was shocked as I was, and months later got a washy letter back from the High Commission in Accra that the employee concerned had since been moved to other duties… Big deal. The window had closed for that application. The visit didn’t happen and I lost my money too.

*

Well, my righteous indignation will never get me a visa to Ethiopia. I can see that even if I got the British consul’s assistance on one item, the Ethiopian embassy will put hurdles in my way: the message was implicit in all the body language. Jump through one hoop and they’ll create another…

I rang the British High Commission and spoke to a young man, who professed to have never heard of the problem before, which I beg leave to doubt, and he quoted the UK.GOV website at me. So I wrote an email to Ms Brook, Consul – and received an automatic reply saying that the British Government aimed to reply within 20 working days to my query. ‘WORKING’ days, that is… Considering they only work half days: “multiply by two,” laughed Rico derisively when I rang to report progress!

So, it looks like I am headed for Uganda! Just as well I loved it so well last year. There’s Tanzania to the south as well, a huge country I haven’t explored much.

AAAAARRRRGGGGHHH!!!!!

*

Back at the guest house, I communicated my frustration to Rico. I came to expensive, not very engaging Nairobi for two things: the Ethiopian visa, and to meet Mr Wood, MD of Olerai Ltd (a seed company, I find), previous owners of the Mosquito. Rico has been in so much contact about the bloody log book! I was to meet Mr Wood on Wednesday morning. By chance, an email from his secretary, says that, oh, it won’t be possible to meet me in Nairobi as they are 100 miles away in Narok!

So, the best thing to come out of it all, is that I can leave Nairobi in the morning. I’m writing this in the garden of an Ethiopian restaurant round the corner from the guest house, as it seems an Ethiopian supper might be the closest I get this year. Maybe I can get the visa in London next autumn and fly out and ride directly to Ethiopia? Some people even go to the length of couriering their passports home and applying in London, but this takes at least three weeks – and in the meantime, I couldn’t even go to Uganda! Huh!

*

To reduce my frustration, I left the Mosquito in the guest house and walked all the way to the city centre and back this afternoon, a distance of perhaps eight miles, so at least I’ll sleep well. Nairobi seems to have lost that edge of danger and unease that gave it the nickname, Nairobbery. Mind you, I was walking in the central business district, and there are security guards on even the smallest business, often with metal detector batons, and all larger buildings have security screening too. On the way home, I walked against the flow of thousands of ministry workers. But I felt quite relaxed and revised my opinion of the city a little upwards again. However, I won’t miss it much as I ride away – tomorrow!

DAY 65 TUESDAY 23rd JANUARY 2017. OL GOLAU, KENYA

Incidentally, the Ethiopian supper gave me indigestion and I didn’t sleep very soundly. There’s a meaning there somewhere…

*

Some weeks ago, William told me of a route to get to Nairobi without using the dangerous main roads. Although I appear to have mis- or re-interpreted his instructions, I find myself 200kms away from Nairobi, avoiding the main roads. But somewhere I took a wrong turn and my day became fun and rather stimulating, but also very tiring. I got lost in the vast Aberdare Forest and had 17 miles of seriously remote, hard trail riding before I found my way out!

*

It was noon before I left the guest house in the big city. I had maintenance to do on the Mosquito – the hot hammering ride into Nairobi on Sunday had used a lot of oil and stretched and dried the chain again; and I wanted to use the opportunity of being close to a good bookshop in the YaYa Centre, to buy a map of Uganda, since it seems that’s where I will be spending some time now. There was talk of me leaving Nairobi in the other direction to visit the MD of Olerai, but a phone call kicked that idea into touch. His secretary is now dealing with the matter (I hope!) and she said there was no point my calling at Narok, where they appear to be… Oh well, I had no reason to go that way anyway, so I turned north once again, back towards my favourite part of Kenya, the Highlands, barely resisting a strong urge to flick a rude sign at the Ethiopian embassy as I passed.

Back up the six lane motorway – swerving to avoid a stolid cow crossing to the median – and slowing down for the inevitable speed humps: even on a motorway, because rather than build pedestrian bridges, they have somewhat unbelievable zebra crossings! After less than forty kilometres the ‘motorway’ ends and then the chaos begins with the appalling drivers. How happy I was to spot the road I wanted within a mile of the reduction of carriageways, which was creating a irresistible challenge and competition for so many drivers. I turned onto a decent tarred road with virtually NO traffic at all. I relaxed and began to enjoy my ride. The road curled and twisted upwards, my spirits rising with the altitude. I was passing just north of Thika, a town made famous by being the title of a book of colonial memoirs – probably its only glorious hour. But the country to the north became increasingly attractive: coffee estates giving way to carpets of tea bushes clothing the steep hillsides, flowered hedges and sunshine. The smile began to rekindle on my face at last. I guess I just don’t appreciate city life any more. What do you DO in cities? Visit dry cultural attractions – and sadly, African museums and rare galleries ARE dry and dusty, flyblown and dull (on the whole), and there are no interesting historical sights to enjoy in Africa; go shopping? – no thank you; perhaps eat in some better quality restaurants – but I am depressed eating good food on my own: it’s a social activity.

The road, the C67, was delightful. I rode slowly upwards, the Aberdares to my right, the north; blue ridges etched against a bright sky dotted with white clouds. I was passing through concentrated agriculture: tea, coffee, maize and hot houses that supply flowers to Europe at this time of the year. I must have missed a junction though… Unexpectedly, I found myself at a rough barrier and the end of the tar road. Lounging on a hillside were a couple of rangers in khaki uniforms, beside a shelter of rough logs and planks. One of them raised his hands in a shrug that said, “Where the hell are you going?” I stopped and told him I was heading for Nyahururu, which seemed to satisfy him. He waved his hand along the now earth track, as if to reassure me. Thinking back, I wonder if he really spoke as much English as I assumed!

The track deteriorated but the scenery was lovely. I was heading deep into expansive commercial forests, glimpsing the Aberdares through the trees. I was given confidence by the suggestion that I was indeed on a route to Nyahururu. Hadn’t the ranger said so..? Several miles in, a motorbike rode towards me and waved me down. The riders were forest rangers; one of them a three stripe security guard. “Where to..?” with a wiggle of his hands. “Nyahururu!”

“Eh, you are LOST! Go on this way and you will be really lost! You are going the wrong way! Carry on this way and you might get back to Thika – eventually…”

So they made me follow them back to an obscure junction of the tracks and stopped again. The sergeant got down and sketched a map in the dust. “You go this way,” he said, his stick scratching the hard surface. “You’ll find a small junction. There’s a rain gauge there. Don’t pass it: go over the bridge to the left. Then you’ll climb and climb and eventually reach a corrugated road. Go right. Don’t go left! You will come to Njambini. It will take you about an hour…” He looked my bike over. “You will be OK on this! Safe journey!” And off they rode in a pother of dust.

Well!!! In hindsight, it was fun, but it was astonishingly remote! The ‘bridge’ was six logs over a river. In places I seemed to be on little more than a pitted, broken, faint footpath deep in the forest, with the undergrowth slashing and catching at me as I pushed on. Astonishingly – for me and for the workers – I came across two straining tractors rocking and forcing their way along towing trailers filled with cut trees, the workers ‘hallooing’ in surprise. The dreadful path eventually gave way to a horrid rock road that bounced me further and further through the forest, and finally, to my relief, to another forest station, where a charming female ranger was surprised to witness a dust-covered, rather wild-looking mzungu daddy come round the corner! In a couple more miles I would reach tar again, all the way to Nyahururu, still at least 100kms distant, she reassured me.

Once my shadow hits the centre of the road, I know it’s time to look for a place to sleep. I wouldn’t reach Nyahururu for another 25 miles, and I was tired and getting chilled by the altitude now. An anachronistic 50-roomed (49 of them empty tonight) ‘resort’ showed up, dull, on budget, a view of the mountains from my dingy room, hot water, a restaurant with most items unavailable, but a couple of beers. It will do for the night. Ten roast potatoes on my plate made me laugh, until I found I had eaten seven of them! I saw a ‘snacks’ menu the other day, offering a KILO of roasted potatoes – as a SNACK – for 74 pence!

So it’s been a fun day: unexpected too. Best, though, is to leave Nairobi far behind me. I have no real direction for the rest of my journey, but that doesn’t matter when things just turn up as they did today. I love that element of surprise! At 8.30, it feels like time to head for bed.

DAY 66 WEDNESDAY 24th JANUARY 2017. KAPTAGAT, KENYA

Another rather long ride today, about 175 miles, and bits ache all over. Perhaps the very rough road, lost in the forest yesterday, is taking its toll too. It WAS rugged, that track. A few days ago I pulled a muscle, at about ‘four o’clock’ in my neck (prosaically, in my sleep I think, despite all the huge exercise I get on the bike!). Last time I visited an osteopath, he commented on how highly developed are some of the muscles in the front of my neck, typical, he reckoned, for a long distance motorcyclist holding up a helmet. Well, tonight it’s my neck, back and bum. And when I think about it, my arms and legs are pretty tired too..! Haha. Oh well, there’s always the balancing sense of satisfaction that these aches and pains come from riding motorbikes around Africa and crossing the Equator another five times today.

*

At least I was spared the routine stress of looking for a place to sleep, by returning to Room 2, Kaptagat Hotel, with the log fires; the numerous drunks round the bar, with their nose-curling body odour, suggesting I buy them even more cane spirit than they’ve already imbibed to the point that they lose all pride and beg; probably with the erratic food order, but also with the peace of the night when all the drunks have staggered away into the African night to shout at the wife, yell at the dependent children whose inheritance they have just squandered, probably at the expense of their suppers, or fall in a ditch – hopefully, the latter.

Smiling Ellen and her cheerful, tubby assistant just brought a shovel of charcoal for my grate. “We will bring firewood!” A few minutes later they arrived with armfuls of sticks and logs, enough for a mighty blaze. “Wow, are you bringing a bonfire?” It’s not really so very cold tonight, but it’s fun to have the fire in my brick grate and drink my beer and eat my supper in its glow – it dries my washing too!

*

Breakfast was enormous in the rather spooky hotel this morning. It was very odd, being the only guest in a sprawling two storey hotel with my room down unlit narrow corridors. And why were the rooms so meanly small, such that I had to clamber over my pannier bags in the tiny space by the bed, when the hotel was so big? But it was quiet: there was no one there to make any noise. I will never understand African design priorities. I ate alone at a rocky table in a huge, empty restaurant beside a large blue swimming pool with cracked edges.

Today I began my ride up around 8000 feet above sea level, dropped to three or four thousand and climbed again to 8000. All quite slow with only 200ccs of engine. I dropped from coniferous forests and cool, sunny agriculture with many plastic hot houses sending flowers to the cold north, down to cacti and succulents, aloes and dry acacias on pale brown stony ground split by dry, dusty riverbeds, and back to green slopes with bubbling streams, forests and people dressed in heavy jackets and woolly hats.

The reason for all the Equator crossings is that to get around the large Menengai Crater, an expansive volcanic souvenir just north of the hideous city of Nakuru, through which runs the appalling East Africa Highway with its ghastly death statistics, you have to make a huge U-shaped loop southwards and back to the other side of the Rift Valley. ‘Nakuru, City of God’, proclaim the signposts. Well, for once God got the short straw there! It means a couple of miles on one of Africa’s most dangerous roads, right at a point where they are constructing a large flyover, but building it without any provision for detours in the meantime, so all the traffic – and this is THE main artery, even to Uganda and Rwanda, including most of their fuel supplies – shakes and bounces across a potholed rough track beside the new flyover, jostling and pushing for position. For me, trying just to make that U turn back onto the other north road half a mile west, it meant a huge, fighting figure of eight as there’s no roundabout! It’s just crazy, and I was thankful to be racing past the city rubbish dump some minutes later with its flying, wind-whisked debris, heading away from that road that I have ridden hundreds of kilometres to avoid.

Now I have a flaming log fire and will probably sink into a soporific doze with my mixed Guinness and Pilsner before my supper arrives. I ordered off-the-bone chicken curry with rice and a chapati. It’ll be intriguing to see what turns up. When I was here last week no dishes arrived as ordered… It’s also part of the quirky charm of the old, cobwebby colonial style – and, let’s face it, I AM only paying £14.50 for the oddity of it all.

*

NB. Next morning: the curry was actually excellent and the chapatis the best I have eaten, not oily but dry. But this morning I was asked what I wanted for breakfast. Egg, sausage and toast? “But we have no bread!” My level of hotel accommodation in Africa can be a bit hit and miss…

DAY 67 THURSDAY 25th JANUARY 2017. KESSUP, KENYA

Having found one of my favourite roads in East Africa, and being only ten miles from the top of it, I made a route down into the wonderful valley to bring me back to Kessup once again. There was just enough rain in the night to settle the dust and make that lovely road even more enjoyable, but it was also just enough to partially obscure the view as moisture ephemerally veiled the valley, burning off in the hot equatorial sun.

It’s the road I took down into the valley on Thursday last week, swivelling and curling down into the Rift Valley to the oddly named Fluorspar. Last week, at the sweltering valley bottom, I turned right through a shallow river by a sign: ‘Warning. Crocodiles have been seen in this area. Washing of vehicles in the river is strictly prohibited’, and crossed the valley. Today, I continued straight on along the bottom of the very high escarpment until I joined the tar road that winds and twists back up towards Kessup on its plateau, three quarters of the way up the steep embankment, the final cliffs of which rise above me here at the Lelin Resort.

Where the track leaves the tarred road, high, high above the valley on the west side, I stopped to confirm my directions from the boda-boda boys. In a moment I was surrounded by at least twenty curious young men, all smiles and welcomes; questions and laughter. It’s such FUN to be the celebrity focus of such cheerful and caring attention. Yes, they all agreed, this was the ONLY road into the valley hereabouts, and if I kept to the left turn at the bottom in fifteen miles or so, I would eventually end up on the Tambach escarpment road another ten miles on. “Safe journey!” “Karibu sana!” All smiles and excitement. It’s SO charming. With many waves, I set off downwards, back on that loveliest of trails to the valley bottom, bouncing and weaving over rock and earth, with views fit for calendars at every turn and people reacting to my waves and smiles – old women, schoolchildren, boda-boda riders – everyone seeming to appreciate the happiness of my wide smile and be happy for me too. I rode very slowly downwards, the heat increasing with every metre, the views still vast and wide. Small villages passed; shacks of tin and earth, people scratching a living from these steep slopes, probably unappreciative of the beauty around them: beauty of the landscape doesn’t put food on the table…

The sun blazed down, the air was fresh, the dust settled by last night’s light rain. The cliff sides were green and abundant, the shambas small and steep. Cows grazed the roadside, trailing their long, handmade tethering ropes. Goats scrambled for sustenance from lower branches. Country people sat and watched me pass, quizzical expressions changing to smiles at my greetings. My happiness was obvious.

Way down, near the valley floor, now riding amongst dry rocks, thorn trees, aloes and termite chimneys, some as tall as eight or ten feet, I passed the pole barrier again, laughing with the security guard from the fluorspar mine, all smiles as I signed his book. “Keep to the left and don’t cross the river,” he said. It was hot here but the road was graded and easier, threading its way through the bush country and thorn trees. A few miles on I stopped for a mug of over-sweet milky tea, provided by the extravagantly named Salome, entertained by cheerful Mary with her hair in short twisted spikes, peppered with beads. But there’s always a drunk who noisily interrupts such pleasant pauses. Pushing a wheelbarrow, which fell over several times, he came and disturbed our easy conversation, booze emanating from his pores, even though it was only midday. I sat on a low stool, removed my jersey and sipped at the hot sweet tea. As much as I needed the drink, I’d stopped to relish the moment: a small tin and timber shack village abreast a dust track in the deep Rift Valley beneath the searing, eye-squinting sun.

On I rode, seldom faster than 20 miles an hour, the road scratched along the base of the high escarpment, the huge valley laid out still a little below, expansive and shimmering with haze and heat. People waved. People smiled.

At last I reached the tar road again, and swept through thorn trees, mango plantations, past dozens of schools and small wayside lock up shops that seldom seem to do any business. Then the climb began towards Kessup and on towards Iten back at the top of the valley rim. It’s a fine road, clambering up the mountainside in a series of bends and curls, my little engine straining with the climb back to the altitudes of the highlands above. A bee, or similar, hit me and stung my neck with a dramatic pain. It’s the reason I keep covered when I ride, despite the heat. Once, in Zimbabwe, I rode through a swarm of bees, at least forty of them peppering my zipped-up jacket like grapeshot. In the tee shirt I would have been so much more comfortable wearing that blazing day, they could well have been fatal.

Thousands of feet up from the hot valley comes the rocky track down to the Lelin campsite and resort, now familiar to me after so many visits. I’d texted my friend William: ‘Your friend will be back in Mexico soon!’ – Mexico being the name of the room that seems to be always allocated to me.

William was so pleased to find me back again, and it’s him and our congenial walks about his community that bring me here time and again. He tells me that so many of his community ask him now, “Where’s your mzungu?” And that my friendship has, in that questionable African respect for the white man, brought him a lot of esteem. It’s so funny to witness the way he organises the staff at this ‘resort’, ensuring that ‘his’ mzungu gets only the best! He is so happy to see me again and we’ve drunk a few beers together and eaten supper in the timber shelter, round a small brazier of charcoal as a cold gale has risen. “It will rain, next three or four days,” says William. “If the wind comes from the mountain above, it means rain.” Usually, I am accustomed to the wind sweeping up from the burning furnace of the valley below. Tonight it rattles anything loose as it blows strongly from the west, over the edge of the high ridges above us, sweeping past and down into the valley far below.

*

I made William laugh out loud, and call Ursula, the young waitress, to retell the story. Talking of how I travel to meet people and find out what makes others tick, I made the comment that most muzungus come to Africa to look at animals. “I’ve been here almost ten weeks and the most exciting wild animal I’ve seen, apart from a few baboons and monkeys, was a red squirrel this afternoon!” I’m old enough to remember red squirrels being common in my English childhood, so I AM excited when I see one nowadays!

DAY 68 FRIDAY 26th JANUARY 2017. KESSUP, KENYA

Everywhere around here I am ‘William’s mzungu’, so much so that I think even if I walked alone in the villages and habitations of the Kessup plateau, I would still be greeted by many as William’s mzungu. Both William and I like people, walking about congenially and being sociable. We spent three or four hours wandering amongst his community, chatting with neighbours and investigating the way of life of the Kessup plateau.

Welcomes abound: fulsome and cheerful. These people love to meet strangers, and for some I may well be the first mzungu to enter their compounds or to chat equally with them. It’s a busy rural life, little changed perhaps for a century or more. Fields must be cultivated, generally by hard graft and by hand with heavy swinging hoes; homes must be maintained, for many buildings are still of earth, plank, stick and thatch or zinc sheet; food must be grown; crops milled or marketed; shambas watered; cattle watched and all the details of life without any modern conveniences attended to. It’s a hard life with no luxuries, except that of human warmth and neighbourliness.

It’s just the sort of day I enjoy. We walk the red dust tracks and trails, wander in and out of village compounds, shake hands endlessly and hear the news as we go, although William seldom engages in gossip: he’s too aware of the value of the respect in which he is generally held for his integrity. He’s a thoroughly decent man, and respected along the plateau for his honesty and probity.

Three hours or more of walking and then back to the pleasant gardens of a bar on the upper side of the long curling road from Iten up above to the sweltering Kerio Valley down below. We enjoy our conversation. I enjoy adding even more smiling African portraits to my already extensive collection.

*

An Englishman, Robin, arrived at Lelin this afternoon. He lives in Nairobi, with an Italian wife and two children. He’s a keen paraglider and sometimes stays here in Kessup for a few days. He joined William and I for a beer after supper. He’s a water engineer and gets contracts with various NGOs. His father used to live in Blackawton, some five or six miles from Harberton! He has probably drunk in the Church House Inn. The old saw: a small world.

Rico texts me to tell me the Mosquito log book will be ready for collection in Eldoret in seven days from now! Astonishing: it’s only taken a bit over a year.

DAY 69 SATURDAY 27th JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

Each time I think that I may be repeating the experiences of this journey, I find it turns into something new. I rode back from Kessup to Kitale, partly by the routes that have become familiar, but knowing that I could find other ‘roads’ that weren’t on my map. It was yet another wonderful ride.

The Cheringani Hills are delightful, and high and complex in their routes. For a place that is so highly fertile and heavily farmed there are, of course, many small tracks that carry the goods to market and the people to their shambas and wood and zinc homes. I set off on the now familiar road to the north, up onto the cliff top at Iten, then on towards the hills. Ten miles on, the road turns to red dust, settled by a brief heavy shower yesterday afternoon, making the experience so much more comfortable. Then, for a few miles, there’s a fine piece of tar road, completely unconnected to any other (this often means a member of government lives nearby in these countries!). At Cherongei, I turn onto the beginning of the grandly named Cheringani Highway, which is slowly being constructed from the other end, but from my end is a rocky red track winding into the hills through old conifers, twisted and dark and majestic. Small villages pass, shacks of timber, zinc and dust, and I am never far from people, for every negotiable inch of the land is utilised: this is Africa, with its vast and growing population.

Somewhere in the hills, at a dusty junction, the boda-boda boys, whom I use for information on the trails and roads, for they are plying them constantly on their little overloaded bikes, waved at a pale dust road weaving off to the left. Kapcherop was that way, and Cheringani town and Kitale would eventually follow. I rode on, through the fine scenery of the cultivated hills, people waving and smiling at the mzungu. I had a strong impression that smiling mzungus on piki-pikis are a rarity up here – in fact, mzungus in any mood are seldom seen.

I stopped at a wayside village, little more than a couple of rows of bare, weathered timber and rusty zinc shacks housing tiny threadbare shops, most of them stocking the same items: soap, matches, tea, candles, plastic shoes, a few local vegetables, some faded second hand clothes (this is where the rejects from Western charity shops end up), loose cigarettes, old biscuits and lurid snacks and products, all still packaged in plastic despite the plastic bag ban and the laudable drive to limit the plastic content of Kenya’s countryside, animals and soils. One or two shacks have the word ‘hotel’ written in wobbly paint across the corrugated walls. Here you can get some broken bones of the tough goats that have scavenged these mean villages and pretty hillsides until they end up in a pot, with dry ughali and peppery soup, served on plastic plates, dull and scratched from use. Here too I can get mugs of over-sweet tea for seven pence, poured this time from a vast aluminium kettle that is kept just on the boil all day long.

This was Kibigos, a village like all the others: two lines of simple shacks, several large tin churches of ridiculous ‘pastors’- the best structures of the villages locked and shuttered for most of the week (many paid for by fundamentalist Americans to bring ‘enlightenment’ to the ‘natives’); a local government office, some drooping electricity lines on crooked poles, weaving their way up from the valley; dusty verges and brightly decorated, dented boda-bodas leaning in the dust waiting for passengers or loads. There are boda-bodas everywhere, for where – even a few years ago – people would walk these dust roads with their loads, they now all go on the backs of small motorbikes, the driver seated with his balls on the tank, with up to four people behind him on the small 100cc machines. They get them everywhere, and I often gain confidence as I shake and weave over these rocky tracks, to think that if they can do it four up, I can do it one up! I am told the name comes from the fact that most of these services began on the Kenya/ Uganda border and the cry was “Border! Border!”

Taking my tea to sit outside the dingy lock up ‘hotel’ under the shade of the tin awning, I sat on a wooden bench on logs with my chipped enamel mug. Another seat, six feet in front of me on the dusty slope to the road, was soon filled with seven or eight men and children, come to gaze at the passing mystery. In these tiny, out of the way places education levels are low and few are confident to speak to me, but they smile shyly and happily when I greet them. Eventually, always, someone with better confidence in English will approach. In Kibigos it was Edwin, who asked the inevitable questions: my name, where from, to where, which football team do I support: all the answers that, after I leave, will be disseminated to the gathered crowd. The tea is sickly sweet and milky, but it hardly matters: I have stopped for the moment, here in Kibigos. It’s the experience of the warmth and curiosity that re-energises me, as much as the rest I need from the beating road or the energy from the tea. Filthy but happily smiling children smile from behind shy hands; everyone is dressed in tattered jackets and anoraks and woolly hats up here. There’s a strong smell of not very well washed bodies used to manual labour. Being Saturday – or maybe Kibigos is always thus – there are people lounging about everywhere watching the most interesting event of the day – until, of course, that is, one of the scrappy ‘hotels’ begins to relay the Premier League match of the day to the assembled fans, for football is without any doubt Britain’s biggest export to the world nowadays. Can it be called British any more, I wonder? For so much of soccer is now Big Business and international now, but it is still generally played on British fields and I often hear of current snow or rain in Manchester, Liverpool, Chelsea, and all the other towns that are now known the world around. I am often asked which town I come from, the assumption being that it will be Manchester, because the world knows where that is.

*

There were 42 miles of rock, dust and rut on that generally degraded road; about half the way was not tarmac. It was hard going, especially coming down from the hills. It always seems that Kitale is high – at 5630 feet – but my ride was MUCH higher, descending for many miles from those high beautiful ‘hills’, that, really, I’d call mountains! After 42 miles of this exercise I was weary and glad to be on smooth tar for the last miles back to the busy traffic of Saturday afternoon in Kitale.

Now I am back in the congenial company of my friends, beers with Rico on the porch as we wait for Adelight to come home from work at her tailoring business that, thanks to her spirit and capability, seems to be doing well as it grows. The eight Christmas puppies are now playing all around the compound under our feet, cheerful additions to already happy family life. Baby Maria, the happiest baby I know, plays in her cot beside Rico and I. We have a few jobs to do on the Mosquito tomorrow, then I must make plans – of sorts – for the next part of my safari, since Ethiopia is wiped off the possibilities. Doubtless, I will find other interests and pleasures in Uganda and maybe in Rwanda and Tanzania again. As I said when I started tonight, I am often afraid I am going to merely repeat my experiences – yet they always turn out to have new directions and new interests – and new people.