I’VE BEEN AWAY FROM INTERNET CONNECTION FOR TEN DAYS OR MORE, SO THERE WILL BE TWO JOURNALS TO CATCH UP ON! Next one tomorrow…

DAY 37. SUNDAY 2nd FEBRUARY 2019. SIPI, UGANDA

My memory of East Africa this year will be of red mud and warm welcomes. An awkward combination for a biker on safari. I’ve ridden back to Sipi to joyous excitement from my Uganda family. “Precious wasn’t able to sleep when she heard,” laughs Alex happily as we sit by a fire of old timber. “She was afraid for your ride in the mud! She thought it would be HARD!” Precious seems to find my age a matter for concern. I suppose that so few Ugandans even reach 70 that her elderly mzungu is a bit of a wonder. She fell on her knees to thank me and god in about equal measure and tell me that no Ugandan parent ever treats their children as I treat her and her family. Not surprising if you’ve seven, or nine, or fifteen, or twenty children in this country of such shocking statistics: 50% under the age of 15, the fastest growing population in the world, the ‘youngest’ country in the world, children everywhere I look. Some of this generous continent’s friendliest people heading towards a total planetary ecological disaster. Everyone’s ambition? More children (a gift from god) and more cattle (status). Mention any worry about the planet and the common answer is, “We’ll pray…” Hmmm.

With all the rain and slippery mud around, and more rain forecast, it was prudent to take the long way to Sipi, not the rough track through Suam border about which Precious was worrying, although it’s less than two thirds the distance. I knew there’d be mud and difficulties that way. The other route takes me on tar roads round three sides of Mount Elgon. About twelve o’clock back to nine o’clock on the map, instead of twelve to nine anti-clockwise. I set off south from Kitale, turning off the main road onto a tarred short cut that takes me past Adelight’s mother’s house, an hour from Kitale, where I was commissioned to deliver a couple of kilos of milk powder to Adelight’s junior brother, Tito, waiting for me at the roadside. That done, I carried on towards the Uganda border, a huge, tedious crossing that carries all the commercial traffic from the ports of Kenya up to the interior of the continent, Uganda and Rwanda and even Congo.

I rolled along, the rain clouds always just far enough away that I kept largely dry. I bowled through rural Chwele, enjoying a tar road. Soon I expected to turn right at a major junction onto the main east-west highway before riding west to the border. Imagine then my surprise to approach a broken gate across the road and a sign, ‘stop for transit’. I had reached Lwakhakha, a remote border crossing I once used a few years ago, after a troublesome journey on footpaths so remote that I couldn’t believe I was on an international route! Now the road has been tarred all the way and somewhere I had taken a wrong turn. I was happy to save myself a number of miles and the big, tediously busy border post. But I remember this border for difficult bureaucracy – probably in search of bribes. So, after a long process, I was told that the ‘law’ allowed me only 14 days in Uganda with my motorbike. I’ve travelled in and out of the country on several occasions and every time been granted 30 days. Finally, I had to accept that I have fourteen days for my tour of the north. Actually, I didn’t want much more – and wasn’t paying a bribe on principle.

The addition of mud and a layer of dried streaky stains to everything along the road doesn’t do much for the attractiveness of the rural villages through which I pass. The crude structures that form most of the habitations en route aren’t beautiful on a sunny day. They’re particularly gloomy and repulsive in present conditions. Half finished, with construction stopping as soon as the building is useable, all decoration then halted, they are rough and ugly. And in this astonishingly populous country, they line most of the main roads. Now in Sipi, red mud is everywhere – on the slippery pathways and tracks, around all the houses, trodden across the floor of ‘Jonathan’s House’ – the original round room of Alex’s Rock Gardens guest house – and ingrained on all the people. Delightful Precious’s once-white skirt, as I write this morning, is patchy brown and stained to grubbiness. She’s two mud-covered toddlers clambering over her all day long. The two children are filthy, like every one of their compatriots just now. It’s a filthy life in Africa when it rains! It’s an absolute wonder that Precious gets the sheets so sparklingly white that they could be laid on a bed in the best Kampala international hotel! How she’s done that I have no idea.

From the border on the Ugandan side, the road will be some time before completion. I had to struggle and slip through five kilometres of thick, greasy mud of the road building project before finding packed earth and eventually tar again, to bring me to the hectic regional town of Mbale, a most unappealing place with more boda-boda motorbikes swarming the streets like ants than any other town in Africa, except perhaps the crazy, congested capital, Kampala – a scene that must be seen to be believed. And once seen, is best forgotten and avoided if possible! Today, Sunday, is the last day of the school holidays and all of Uganda appeared to be shopping in Mbale. The town was packed with pedestrians and wayward boda-bodas, weaving through broken streets, competing with badly driven cars. Uganda has arguably the worst drivers in Africa. And as for boda-bodas, they are dangerous in the extreme, competing for business – an overload of three passengers here and vast load there – on their 100cc Chinese motorbikes. No one has any training or road sense. Many die. I must ride with eyes like a hawk. Sadly, few others of my two wheeled friends do the same. I watched an accident happen as I rode through Mbale, actually anticipating the collision. Two riders rode along looking at the back of the car close in front of them. As I (who looks ahead) had the thought, ‘that car in front will stop in about 15 seconds’, and held back, the driver stopped and both motorbikes piled into the back of it, tumbled in a heap in the road, with the rear decorative bumper of the car hanging drunkenly. I rode around the whole mess, watching with wry amusement as the well-dressed Haji moslem driver pulled over to begin what I expect was a long harangue with two shamefaced boda-boda riders, now picking themselves up from the road as hundreds more weaved around the heap! I was happy to leave Mbale behind, as I’ve always been when using that road.

The temperature drops several degrees as I ride up the escarpment towards Sipi, several hundred metres above the valley. It’s a steep, winding climb onto the wooded hills, bananas and coffee everywhere, tall eucalyptus towering above the rocky precipices. The final trail to Rock Gardens is the worst track of all, heavy sticky clay on which to slither the final kilometre, my tyre tread filling to provide a greasy slick.

The last two hundred yards, and Precious has been listening for the engine. She comes running, arms waving, exclamations rushing, to hug me as I reach the slowly progressing resort. Some day, these two delightful, hard working, diligent young people will be independent. Alex dreams of his new hotel. If anyone can achieve their dreams, it will be these two. It won’t take much, that’s the saddest thing. Telling Alex of the (surprise) corporation tax bill I just paid (I’d forgotten to pay the last two years, my accountant emailed me to tell me! Huh!), he exclaimed, “Just think what that money could do here!” It could have set up this young family for life, a life independent of crooked, exploitative employers, a chance to build their dreams into reality and become a charming place to stay for Ugandans and visitors alike. I’d so much rather my tax pounds supported people with dreams than completely useless nuclear submarines that can never be used, pointless Brexit negotiations and high speed trains that’ll cut 20 minutes off over-paid executives’ travel time to Birmingham. Sadly, no one has the foresight to include my choice in my corporation tax payments!

Since we were all here three weeks ago, Alex has painted the walls of the rooms, planted more shrubs and is collecting stones to lay on the paths around the property. He’s employing some of the local boys. They need money to buy schoolbooks, so he’s paying them 5 pence a bucket for stones collected around the fields! A steady flow of small boys arrives as we greet and chatter, plastic containers on their heads, and rattle the stones onto the growing pile.

But there’s mud everywhere. It’s horrid, greasy mud. If I could have paid my tax to this business as a charitable gift, we could go and purchase doormats, pebbles for pathways and so many more useful items towards their eventual independence! Alex shows me the first signboard he’s had painted, awaiting the resources to declare his guest house and restaurant and bar open. It’s well painted by ‘artist Jonah’, it says in one corner. ‘Welcome to Rock Gardens. Enter as a guest, leave as a friend’. It has a picture of one of the round houses, a silhouette of Mount Elgon superimposed, and a depiction of a rider on a motorbike across Mount Elgon. That’s me! I joke that it should also read: ‘enter thin, leave fat’, anticipating Precious’s overestimation of my appetite, so much smaller than hers.

I do love these two young folk. What a happy chances I have to meet such delightful, honest, inspiring youngsters across the world. We sit until midnight beside a fire – slow to get going with all the wet wood around – and talk after dinner. I have my two bottles of beer, Alex and Precious make copious amounts of tea. Little Keilah, about three and no longer terrified of her mzungu granddad, falls asleep on her feet, her torso laid across the seat of one of the ubiquitous Chinese plastic chairs. Jonathan Junior, already nicknamed JB, scavenges in the mud and muck around our feet by the firelight, apparently eating dust from a dropped spoon.

Young Innocent, a willing lad Alex has drafted in to help about the house while he is exploited by his unpleasant employer (who hasn’t paid any wages this month and is trying to persuade Alex to lay off staff, an instruction he is resisting), Innocent plays some game on his phone, the blue light reflecting off his young shiny face. We are peaceful and content – even if I’m a bit tired and would really rather be in bed by now. But Precious and Alex want to maximise their time with ‘Alex’s rich mzungu’, his ironic name that came from his jealous cousins’ and ex-business partners’ (except they weren’t partners…) suspicion that I was staying ‘months’ in their resort while he took my money! The rumour was spread by envious relatives, who resent someone with determination and dreams. Alex is well off out of that business deal. He’ll make out on his own, although there will be many challenges on the way. He knows that and is cheerfully confident. “Oh, we’ll get customers! Already I have people from Kampala asking when I will be ready. You see, they come and like Rock Gardens, but they want showers and toilets.” It’s only the ‘rich mzungu’ who prefers the good company and is willing to accept a wash down in a bucket and is content with a hole in the floor!

DAY 38. MONDAY 3rd FEBRUARY 2019. SIPI, UGANDA

Rain, rain, rain! What a ‘dry’ season this is. Miserable, lashing rain, mud, mud, mud. It’s very unattractive. The heavy undergrowth drips, the light is grey, brown spreads everywhere.

A calm, damp, grey morning at home with my charming Ugandan family, then, just as Precious, who has such a prodigious appetite, announced that she had made another meal, Alex saved me by suggesting a walk to get appetite ourselves. So we set off for rather a long walk. Perhaps a somewhat foolhardy one, in the circumstances – that is the family elder with a weak and damaged ankle…

We walked, I guess, some 9 or 10 kilometres on the roughest, mountainous ground. That might have been OK, had the mountainous ground not been as slippery as ice and my shoes with tread that is fine on dry ground but like slicks on Sipi’s escarpment footpaths and wet grass. Tonight my ankle is stressed, but – kill or cure – taking the strain. But now, as I sit by the cooking fire in what will one day be Rock Garden’s bar, but is now a damp, muddy corner beneath the tin roof of the upper level restaurant, equally unfinished, I have that ingrained sense of dampness that comes from constant, heavy rain. Rain through which I stumbled and slipped for some hours. My clothes are filled with mud stains and generally wet, my mood only made positive by the company around me as Precious and Innocent and Alex prepare our supper. I’m helped by a bottle of beer…

DAY 39. TUESDAY 4th FEBRUARY 2019. MOROTO, UGANDA

I thought I had learned: never ask a non-driver for directions or the condition of the road. “Oh, it’s a good road! Good murram until Nakapiripirit, then a fine highway. Tar! No, it’ll be no problem. You’ll be in Moroto in three hours!”

Yeah… ‘Good road’… Huh.

A couple of times today I doubted my sanity. Why the ****** was I doing this? What was I proving? To whom? Why, anyway? Well, of course the only answer is to myself, proving I could do it, despite my anxiety. It’s all about challenging myself and overcoming. How utterly stupid! But, you see, I sit here hours later, as the sun sets, with a Nile Special before me, and I think to myself, ‘I did it’. I battered down my fear of breakdown (ever-present as I ride); I managed to ride a horribly difficult trail (that was supposed to be such a ‘good road’), and I overcame my fear of the remote road and the unknown ahead. I could have faced worse in front, after all; it might lead to even more difficulties.

What I had to deal with was challenge enough. Two of the worst stretches of deep, slippery, cloying mud I have ridden through in many years. It might have been just about a passable road without the recent ceaseless rain. And of course, when I hit the two mud baths, there were plenty of helpers and watchers. Stuck cars and trucks wallowing in deep mud is a big attraction out in the remote bush – that is never so remote in an over populated country like Uganda that there aren’t people hidden in their stick, earth and thatch houses, camouflaged in the landscape. People with nothing better to do than sit and watch and hope for a few shillings for pushing a mzungu through deep mud and filth. And the old ‘mzee’ can still do it! Even with a dicky leg. Mind you, I bet I’m asleep by 8.30 tonight! I am utterly and totally exhausted.

So what was it all in aid of? I’ve decided to investigate a bit of northern Uganda, the Karamajong area that reaches up to the Sudanese border. It’s a region long aloof from the rest of Uganda, frequently troubled in the past and always kept remote from the more cosmopolitan areas of the south of the country. It’s ‘here be dragons’ country. Has it’s own lifestyle and a number of indigenous tribes; cattle herders, who not so long ago were so remote that they even went naked. Tribal Africa. Far from ‘civilisation’. Aggressive by reputation. ‘Different’. Now that’s changed of course. I find, on arrival at Moroto, that there’s now a sweeping tarmac road all the way south to Kampala! Why didn’t you come via Soroti?” I am asked, now I’m here – by Nakapiripirit. “Oh! That road is terrrrible!” Yeah, I know. Now.

I didn’t come by Soroti because I didn’t bloody well know! And because I’d probably have challenged myself if I had…

I slept like a log in Jonathan’s House in Alex’s Rock Gardens (named after Rock Cottage, Harberton) and enjoyed a relaxed breakfast amongst my family. Little Keilah, now about three, who was terrified of the white man only a year ago, is now familiar and fascinated, stroking the hairs on my arm and playing with my pink fingers. Little Jonathan, the junior ‘JB’, is a cheerful, wilful child of 14 months. They are dressed in filthy rags, not through poverty or lack of care, but because they live and play in red mud, dust and stones. It’s a squalid but very natural African childhood. I doubt they’ll ever indulge allergies or become addicted to ‘devices’.

Family photo duty done, I was on the (slippery) road from their gardens about 11. I’d watched the clouds burning off the vast valley below, where we can gaze 100 miles west over Uganda. I knew it’d be warmer down at the lower altitudes. Sipi sits in cool air at 1800 metres, refreshing when I come in a normal dry season – but chilly in this worrying year.

Soon I was on the limitless plain that makes up much of this country. At the foot of the mountains, I turned right onto the murram road to the far north. Murram is merely rock, gravel and dust. In good conditions – which these weren’t – I can ride along at 50 miles an hour. After the endless heavy rains, I was lucky to make 30mph amongst slippery ruts and muddy puddles. But all was going well. In Uganda you seldom leave behind people and ribbon villages, muddy trading centres and idle men. There are children everywhere I look. This week they should be in school, but many fall through the educational system cracks. They’re children of huge poor families and must tend the family cattle, their wealth. School and education is a luxury that few afford or respect out here. Many don’t even see the use of it. Why do you need education when generations have herded their cattle without it? And who’s to check? We’re a long way from inspectors out here. This is remote Uganda and it obeys different rules. Or makes its own.

With care, the ‘road’ was bearable. A few big mud lakes and a lot of slippery filth, but nothing formidable. After an ugly, mud bathed, spreadeagled village, I rode into the Pian-Upe Wildlife Reserve. The track deteriorated. The mud became more frequent. I was crossing a large, bush-covered plain, steep mountains to my right, clouds huddling amongst the rocky peaks. I passed the camp headquarters. Waved at a pointless ‘revenue barrier’ as I passed. Saw a crowd gathered a few hundred yards in front. Lorries blocking the track. Villagers rubbernecking a car that was slithering and struggling, its near side buried nearly roof high in a huge embankment of red, slimy mud, the bonnet blathered in red mud, the driver looking a bit wildly desperate, at an extreme angle as mud arced over his once-white vehicle. It seemed to me that he’d be there for some time yet, a line of ancient trucks impatient for their attempts. I guessed that on my piki-piki I might bypass the sorry mess on the narrow top of the field embankment. I back-tracked, watched by an idle crowd, to a place where I could bounce through the ditch of filth that lined the mud bath and teetered my way, with great concentration, past the obstacle. But now I had to get back to the muddy trail, through a deep ditch of red water and mud. I chose my place, slithered into the mire and promptly fell sideways into the ditch. I spent some minutes tonight washing red mud from my underpants! With the help of a few lads, and with my boots deep in slime, I was able to extricate myself from the mess and regain the mud slick of the ‘road’ – the ‘Oh, yes, Good Road’!

I was congratulating myself on getting through the obstacle, and fist-bump greeting a young man who’d helped to get me upright, when, with a big smile, he said, “Bad road ahead! Same like this!”

Half a mile further on, there was indeed an even worse mud hole. Another 100 yards of deep filth. But I’m an overland biker in Africa, aren’t I? Even if I’m a 70 year old fool too!

There was an occasion in the wet season in Tanzania when perhaps I was more filthy. I was brown just about all over that time. This time I was just bemired in red muck by the time I got through the second obstacle, with the help of a crowd of cheerful boys, pushing and correcting my sliding and slipping. They were rewarded with £1 or so of change from my pocket. Without them, I’d probably have drowned in mud!

Later, at a junction in the red mud road, I stopped to ask my way of a calm fellow with a ready smile. “Yes, keep going. You will find many corners but it will be stony and you will come to a FINE highway in Nakapiripirit!” Music to my ears by then, for I was becoming weary. So tired that ten minutes later I tumbled off the Mosquito on a stony hill and needed the help of a boda-boda passenger to lift my bike from the ditch. Sometimes, being a septuagenarian with an injured leg makes life a trifle more complex!

Well, after 60 of the most testing miles I have ridden for a year or two, I DID emerge onto a fine tar highway. Rather boring, actually. The second half of my 200 kilometre day was on a very lonely, sweeping tar road across a huge landscape, gazing down to limitless Ugandan bush country to a far distant horizon, dotted with old volcano cones. A storm threatened, off to my left, but only a few warning drops disturbed my ride, as I watched anxiously the slashes of torrenting rain away to the west.

I reached Moroto about five or six HARD hours after leaving the family in Sipi. (“Oh, you’ll be in Moroto in three hours on your piki-piki!”). Thankfully, for I was now almost beyond rational thought, I had the recommendation of Wanda and Jorg to a hotel for the night, and arrived half-expected. I’ve a decent room in the quiet compound for less than £12, including breakfast. Now, after two Nile Specials and supper of chicken, chips and local greens, at 19.55, I’m heading for bed. A good day – now it’s ended.

And I proved – pathetically to myself – that I could do it, and there’s life in the old dog yet.

I had to send my pannier bags for repair. I’d caught one of them on part of a lorry as I struggled and slid to pass in the mud. No driver has the patience to wait at a sensible distance, they crowd together, one behind the other, blocking what little of the track is passable to anyone who may just be able to come the other way. Matthew, the guest house assistant, took the bags on a boda-boda back to town, where a cobbler stitched them up efficiently. It’s possible to repair anything in Africa – all those things we’d be told were beyond repair and we must buy new in our throw away culture. Those bags have been stitched back together in various places. It’s hard work for canvas bags, being trundled across the depredations of the African landscape. A couple of pounds, including transport and a tip to Matthew, extends their life again.

DAY 40. WEDNESDAY 5th FEBRUARY 2019. SOROTI, UGANDA

I’ve failed. The legendary JB obstinacy has been beaten – by a combination of climate change and rounders, rounders being the game I was playing on the beach when I tore my Achille’s tendon back in September. Climate change is a little more serious, of course, but my weak ankle is a very personal trial. I feel rather a deep sense of failure.

A problem of long, lone journeys – especially over boring, flat bush lands, is that there’s a tendency to fill the time with self-analysis, and to flagellate myself with criticism of weakness, increasing age, timidity and lack of stamina. Maybe I AM too old to be acting as I do? Maybe it’s just my injured leg, swollen by evening from sitting for hours on the bike, telling me to slow down?

By about one o’clock the African sun was completely veiled by cloud. Not those usual puffy white handkerchiefs drifting across the infinite blue dome of the equatorial sky, but grey-lined blankets that presage rain. I had by now turned off the new highway, a few miles from Moroto, onto the long piste to the north. I’d already, in the light of yesterday’s efforts, decided to limit my ride to reach only Kotido, little over 100 kilometres. But as I left the main tarred highway, I was setting off onto a circuit of gravel and earth roads that would take me over 650 kilometres of hard, rain deteriorated tracks. That’s 400 long miles. On my own. With probable slippery mud for parts of it. About twenty minutes into that journey, that would take me perhaps five days or more, the clouds ahead were thickening and boiling high into storm heads. I could see sharp showers to left and right. It was only a matter of time before left and right became ‘here’. I stopped. The piste – it really wasn’t a ‘road’ – was narrow and already broken, two deep ruts with a hard central ridge and muddy dips to either side. A false move, loss of concentration on my hours’ long journeys and I’d be in difficulties. It was very remote and would become far more so. I was on my own. Entirely alone. Yesterday, when I fell off the bike on a stony hill, I had difficulty in getting a footing with my damaged ankle, then got stuck with the weight of the bike on my leg – the bad one of course. I realised that my strength in that leg is compromised. In 650 kilometres of trails like this, I was pretty well bound to tumble off here and there if I hadn’t the strength to react rapidly.

It’s not as if I had to get across this region to get somewhere. I was here only from curiosity, to go and see the Karamajong people, a different tribal life, the old life of Africa, so seldom seen any more. A place where independent people follow their own traditions – as much as anyone with a mobile phone constantly in hand can be said to be following their own traditions, not those of the material world that has engulfed them so rapidly. I was riding merely to see what was there. 650 kilometres of potential risk – with the rewards of overcoming my own fears, of perhaps finding some interest amongst the peoples, seeing the lands of the remote north. With the risk of possible accidents that would be more severe with one 70 year old leg (the other being about 40!) that is so vulnerable. All this to extend the lines on my African maps.

Beaten, I turned round.

I rode back towards the new highway, back to more cosmopolitan Uganda. Away from rain – as I thought, only to ride through various light showers on my long, boring slog south to Soroti.

Soroti is a noisy, incredibly noisy, scruffy, busy regional town that I associate with perhaps one of the hottest nights of my East African safaris. I stayed here three years ago and sweated the night away on top of the bed. Tonight I am going to bed beneath a blanket. (It didn’t last, as I had to close the window to keep out the noise and sweated in a humid room).

In the north, as far as I went, which was just touching the edges of the tribal lands I wanted to see, I felt a distance and aloofness from the people I passed. There wasn’t the usual Ugandan welcome and waves. Children watched me without the usual passion, unresponsive. A reserve I don’t associate with this extremely friendly country. Approaching Soroti, the greetings began again. The people of the north have followed their own stars for long enough, cut off from the rest of the country, to have a self-determined spirit and insularity. Young women wear flared, pleated, above-the-knee-length skirts; the men barelegged, with a cloth tied about their waists or across their shoulders; a bizarre psychedelic Trilby hat with a long feather poking from the back, or slightly risible tall striped, knitted, flat-topped tubes, about six inches high, perched on the crown of their heads, with a narrow upturned brim. Odd thing, fashion. All men and boys carry a herding stick and most now, amongst these people who eschewed clothing nor so long ago, wear Uganda or Premiere League football strip shirts, ubiquitous phone company tee shirts or mtumba wear – Western charity rejects. Most clamp a mobile phone in that palm clutch that will probably become a genetic modification in future generations. Chances are, I wasn’t going to witness much remote ethnic culture anyway!

A strong blustery wind rose as I rode south, bored witless by the tedium of endless low bush country, dotted with thatch and earth homes, round huts with concentric circles of reed thatch. Countless muddy children everywhere. Endless herds of cows and goats wandering across my road. I did have the comfort of watching the clouds thicken and turn slate blue, building to storm clouds across the entire sky in my mirrors. I’d made the correct decision. One vehicle overtook me in 100 miles, and my Mosquito snails along at just 35 to 40mph. The road is so new that no one’s yet had the enterprise to open a petrol station or chai house along its entire length.

There’s obviously a plan to develop the region, perhaps to accommodate some of the ballooning population. I passed through several non-existent villages, no more than a road-sign and a few feeder roads onto the nearby bush. A few straggly villages whipped past, red dust, incomplete buildings, countless boda-bodas, the only desperate employment opportunity out there, where nothing happens from one week to the next and everyone scratches a near-poverty existence. ‘Educate a girl: you educate a nation’, urged one township. ‘Don’t sell your children. Send them to school’, exhorted another. ‘Sale’ being exchanging child daughters for dowry of cattle and money. Featureless semi slums of scruffy habitations. This frighteningly overpopulated land… My thoughts weren’t very positive.

Finally, almost asleep from boredom after several hours of this featureless road, I reached Soroti. Civilisation. It’s oddly attractive, despite its noise. It has a strong past Indian influence, with arcaded shops along the main street, through which klaxon heavy lorries and several thousand small smelly Chinese motorbikes. The Asians probably left during Idi Amin’s pogroms, and there are few Asian faces now. But the distinctive architectural style survives them. There are banks, regional offices, numerous clothes shops where pink mannequins stand sentry in the covered footpaths, petrol stations and hotels. An arcaded East African main street with Asian influence.

I found a smart £13 hotel on the main street and selected a top floor back room, away from the thoroughfare and klaxons. There’s even a lavatory seat. I’ve a balcony looking down into the yard behind the bank and overlooking the side streets, filled with boda-bodas and noise. I can see right across the town to the deep blue rain clouds boiling all around, 360 degrees of what should be African glare. And tonight there are no stars, just a stiff breeze arising from the rainy north where I should have been tonight. I had a new front tyre fitted in Moroto in preparation too. Fitted at ‘Karachi’s’ motorbike shop, owner, Ali from Pakistan.

The hotel regulations include the following directions:

* Guest room duvets, pillows, bed sheets, and towels are not for wiping shoes.
* The hotel does not allow fighting in the rooms as it can lead to destruction of the hotel property.
* When our staff is cleaning the guest room with or without a guest inside all doors MUST be open.
* Bringing of hazardous goods to the guest room is highly prohibited e.g. fuel explosives etc. In case of any tragedy a guest is fully liable to management’s.
* All hotel items (moveable property) e.g. bed sheets, pillows and their covers, duvets, TV remotes, towels etc, should be left in the rooms intact when checking out.

The Laundry Services price list tells me that washing knickers or pants (at over £1) is more expensive than washing a pair of jeans or washing and pressing a pair of bed sheets. It’s one of the most expensive itemised costs on the list. Only washing a duvet or blanket costs more than a pair of undies. It’s a cultural taboo to wash anyone else’s underwear in much of East Africa.

I am happy to see – on the hotel laundry list – that I could get a carpet cleaned for as little as £6.

A disappointing day, a feeling of frustration and a sense of failure. A feeling that this 2020 safari is more aimless than usual. Now I need to get that leg up and stop feeling sorry for myself! Not every journey, every moment, can be fascinating. And anyway, most of the satisfaction is retrospective! Maybe I’ll look back on this and create the stories of the adventures and highlights as usual. Forget the tedium and disappointments. Life’s pretty good at doing that.

And here’s the rain. Lightning too. Another big rolling storm. Dry season Africa.

DAY 41. THURSDAY 6th FEBRUARY 2019. SIPI, UGANDA

I awoke, weary, after a night of heavy persistent rain, thunder and lightning that put out all the lights and empowered a hammering diesel generator in the yard of the bank below my window. It roared from 10.00pm until 8.15 this morning, not even kept at bay by earplugs. The trials of a light sleeper.

My quite new hotel included breakfast in my £13 deal. Two waitresses looked after me, Rose and Angela. Angela was very zealous in her attention, whipping away my plates as I finished. Then: “How’s the White Horse Inn?” she ventured. Imagine my surprise. The White Horse Inn is a fine old colonial hotel on the other side of Uganda, a hotel into which I cheekily bargained my way on two enjoyable occasions. “Angela!” I exclaimed, memory pouring back. Both Rose and Angela worked there, but hailing from this district, have moved to the Town View Hotel here in Soroti. I even have a portrait of Angela in one of my photo books. The old hotel is in Kabale, in Uganda’s beautiful far western mountains, hundreds of miles across the country. And I am recognised two years later. Tourists who engage with hotel staff are uncommon in Africa. We get remembered. It turned out they remembered me from even earlier: the time I stayed a night in another hotel here in Soroti, where they both trained.

Riding away from the hotel – leaving the bed sheets, pillows and their covers, duvets, TV remotes, and towels intact in the room – the road south eastwards from Soroti back towards hectic Mbale is unexceptional, rolling through towns and villages ugly with mud stains and half completed structures. It crosses swampy lands filled with reed beds and glittering ponds of water. Away to the north lies a big straggly lake. Along the way, on the 100 miles back to the family in Sipi, I pass through the village of Television. I wonder how THAT got its name?

I’ve decided to retreat to Sipi. Maybe instead of risking the lone rides with a weak leg, I should get to know my charming Ugandan family better. This trip is taking on a different perspective to the others, more settled and slow owing to my injured leg. Frustrating for one usually so restless, but I must try to turn it to a positive instead.

DAY 26 – 31 WEDNESDAY/ MONDAY JANUARY 22/27, 2020. KITALE, KENYA

Apart from seemingly endless waiting – for my ankle and parts for my little motorbike, it appears that my role on this safari is bringing people together, introducing friends to one another. I introduced the Kitale family to Alex and Precious in Uganda. Then I introduced William to the Germans, Wanda and Jorg. Now I have introduced the Kitale family to Wanda and Jorg. Now they have introduced themselves to Alex and Precious. I seem to be the catalyst.

I carried my cheap phone about on Wednesday morning, expecting a message from my new German friends, met in the Kessup campsite/ guest house with their old Land Cruiser. We thought they might appear on Thursday. I’d drawn a map for them to find Rico and Adelight’s house. Mid-morning on Wednesday, they turned up at the gate unannounced – and were welcomed like old friends and became part of a happy family for two days. Everyone bonded well and we enjoyed a lot of warm conversation and contented times around the table, and both evenings round a camp fire and barbecue in the garden, the fire being an influence from Alex’s hospitality in Sipi last week. I reckon it might become a feature of warm evenings at home here in Kitale.

Wanda is in her mid-sixties, Jorg turning 60. They’ve travelled a great deal of Africa with that same obsession that hooked me since my first visit. They travel in their well fitted old car, sleeping and eating on board and making friends everywhere they go. Jorg and Rico are both mechanics and mad about old Land Cruisers. There’s been a lot of chatter round the subject! Meanwhile, Wanda is a warmhearted person who’s bonded with Adelight and the girls. They both engaged with little Maria cheerfully. Both evenings we made a fire and barbecued big meals. Adelight enjoys the opportunity to entertain. The girls uncomplainingly wash up and help prepare the meals, a vast wash up after the barbecues.

Meanwhile, my motorbike moves forward two steps and back one all the time. We’ve cleaned and fitted all the carburettor parts; put it back together and now we find that the small ‘key’ that fixes the magneto to the crank has failed. Rico spent much of a day making this part when we rebuilt the engine with the new cylinder and piston. It’s a tiny piece of very specific metal, about half the size of my little fingernail. Cor, Rico’s old Dutch friend, co-mechanic and neighbour, currently in Netherlands, but who took the Mosquito to bits with Rico, thinks they put it somewhere safely not to lose it! The old story. Rico doesn’t recollect that, but whoever is correct, it is lost. Now another one has to come from Nairobi…

So days pass. I left Harberton a month ago! Perhaps this has been the best for my ankle injury. I must just be philosophical and hope so – and exercise my new-found patience.

I received a message from Alex in Sipi after I texted him that Wanda and Jorg would look them up and that I had decided to travel to Uganda this year. I love the open way that Africans express themselves. Alex wrote:

‘Thanks papa! Seeing you very soon is so beautiful. We love you so much. I wish the two visit us! As we continue marketing, J you are the best! I know Precious will be happy to see you home. What can we be, where could we be! Ure our turning point. We are not ashamed to say that! Yours Alex’

I’m not sure if Wanda and Jorg stayed at Rock Gardens, but they went to greet the family. They sent photos.

Much to the girls’ horror, I announced that I would walk to town one afternoon. They are of the generation that does not even consider the concept of walking 6.5 kilometres, but waits for a boda-boda. What Wechiga in Ghana calls the ‘pick me there’ generation. My ankle benefitted from the exercise of walking in Kessup and here, with less muscular work, was swelling again. In fact, I walked a rather exhausting 10 or 11 kilometres, including a long slog about town searching for a petrol filter for my motorbike.

A couple of kilometres up the road, I was joined by Patrick. I love this friendly way in which people will introduce themselves and wish to walk with me. I’m seldom alone. Patrick lives with his grandmother down a dirt side road in a rural area and works when he can as a caddy at the Kitale Club. “But there aren’t many golfers… Sometimes I think I should go and try to find work at a bigger club, perhaps in Nairobi or Mombasa. But my grandmother is old. Some days I sit at the club all day with no players. But you know, unemployment is a problem here. I make enough to eat…” He was cheerful about his lot. Conversational and warmly welcoming. Maybe in his early 30s, a smiling face enhanced by one silver capped tooth. A short beard and an engaging manner, we walked the back road toward the Club gate, where he left me with many greetings, to go and sit and wait in hope of a few bob on the greens. “How will I contact with you?” Everyone wants a phone number. I gave him an email address instead. I know that these casual contacts will want to exchange endless friendly greetings once people have my number. “Oh, my phone is temporary!” I explain. Later I must extricate myself from Baraza, a boda-boda driver who carried me home the last half of the return journey, when I realised that my walk had become the shambling, exhausted, rather limping gait of an old man!

There’s a funeral company in town, ‘Delight Funerals’. They have an odd six-wheeled, glazed trailer that is towed behind a hearse – a shiny black minibus emblazoned with prayers and decorated with large purple bows. As I walked along the wide scrubby area beside the narrow, busy road into the town, I passed a number of well dressed people standing about by waiting cars. Wondering what was afoot, I looked around – and saw the Delight Funerals’ trailer having emergency welding done to the tow bar behind the purple-bowed hearse. Complete with coffin and flowers in the trailer! I was reminded of the way that a matatu never fills with fuel until it has collected its full compliment of passengers and their fares. Every minibus journey begins by pulling in to a petrol station. Hand to mouth is Africa’s normal economic mode.

On Saturday, again I took a long walk, this time through the fields and countryside that starts just beyond Rico and Adelight’s home, here on the edge of Kitale. I was a source of amazement for families in their rural houses. It’s not often a mzungu walks in those fields. Everyone is universally polite, even the choruses of calling children who gather wherever I wander. It’s a fallow time out in those fields, a tractor and plough turning the soil for a new season. But will that season be reliable this year? Now rainclouds gather and occasional showers fall, even here. Down to the east, towards Nairobi and Tanzania the rains still fall heavily, and floods inundate housing and farms. This is the dry season… There’s a a seventy year record plagues of locusts in parts of Kenya, the parts across which I rode last year, through the deserts of the north. It’s caused by the extraordinary changes in climate this year and will further devastate crops and threaten survival. Africa is the smallest creator of greenhouse gases but will bear the brunt of the greedy nations’ changes to our planet’s fragile conditions. It’s happening already, if you look. But little of the world’s media tells anything of this beleaguered continent. Poor Africa: out of sight, out of mind…

On Sunday, my third Nairobi parcel still had NOT arrived in Kitale. We had confirmation that it was sent on Saturday, but it did not arrive up here – or quite likely WAS in the collection office all the time but no one looked well enough. So another day passed with me twiddling my thumbs, Africa fashion. That day I walked the six and a half kilometres back from town.

It’s Monday morning now, and after many attempts to connect with the bus company office in town – Adelight finally resorting to sending a town boda-boda rider she knows – they confirm that the tiny part is now in. We’ll head out and collect it and then today Rico will reconstruct the bike and perhaps tomorrow I can set off on my 2020 African safari. On day 32… Four and a half weeks since I left home.

On Monday evening I am updating during heavy persistent rain, lying in bed with the comforting sound of the rain on the tin roof of Jonathan’s House, here in the Kitale compound. Comforting until I remember that I am here for a motorbike safari! And this in the dry season. It’s been raining, following a rolling thunderstorm, for a couple of hours. By good fortune we had a barbecue on the porch tonight.

My Mosquito flies again! The minuscule piece of metal, a third the size of your little fingernail, arrived on the morning bus from Nairobi. Rico duly fitted it in the engine and later I took a cheerful test ride. All is well and the little bike is healthy again. In fact, it’s probably the healthiest it has been since I owned it. After all, it has over £450 of new parts in it!

I’m trying to make a habit of a decent walk each day. I’ve walked the 6.5km to town, and the 6.5km back. I walked another 5 or 6km on Saturday and a further 5 or so today. This time I took the red dirt road that leaves the main road near the house. It goes to a distant village called Ndalu, about 15 kilometres to the east, a boda-boda man told me. I just plodded to the first village, being greeted by everyone and, on the way back, invited to coffee in Ben’s house, a rambling, slightly ill-kempt compound of earth buildings. His wife, Milka, made me a mug of very sweet, thin Somalian coffee in a saucepan over the gas bottle. Ben likes visitors, he insisted. A somewhat beer-bellied man in his late fifties, he worked for a Swiss charity encouraging sanitation in villages around the small town of Turbo, fifty miles away, a town memorable to me for the worst road in East Africa. The potholes, filled with dust, were feet deep and unavoidable, even on my motorbike.

Ben ‘decided to leave’ his employment – which probably means the project, or his contract with it, ended. He returned to ‘carry on his own business’, usually Africa-speak for not doing much and making ends meet by selling the milk from his cows and cultivating his shamba. “I plan to build a decent house across the road on my farm! Then you won’t have to rent a place to stay. You can come and stay with Ben!” This to a complete stranger ten minutes before. It’s always very engaging, life in rural Africa. He was very proud of his time as a local councillor and pleased to name-drop some of his ‘very good friends’, the local MPs and officials. A kindly man, we sat in his dark, earth-walled living room, the usual collection of old settees covered in cloths and blankets, a small TV on the common multi-doored sideboard. A small round woman, his mother, is 90, he told me, as she bustled in with polite greetings. “You should watch her work! I leave her part of my farm for her vegetables. She says it keeps her young!”

Now that my piki-piki is finally complete, mended and running perhaps as never before, the weather is dreadful! In the evening the rain started in earnest, with lightning rolling about behind heavy clouds. This is forecast for several days. This in the ‘dry’ season.

Tomorrow I shall return to Kessup for a test ride. I don’t want to go to Uganda (where it’s also raining) until I am sure of my wheels. Kessup’s a convenient distance and I know I am assured of a warm welcome.

DAYS 32/33 TUESDAY/WEDNESDAY JANUARY 28/29th, 2020. KESSUP, KENYA

Back to Kessup for a shake down ride with my newly improved Mosquito. At last it is running very well, thanks to Rico’s expertise. It’s probably more reliable than it’s been since I bought it four years ago. Today it ran well without any hesitation. All the new parts were worthwhile.

I always know I’ll be accorded a warm welcome here at the Lelin Campsite and Guest House. The staff know me well now, and William makes sure his guest is ‘com-for-tible’ every visit, bargaining the prices down for a regular customer.

The weather, though, leaves a lot to be desired, when compared with my usual hot African sunshine. I arrived dry but this evening it is raining steadily once again. It’s also cold. Well, not cold by northern European standards for January, but probably no more than 20 or 21 degrees, with a keen wind, that usually dies down after sunset. This evening, in our outdoor sun shelter, we needed a charcoal brazier beneath the table and a light blanket around my shoulders as we ate supper. Riding up towards Iten, I hd to stop to don my waterproof jacket against the high altitude chill, on top of a tee shirt, light jersey, fleece jerkin and riding jacket!

This is a good ride for a test of my machine. Just 125 kilometres (75 miles) on quiet roads. Now it’s 8.00 and I am already in bed, with the susurration of rain on the roof and the vast cleft in the earth below my windows deadly silent except for the whisper of the rain.

The reason I am very diligent about keeping covered up on my motorbike – gloves on, jacket zipped, skin covered – is flying insects, with which I sometimes intercept painfully. Riding out of Kitale into the country, I collided with a wild bee of some sort. It stung me on my throat. I now have a large and very itchy wattle like a turkey. One day, years ago in Zimbabwe, a bee was scooped up in my sleeve and stung me on the forearm, which swelled dramatically to fill my jacket. A few days later, I rode into a swarm of similar bees. I stopped quickly to brush perhaps 40 or more bees from my jacket front – thankfully well zipped despite the extreme heat. That lot could have killed me! The guest house manager just passed (I’m writing as I await my breakfast) and asked after my night. I complained of the very irritable lump under my chin.

“Oh! So you need antibiotic..?” So began one of my African rants about the misuse of the wonder drug of my lifetime, prescribed by unqualified salespeople masquerading as ‘pharmacists’, issuing what would elsewhere be prescription drugs. What I actually need is to find an old woman who still knows which leaves to boil up to make an effective antihistamine drug. Maybe William and I will find one on our walk today down in the – now rather muddy – village paths. Knowledge being fast forgotten as people flock to the panacea of ‘modern’ medicine.

The ‘whisper of rain’ about which I wrote last night, continued for hours, becoming a drumming of rain, heavy powerful rain. Thunder rolled across the great valley and this morning the nearby river that tumbles down from the high cliffs is roaring. This year is the first time I ever heard or saw it do more than trickle. We are in the height of the dry season. How long will it take for the climate change deniers to face facts? DRY season Africa with torrential rain?

“We’ve never known it to rain like this in January,” says everyone, as the rain torrents down in the evening after a rather disgustingly humid day. The rain thunders on my roof again tonight and thick fog disguises the entire gardens of the guest house. It’s just horrible.

Today, Wednesday, William and I made our usual activity of walking the village paths and tracks, meeting people, invited into shambas and compounds, chatting with these country people amongst their green farms. The great valley steamed below us, greener than normal. We drank fibrous, sour bulsa, the local maize beer, from tin mugs, sitting on a grassy slope above Caro’s earth and zinc houses, surrounded by onion fields and avocado trees. We walked in Kewapsoss this time, the village area to the immediate north of Kessup on the plateau. It’s a fertile part of the plateau, but William says it’s poor because transport to market and distance from the mountain water makes for logistical problems. But it’s a handsome area for a mzungu tourist to explore, green, cultivated and filled with mature trees. A pleasant walk.

William has malaria today, so we walked via a small village dispensary where he could get free treatment – a pin prick blood test and a course of chloroquine tablets for the next three days. The clinic was oddly sited on a sharp hilltop, a simple place with a nurse on duty and half a dozen patients waiting on benches in the lobby, amused to be joined for a while by a mzungu. Schoolchildren chorus at me and William says, “They never saw a mzungu before! Only perhaps in pictures!” What fun it is to give so much pleasure just by walking around these rural areas smiling and shaking hands!

But, oh dear, the rain pounding on my roof does rather depress me. I come to Africa to get away from gloom and wet. Making a piki-piki safari in rain, on mud roads, isn’t much fun. If this weather continues, I think I have to seriously consider my plans. And at present there’s no sign that it will not continue. “They say we will have a lot of rain in March,” says William as we walk…

It’s the dry season.

DAY 34 THURSDAY JANUARY 30th, 2020. KAPTAGAT, KENYA

Once again I am sitting by a roaring log fire in my room in the faded old colonial Kaptagat Hotel, a place of once smart bungalows ranged round a fine mature garden. A garden so loved of the British of former times. Kaptagat is high, over 2000 metres, and a fire is a pleasure up here. A fire of fragrant local cedar and pine trees. The fire is one of the few attributes of this old place, without running water and with antique candlewick bedspreads, vintage about 1950. My room is huge but the curtains also colonial vintage, the fireplace a confection of red bricks that might have been fashionable in a mock Tudor semi, back in British suburbia. But I have a fondness for the place, down its red mud road amongst the tall trees, back from the main road. It’s fun.

After a night of constant heavy rain, thundering on the roof of my Kessup room, rain such as no one has witnessed here in January before, a hundred waterfalls cascaded over the lip of the high cliffs at the top of the Great Rift escarpment, tumbling and foaming into the deep Kerio Valley a vertical mile below. This usually desert valley winked and shone with lakes and rivers running through what’s normally brown scrubland when I am here.

As I twist and wind down the great valley on a good road, the heat increases, even today after the night’s rain. It’s humid now, instead of the parched burned quality I know. Foggy clouds hang in the air above and roll and tumble over the cliff edges far far above. The scenery is green this year, enhanced by the gashes and streaks of falling water cutting through the dense growth.

Almost at the lowest point of the valley, where by now the trickle of the Kerio River must be a roaring torrent, I turn onto a trail I love. I found it a few journeys ago and make an excuse to go that way every visit now. It’s 26 lovely miles, climbing the apparently impossible terrain straight up into the clouds. For the first ten miles or so, it’s a sandy track through the bush country of the valley bottom, passing through a few small remote villages, where it’s difficult to imagine how anyone scratches a living from the unpromising terrain. I was forced to splash and wallow through tumbling rivers and streams where I have only seen dry dusty fords. At last I pass the ragged settlement of Kimwarer and its fluorspar mines, now redundant from reduced market, I am told later as I chat with men at the top of my ride. There’s a sentry on duty at a barrier, ostensibly for the security of the mine. He’s cheerful, doubtless I gladden a boring day for him. And now the rocky track begins to rise, the view becoming splendid as I climb, looking back across the huge valley and steeply up at the cloud-wreathed cliffs above. It’s incredible that a road actually attempts to clamber through such rocks and forest. It’s impossible to see how it gets up there, my neck craning at the near-vertical rock faces above. This rain-swept year there are many scars from recent rock falls, and banks of mud and rock are bulldozed to the sides of the trail. In a dramatic series of twists and hairpins, somehow the road battles its way through the improbable topography and eventually emerges into a small, busy village of shacks and booths, boda-bodas and the customary congregations of aimless men and busy women that comprise these scattered trading posts along the tar roads.

“Where can I get chai?” I call to the boggling boda-boda riders, astonished to see this old daddy appear from the depths on his ‘big’ bike. They direct me to one of the tin shacks nearby. Everyone is happy to greet me, full of questions and admiration for my ‘strong’ piki-piki – the smallest one I ever owned.

I enter the tin ‘hotel’ to a chorus of greetings and confusion of handshakes. Chairs are pulled forward. Smiles everywhere. I love this activity. It’s why I come. Soon I am sitting with three men at a plastic covered low table, a brown china mug filled to the brim – always to the absolute limit, so that I scald my fingers and spill the tea on the table – engaged in conversation, answering questions, enjoying the warmth of these happy people. There’s not a moment of threat or uncertainty, just welcome and generous warmth. I don’t even pay for my own tea! The gentleman sitting next to me with his plate of beans and chapati includes my tea in his payment before shaking my hand and continuing his journey. I am left to chat with Patrick, Kipkuru and smiling Kipsoisoi. We talk of politics and politicians and they want to know why Britain is leaving the EU tomorrow. Sadly, I cannot give a single good reason for that, only the stupidity and hubris of my shameful, arrogant country, many of whose inhabitants still think that Kenya is their empire and should feel grateful for our patronage!

It’s the company I stop for, more than the over-sweet, milky tea. If I don’t pause on my journeys they become just a series of great views, junctions and petrol stations. Kipkuru is the server in his corrugated ‘hotel’. The food looks sustaining and hot, served on plastic plates. There’s some smashed up goat, tasty looking brown beans, chopped chapati and some sort of pasties that look a bit anaemic. Were I hungry at lunchtime, I wouldn’t mind a dish of beans and chapati. There’s sawdust all over the rough boards of the floor, posters and calendars on the walls, that are covered in printed vinyl. Someone, maybe Kipkuru, has tried to make the place look smart, despite the obvious poverty of the situation. He walks through his low-roofed shack with a huge aluminium kettle of mixed tea, refilling my mug as he passes. The high mountain light enters through the door and holes in the tin walls and a single lightbulb adds some shadows. People are heavily dressed up here. It’s chilly in Nyaru. When I leave, I add my waterproof jacket to my warm clothing to protect my chest from the cold highland air.

As I write tonight, beside my flaming, aromatic fire, the rain starts again. I’ve pulled the Mosquito onto the bungalow porch tonight. It’s chilly and very dark, the clouds thick and any reflected light negligible. Ellen, the woman who looks after the rooms here, greeted me with a big hug like an old friend and brought two enormous logs for my fire. I sleep well here, a big bed and blanket beneath the candlewick, the embers of my fire – if these big logs ever burn down – filling the room with warmth and a comforting red glow. I’ll finish my Tusker and sleep.

DAY 35 FRIDAY JANUARY 31st, 2020. KITALE, KENYA

Just two years ago I rode the red dusty track that constituted the road from Iten to Kapenguria, a journey of about 60 miles. The latter third had been tarred into a magnificent twisting road through the high mountains, later with enormous vistas down towards the northern deserts of Kenya. I rode it again today. It’s smooth tar all the way. Much less attractive for an ‘adventure’ biker, of course, but doubtless welcomed by the inhabitants of the lovely Cherangani Mountains.

The only problem with the old hotel at Kaptagat, ignoring the fact that there’s no running water or lavatory seat, and the old fashioned quality of the fittings (that I find oddly quaint), is the bar. It’s a large, dark cavern of a room with a fireplace in which you could park the average car. Those aren’t its problems. They are the customers. It attracts many local men, slowly killing themselves and probably ruining their families by imbibing unwise quantities of cheap local spirits. I have to take my beer to my room. I was shocked as I walked into the garden to await my breakfast. A group of five men were already noisy and drunk, carrying two bottles of the stronger lager each. One man had finished a 33cl bottle of KK – harsh Kenya Kane rum (also called Kill me Kwik). It was 9.10 in the morning. I bet their wives were working hard, and their children suffering privations. The sadness of Africa: booze and lack of control from stupid men. Without women, Africa would grind to a halt. Two women swept an acre of grass clear of fallen leaves with small hand-brooms nearby. Inured to their lack of power on this continent and accustomed to their inferior social status – as their idiot menfolk drink themselves into early graves. I’d say ‘good riddance’, but they impoverish their families on the way down. Alcohol, the weakness of Africa.

After a breakfast of eggs and pancakes and an black, wrinkled sausage that might have been interred with an Egyptian pharaoh, I was on my way, using the new roads that have been spreading across the region for the past few years. I made my way back, across country, to Iten, the town above Kessup. Wikipedia tells me the name comes from a corruption of Hill Ten, as the early colonial explorer, Thompson, climbed and counted the various small free-standing peaks along the edge of the Rift Valley below the town.

Then it was off on the new highway to Kapenguria, a delightful ride through the expansive Cherangani Hills. The road climbs high. Iten itself is at 7900 feet (2400 metres) and the highway clambers considerably higher into the chilly dampness of the highlands. The day remained just about dry, not the usual sunny smiling scenery to which I am used at all. Up at the heights I was in cold cloud, pressed to wearing all my layers to keep warm. It’s a fine ride.

Home again to Kitale. I’ve spent a lot of time here this year, with my East African family. First the delays of getting the bike fettled, and now the heavy rains. Once again, tonight the rain cascades on my roof in a noisy tattoo. There’s really nowhere to go on a piki-piki, since I don’t have to, in such cold wetness.

There is hope that next week the weather will improve, but William informs me that the long term forecast for March is for plenty of rain. I rode home considering my next moves. For some time I’ve wondered about making this a two-centre trip by taking a diversion to South Africa. By chance, an email landed when I got home to internet connection, from Kenya Airways, with special deal of flight reductions to a ‘valued customer’. The flight I checked last week is now 20% cheaper. So I’ll fly to Johannesburg at the end of the month and spend a bit over three weeks in the south, enabling me to take a much longed for trip to Lesotho. Whether I’ll be able to arrange a motorbike remains to be seen.

As I upload this journal, soon after lunch on Saturday, the heavens have opened once again. It seldom rains lightly in Africa. As with every climatic force, Africa goes for the dramatic…

DAY 20 to 23. THURSDAY – SUNDAY JANUARY 16-19 2020. KESSUP, KENYA

Sometimes I think I’m one of the luckiest people around! Not only do I surround myself with congenial friends, but when my newly restored motorbike breaks down, it does so at the junction to the guest house I plan to reach, and the lane from there is downhill! For that’s how my afternoon finished: with my engine, which had been struggling for the final 30 kilometres, failing at the top of the rocky track to Lelin Campsite, my destination tonight. It’s not so much a campsite as a small, wonderfully situated ‘resort’ with chalet rooms, perched on the very edge of the vast Kerio Valley, a branch of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. I’ve stayed here many times and am welcomed back as an old friend.

I’ve come here to revisit my friend William, the retired policeman who’s been my companion in Kessup these past four years. I am ‘William’s Mzungu’, just as I am ‘Alex’s Rich Mzungu’. How fortunate I am to have these kind friends.

My journey began well enough. If you aren’t and have never been a biker, you won’t perhaps understand the sense of freedom and pleasure I felt to be setting off on a journey, having not ridden for over four months – apart from those two brief test rides up the road outside Rico’s house this week. So I set out with a smile on my face once again. A road I know well. Unexciting but quiet and with decent tarmac. And hundreds of boring speed humps, the obsession of Kenya’s Highway Authority. Maybe it keeps the speeds down for these many not very safe vehicles and bad drivers. They also cause a lot of mechanical damage and a few very serious accidents. The road sweeps in a large curve from the north of Kitale and heads to the north east, skirting the green mountains covered in dark conifers. It sweeps between some straggly towns and villages, past thousands of shambas and commercial farms, and is pleasantly rural much of the way, nipping past the northern outskirts of ugly, busy Eldoret quite quickly. Then it’s north in a steady rise towards Iten, ‘Home of Champions’, as the sign across the road at the entrance to town claims. Here are many training camps for international runners and Olympians, taking advantage of the high altitude at 7900 feet.

Through scruffy Iten, and by now I didn’t dare to stop for the ATM, for the bike was struggling seriously. And then one of the finest scenic reveals in East Africa. Round two tight bends the road drops steeply out of Iten with its untidy markets and dilapidated business buildings, to the very lip of the Rift Valley. Suddenly, the vista opens up across the depths of the Kerio Valley, thousands of feet below, scrubland and pale green expanses stretching far to the north, where they join the main Rift that splits the Earth from Mozambique to Jordan. It’s a memorable sight indeed. I still recollect my amazement the first time I came upon this theatrical reveal, back in 2001.

The Mosquito was struggling badly, losing power and gasping for fuel or air, it seemed. Downhill the symptoms reduced a little, so I kept rolling, knowing that my destination was several hundred feet lower, down the winding main road, the great view off to the left now. About four miles down I reach the rocky turn I need to bring me back to familiar Kessup. Right at the last, I decided to turn the bike and try a little venture uphill once more. Within moments the engine failed. At least all I had to do now was to freewheel to my destination, helped by enthusiastic pushing on the rocky track by a group of delightful schoolboys, thrilled to push the mzungu’s bike. Their glee was enough to lift my spirits at this latest upset. Dark blue jumpers over white shirts and dark shorts, their merriment and chatter accompanied me as I tried to slow them down to keep up! Then a slow bumpy roll down the track past William’s shamba so quietly that he didn’t hear me pass, even though he had been waiting with anticipation for the sound of the Mosquito.

What’s happened to my wheels? All those new parts and yet disaster. It sounds serious. I think repatriation to Kitale may be called for. At least I am now amongst friends who will assist in whatever way they can. I am a well known celebrity in these villages. Many of the people are featured on the portrait walls of Rock Cottage and I have just brought back a pile of prints that will be received with heartfelt friendship as William and make a regal tour tomorrow. It’s a response that I love – and one no tourist gets from their expensive animal safaris. To engage with people is why I am here. When I first met William it was in the guise of a local guide. Oddly, one of the first times I ever hired one. Instinct again? The then guest house manager, Chesoli, thought I might like a guide for a local walk. A favour to William, who lives on fresh air, his own vegetables and milk and yoghurt from his five cows and whatever his daughter, training to be a nurse in Australia sends him. “He’ll guide you to our waterfalls…”

When I met William I was immediately comfortable and later we bonded as friends. “I’m not interested in your waterfalls,” I said, “but I’d love to meet your neighbours! That’s much more interesting to me.” I found William to be a respected member of his rural community and his friendship has been my open sesame throughout the villages along this scenic plateau. I’ve been in many houses, met hundreds of his neighbours and am now ‘Kessup’s Mzungu’. “Oh, people have been asking, when is our mzungu coming?” says William within moments when we meet on the track past his small hillside shamba.

The bike parked, I decided to think no more about it for a day or two. I’ll probably have to get it back to Kitale somehow, so I may as well enjoy my sojourn in Kessup for now. My leg has coped with the ride, somewhat swollen now from the position for two and a half hours. Soon William and I were catching up in one of the small shelters overlooking the great valley, beers in hand. I sleep in my usual room, ‘Mexico’, in which I have stayed many nights now. William takes it as his personal responsibility to make sure his mzungu is looked after, harrying the staff with demands that, were he not a neighbour, me well known and the fact that I come to visit him brings them my custom, must irritate the management! The price for my room has not risen in three years, still under £12 for a simple room with a basic bathroom and a balcony room that overlooks the wonderful view below. Most places it’d cost a lot more – but then most places I guess there’d be a lavatory seat and less African foam green emulsion paint. But I like it here much better than those more pretentious places and, after all, what do I need but a bed, preferably clean, to lay my head and a door to lock out the world for eight hours?

Kessup’s mzungu is back.

***

“I thought I’d bring the stick that I use for my cows, but I knew you wouldn’t like it!” says William, arriving in the garden at breakfast time.

“No William! I’m not old enough for a stick! My pride won’t allow it. People here already think their white man is old as Methuselah!”

He’s brought an enamel mug of his cow’s ‘milik’. Fresh and delicious, it’s cool from the night. “My house is of wood, so it’s cool at night,” he explains. “I boiled it last night.” We are going to walk down in the villages below, greeting William’s neighbours and distributing photos. It’s to be a long walk, probably the longest I took in four months, apart maybe from struggling around Nairobi the other day. “We will go slowwly! For your foot!” William is very caring, like most of the Kenyans I’ve come to know. Solicitous for my comfort. Everything must be right for his mzungu.

William’s gangly, spare, a lined face a little distorted by the attack with a machete that made him end his police career. He was in the Flying Squad in Nairobi. Then in hospital for three months with the possibility of a brain operation. It was enough to make him decide to quit the violence of his job and return to his meagre shamba here in Kessup. His house is little more than a shack, his possessions few, comforts almost nil, except the flat screen satellite TV his daughter in Australia subsidised, partly as an alternative to alcohol, so that he can follow his revered Manchester City. He’s respected in the area, an upright citizen with a strong sense of honesty and fairness. He’s turning white about his sparse beard now, and white hairs appear in his receding hair. He’s 54 now. A calm, relaxed fellow who knows everyone on the plateau, and introduces me to most of them.

It’s a relaxed wander. “Oh, it will be HOT!” he exclaims, seeing me tie my thin jersey round my waist as we leave. But I explain that I am from England and we never take the weather for granted. Later I am grateful to throw the jersey over my neck to screen the burning sun. It IS hot! VERY hot, as we amble between small houses and shambas, shaking hands with hundreds, joking with children, being welcomed into fields and compounds, greeted and hailed as we walk. I add twenty or thirty portraits to my collection each day we walk, smiling, cheerful folk, happy to welcome ‘their mzungu’ again. It’s convivial and generous. Soon I have my pockets bulging with ripe passion fruits, a crop that seems to be being cultivating everywhere this year. Purple eggs filled with mysterious, slightly slimy but the sweetest pulp and seeds. This is fruit season in East Africa. Juice-dripping pineapples unlike any we know in Europe cost a pound. Mangoes are the sweetest and most succulent, about 15 pence each. Two ultimately delicious fruits.

I’ve brought back at least forty photos that we must hand out. It’s a great introduction of course. Invariably, I must take more. People are happy and pose cheerfully. It’s difficult in this beating, high sunshine, so near the Equator. I have to choose my locations carefully, otherwise all I get is a black silhouette – black faces against the squintingly dazzling landscape. Harsh light, strong contrast, black skins, white smiles.

We meet Maureen and Mercy; Rael and Purity. We meet cheerful ‘Lunch’. “Eh, even as a young boy, if you asked him where he was going, he would reply, ‘No, I am going for lunch’, so we gave him that name!” explains William with a laugh. Later, we meet Changwony – William’s 85 year old father; also Rongue, his senior by seven years. Old men here. Changwony’s senior brother is even older. “Maybe 100!” says William. Who knows? I often hear that people are “100”, but it’s difficult to know. It doesn’t matter. They receive the respect of their community, these rare old men. Rongue lives in a small earth house on a dusty terrace. He can’t walk any more and is looked after by his daughter and her husband, visited by legions of grandchildren, respected for his extreme age. He knows he was born in 1928, but not the month. He was a policeman too. We sit in his dark, stained bedroom. He sits on the iron bedstead, on somewhat unsavoury blankets. A kitten sleeps on the bed. Rongue has all his wits and even his eyes are sharp enough to enjoy my photos, even to laugh at the picture I take of him, viewed on the back of my camera. I got him to smile this year. Last year I got only a formal stare, these old people maybe only used to posed photos for colonial ID passes. No photographer ever came to Rongue’s simple house before. In the evening we send him two bottles of Coke via his daughter, a well received mark of respect, William says.

The children, Faith, Ruth, Cherile and Mercy are fascinated to be close to a mzungu who sits on a black rock on the edge of the great escarpment down to the usually parched Kerio Valley below. This year, it’s green and the lake in the middle, used by elephants and animals that roam down there in a small national reserve, has swelled to four times its size, now covered in dense green weed, visible from my vantage point up here amongst the children several miles away. The children are excited and touch my skin, feel the hair on my arms, stare at my blue eyes, exclaiming. Probably they never came close to white skin before, as they pull my ears and stroke my hair, giggling at their bravery. “There’s only a millimetre of difference!” I explain. But Purity, their mother, believes I am white all the way through! She’s astonished when I tell her that my blood is just as red as hers. She’s probably not very well educated. She lives in a crude compound that I can see far below, amongst usually arid fields. Her shamba is poor. I visited last year and wondered how anyone could live in such privation.

Education levels are very mixed here. It depends on the family. I meet one mother whose five children are all at university. Her last-born, a quiet youth, has just finished school with the highest marks in the region. He’s bound for university in due course too. In September, his mother tells me. She’s stopped briefly from weeding her flowers around her simple zinc and timber home. A well maintained compound, not many grow flowers around their homes. This is a family with keen intelligence and education. “The only thing you can do for your children is to educate them and make them independent!” she says. But I wonder why then she has five children?

Folk here in the villages have no idea of world affairs. Of fears of the climate crisis. To them, the resources of our ailing planet are infinite. They know nothing of global warming, the climate emergency, the depletion of their soils, contamination of their lands, overpopulation – the cause of their self-inflicted poverty. No one educates them of the consequences of having so many children. In fact, the opposite: the churches and mosques irresponsibly promulgate these high birth rates.

“Oh, I will have at least FIVE children!” says a young man, planting onion seedlings on a patch of red soil. “I must! It’s good to have many children. And if I don’t, who will inherit my land? How will I be remembered when I die?”

“But if you have two, you replace yourself and your wife, you can afford to educate them, keep them healthy, and you still carry on your ‘name’ and everyone has a better life…” He looks at me as if I am telling him a joke. It’s incomprehensible. Beyond belief. Madness. “…And if you have five children, they will each inherit just twenty percent of your land! If you have two they will have half each. If you have so many, and they have so many, they will end up with a piece of Kenya the size of this seed bed!”

Warnings of the heating planet mean nothing here. It’s always been hot. So what, if it gets a bit hotter? There’s no understanding that these conditions will be irreversible. That by the end of the century this land on which we are standing will be uninhabitable. That their great grandchildren (a generation here being about 18 years) will be suffering as no one has yet suffered in humankind.

In the West we may tinker with emissions targets and boast about ‘cleaner’ lifestyles, but while Africa – and the Indian Subcontinent, South East Asia, South America, and most of the world beyond the relatively educated ‘developed’ countries, keep up their exponential birth rates, there is no hope.

But the children here are charming and fun. Inquisitive, curious, cheerful. Happy to have a mzungu passing by. They chorus from distant hills and shambas, run to politely greet. Shake their fruit-sticky fingers in mine. These are happy wanderings for me.

And I’m feeling very upbeat about my ankle! This was to be the test, my time in Kessup. I have wondered for some weeks how I would cope with the very rough, broken surfaces of the red footpaths and tracks amongst the village shambas, even sometimes walking over broken fields and rock strewn hills. These days I walk many kilometres, usually at a gentle amble, but on rough, steep hilly surfaces. I’m careful where I put my foot but walk up and down the hills and across the expansive plateau. By the second long walk my ankle barely swells and suddenly I can stand on my toes – which I couldn’t do even four days ago! I have decided that I am trying for the three month recovery, not the six months that the physio nurse forecast! “Three to six months from removing the big boot,” she warned me, meaning doubtless, that a 70 year old might expect the longer time. I’m now nine weeks past that day. Well, here I am getting a LOT of gentle exercise, plenty of sun and no stress. These days have made more difference than the previous weeks. It may take many months to rebuild the muscles, but even now the limp is reducing – except when I am on the home straight of a long rugged walk. In the morning my ankles look equal, all swelling gone, but I hate the fact that I have one muscle-dwindled leg of an old man and one of a healthy middle aged man, but I’ll be working on that over the next weeks too!

No, William was right, no way am I using his cow stick!

***

People often ask me, “What do you DO in Africa?” Well, these days were typical. I met and talked to hundreds of charming village folk on the Kessup plateau, in scorching sunshine that has turned various bits of me beetroot red.

The resort here gets to be a noisy place on weekends. A busload of teenage schoolboys arrived on Sunday morning, trooping off their bus with respectful greetings for a school day out. Middle class families often come for a treat. A few sodas and a meal of potatoes and meat at tables in the gardens overlooking the fine views of Kerio Valley. Everyone is extremely polite. As I passed one family group, with a smile and a hello, one of the boys asked, almost as if he hadn’t really meant to be heard, “How old are you?”

“Seventy!” I replied cheerily.

“But you are looking so STRONG!” said Dave. “Look at us, we are 18 and already looking old! Give us some tips.”

It’s so disarming! How could I fail to be charmed by such politeness – let alone the compliment?! I gave Dave to usual ‘tips’ about exercise and diet. To those I add one more: to remain amongst young people. Easy in Africa. Dave was very charming in his interest and respect. How attractive that he was prepared to chat so unselfconsciously with an old bloke. What fun travelling in Africa is as an older person!

The only other guests staying in the Lelin Campsite are a very congenial older couple from Germany. Wanda is in her mid sixties, and her husband Jorg just turning sixty. They are travelling in a 20 year old German registered Land Cruiser, thoughtfully converted for African travel. Like me, they have been coming for three months a year for the past eight years, after shipping the car to Cape Town and now leaving it with friends in Tanzania, as I leave my Mosquito in Kitale. They’ve visited here at Kessup these last four years, and wander about East Africa for three months. We have, of course, many similarities in our attitudes to and love of things African. Wanda is an artist and Jorg a mechanic. We’ve travelled to MANY of the same places with remarkably similar tastes. Jorg first came to Africa 40 years ago, beating me by seven years. He crossed the Sahara as a 19 year old and they’ve travelled in many countries, obsessed by Africa – as can happen! I know only too well.

Long conversations ensued and we swapped ideas and routes. They have put me off the idea of Tanzania, telling me that the rains are extreme and flooding rampant. This should be the dry season… Instead, we have been talking of northern Uganda. Well, I enjoy the Ugandans very much and haven’t seen the proper north, tribal areas different to most of the country. When Wanda and Jorg come to Kitale in a few days, I shall introduce them to Rico and Adelight. They’ll find a lot of links!

Jorg asked if he could join William and I on our third long village wander. We walked six or seven miles on rough ground and rocky red tracks. We met and interacted with probably another 100 people, shaking hands with them all, joking and laughing together, invited into homes and compounds, investigating shambas and playing with dozens of happy children. They are such fun. Natural and expressive, unlike most Western children, their inhibitions slight – once they pass their diffidence with a mzungu. It’s easy to put that to rest. Sometimes children are just so attractive that I could bring them home! Angel, about three or four, was such a child! We spent the day with a motley collection of children following the two wazungus, calling, greeting and playing. Such fun.

One of the people we met was Mokijo, an ancient lady older than Rongue. He was born in 1928. Mokijo, William translated, calls Rongue ‘no more than a young boy’. She’s another one who claims to be ‘100’. Everywhere people welcomed us with delight, a happy progress through the villages.

William has negotiated with a brother in law to carry the Mosquito back to Kitale in a pick up. I hope Rico can discover the sickness so that I can set off on my next safari before long.

But this enforced wait has given time for my leg to repair a good deal. The walking these last three days has done wonders. The ankle hardly swells now, I begin to be able to take my weight on my toes again, and the leg is – very slowly – becoming stronger. I am content.

DAY 24/ 25 MONDAY/ TUESDAY JANUARY 20th/21st 2020. KITALE, KENYA

By pick up with two young men, Titus the driver and Leonard, William’s nephew and the owner’s son, back to Kitale. The owner has made a good profit from the 150 mile round trip, charging me £55. Oh well, I had to get the Mosquito home. An easy journey, Titus never exceeded 35 miles an hour. I sat crunched up in the middle of the small pick up seat, the bike strapped in behind.

In the afternoon, Rico and I (well, Rico really, of course) took the carburettor to pieces, for we’ve both decided that the problem must be related to fuel delivery. We put the machine up on a box and removed the carb. Then Rico began to dissect it. After a time, poking with tweezers, he called me to look at it through the magnifying glass. “What’s that..?”

‘That’ was a shred of old twisted copper flex wire, wrapped around the main jet with a strand going into the hole that the needle slides up and down inside, regulating – very finely – the petrol flow.

It took me until well into beer time, and a search back through my old diaries to identify the culprit. This out and put bodge must have been applied by a ‘mechanic’ in Masaka, Uganda two years ago:

‘It was after noon before I got away from Masaka. By then Jahz’s boys had stripped my carburettor, emptied and cleaned out my tank and found me two new Japanese spark plugs somewhere in town. Meanwhile, I adjusted the chain and washed the extremely dirty air filter. This was all done on oil and petrol soaked mud at the edge of a piece of town wasteland, during which a downpour added filth to the underfoot conditions.’

Three hours work in Masaka cost me £2. I’m pretty certain this was when the African ‘repair’ was installed in my carburettor! It’s been there several thousand miles. We’ve identified the parts we need and Rico ordered them from the Suzuki representative in Nairobi. It has taken all day to organise this. “What do you DO in Africa?” people ask. Well, every piece of business takes a day. Rico rang the company in the morning. The man in Nairobi said he’d check availability and call back in a few minutes. A couple of hours later, he asked for a photo of the parts we need but gave us an inoperative electronic address. I had to email the photo to the business address and we had to ring the salesman to check the company email. They had closed for lunch. After lunch the fellow promised he’d check and call back shortly. ‘Shortly’ was late afternoon… Finally, he admitted they had the parts in stock. “Please tell us the cost and we’ll transfer the money!” says Rico. “Then you can put them on tonight’s bus to Kitale.”

“Oh, but it’s raining here,” says the fellow in Nairobi.

“So you don’t have an umbrella?” asks Rico as I laugh in the corner.

Business in Africa is done differently. The man in Nairobi doesn’t want to get wet taking the parts, probably on a boda-boda to the bus depot. So he delays telling us the cost of the parts to keep dry. Meanwhile, I wait. I spend another day of my trip waiting, despite Rico’s insistence that I am stranded and wasting my money and time. The fellow doesn’t want to get wet! This is not Amazon next day delivery!

So, more quiet days. One thing Africa teaches is patience.

The ‘most expensive potatoes’ Adelight ever bought – the ones we bought on the Mount Elgon slopes the other evening, all turned out to be rather soft and inedible! They have all been planted in Adelight’s shamba. “So I’ll have to come back next year to enjoy the bloody things?” I asked, to her laughter.

I’m the world’s lightest sleeper. Why ever do I come to Africa? ‘Jonathan’s House’ is in the garden, a simple block of cement plaster over an earth and stick framework, with a red zinc roof. It’s becoming engulfed in a fast growing avocado tree. In the properties around there must be thirty bloody dogs, including Rico’s own three – Pablo, Booby and Gerry and the cute little hairy pup. I’ve suggested a large barbecue might make my nights a damned sight more peaceful. Rico, a dog lover, doesn’t really share my thoughts. He maintains that they are necessary for security. Of course, that’s something you can never prove without barbecuing the noisy buggers! Even ear plugs, my nightly habit here now, don’t combat the chorus some nights. How I wish I slept like an average African.

Days here are slow and congenial, family days. We eat simply, enjoy the sun, work at a relaxed pace – and wait on the whim of salesmen down in Nairobi who don’t want to get wet taking parts to the bus depot for despatch, and never calling back as they promise.

Life in Africa works at a different pace. You just have to be philosophical and relax.

And wait…