DAY 21. TUESDAY JANUARY 1st, 2019. MOYALE, KENYA

So it’s 2019. I was fast asleep a couple of hours before midnight, and woke to a miserably grey, windy morning. This is Marsabit’s microclimate. By ten thirty it was the usual hot house, and the desert below the mountain was burning.

It’s been quite a day! Wow! And again wow! What a day. It began badly when I topped up with oil in the hotel car park and drove away without returning the filler cap, because I was talking to Saleem, the manager. I rode north, stopping – fortunately – to take a photograph of the large crater that drops beside the road beyond the town, in fact the road follows its rim for a mile or so. As I walked back to the Mosquito I saw my boot was covered in oil. Expletives, loud and colourful, followed. I rode back to town, ten kilometres back, with my foot on the oil filler hole, oil atomising all over the bike. Back at the hotel, I knew just where I had ridden and Saleem and several others joined me in a forensic search of the rocky approach lane, car park and main dual carriageway outside. We searched and searched in vain. Saleem, so helpful, phoned the best mechanic in town. He would come in due course. Meanwhile, we all searched again. 

It was an hour before one of the young men found the filler cap! He found it on the other carriageway of the big road passing the hotel. Sadly, a truck must have run over it, but by then Sam, a charming Kikuyu mechanic from middle Kenya, and obviously a knowledgeable and decent man, had arrived. Now he left again to bring a small file with which to buff the threads back into shape. 

Because of all this it was high noon when I finally left, into the hottest part of the day and one of the hottest parts of East Africa. I have Sam’s phone number and will have him check the Mosquito when I pass back through Marsabit. What a kind, gentle man. He was at some time in the military but settled in this northern town with his brother, and fellow mechanic, to do God’s work, he being a devout evangelical Christian in this rather Islamic town. Despite my own total disbelief, I do respect the sort of guidance that Sam obviously takes from his religion. It forms the foundation of his life without preaching too much to the rest of us. That’s fine by me. He’d probably be a decent, honest and likeable man without it, but he obviously believes he’d be a lesser man. It’s an unquestioning complete belief.

****

It was another astonishingly alone (not lonely) ride. I fell to thinking, for there’s not much to do out there amongst the red sand and burned purple rocks, the low dry scrub, the camels, numerous graceful gazelles, the local mayattas, the decreasing thorn trees, the blinding sun, the horizon visibly bent to prove that the world is round, the long smooth tarmac, and a vehicle coming the other way about once every ten or fifteen minutes. 

And what did I think about in my reveries..? I thought that I am probably certifiably bonkers! Absolutely off my trolley! Obstinate and utterly crazy! What the hell, I wondered, was I doing there? I was riding across about three hundred and fifty miles of burning desert on a tinny 200cc motorbike; no shade, dressed in hot boots, jacket zipped against the danger of flying insects, wool scarf to protect the back of my neck from the vertically overhead sun, steaming helmet and goggles. I am four months off seventy years old. Why can’t I stay at home, pour another Laphroaig for New Year and act my age? Take up carpentry or painting or some sedentary hobby? What is it that drives me to this? 

Of course, it’s the Challenge. I’m afraid of these decisions I make: to cross this huge desert to explore even bigger Ethiopia. I have been apprehensive, deep down, for weeks. And the trouble is, as soon as I acknowledge my fear, I know I can’t, or won’t, let it beat me! Which is where my legendary obstinacy comes to the fore. I WILL overcome the disquiet. I WILL persevere. And there, of course, come the rewards, the new confidence, the high of achievement. It’s about beating the fears. 

Utterly, totally pointless! Bonkers. 

****

The sun beats remorselessly on my helmet. I listen to that loose timing chain, wait for the puncture, count the miles down. It’s incredibly empty and incredibly vast: just me on the little bike moving through this terrifyingly remote landscape. Here and there herdsmen sit beneath the thin shadow of a thorn tree, hundreds of sheep grazing the empty miles, scavenging for goodness knows what. There are perhaps five small, rude villages in all these 150 miles, mainly basic places of local manyattas, caravan-sized homes of curved sticks covered with astonishing patchworks of scavenged debris: old plastic, woven nylon sacks, pieces of torn canvas truck canopies, tablecloths, bedsheets, and dust-faded plastics, all tied down with home made ropes. What do these people DO? What do they eat – camel milk and sheep, I suppose. Much of their day must be taken up in the basic need of fetching water – there are numerous donkeys carrying yellow plastic containers across the desert. What are these people’s ambitions? Just to survive, maybe? What do they think about? How do they see me? They are a mystery to me, just as I would be to them, should we come into closer contact as I hurry past. Why is it that at almost 70 I want to ride my motorbike across their harsh homeland and all they want is to exist in this furnace? It’s all they know… But I’m not content with that…

****

Around four, weary and overheated, I approached Moyale, the last Kenyan town. It’s not an attractive place. It’s full of large mosques and that directed my search for accommodation. The obvious hotels were too close to that dismal drone of the muezzins at dawn. I rode down every dusty lane looking for signboards. I found a guest house in a quiet place but it seemed to be closed. I turned in the dust lane. And that was when the clutch cable broke! All I wanted was a cool shower and a drink – and now I must deal with this. 

I was proud of the bodge I fashioned from a six inch nail with my pliers. By levering it against the handlebar I could pull in the clutch enough to ride to find help. First, I checked into a nearby basic lodging house, a simple room on the second floor with a view of scrubby hills and people’s compounds below. It’s good enough for the night, a cleanish bed, a rugged bathroom with a cold shower, a railed passage in front of the room; there are no other guests so it’s like a balcony. Tonight the whole town is without electricity, which may help keep the lugubrious misery of the mosques quiet. The watchman brought me candles and matches and it’s quite atmospheric as I write. The sound of families below floats up, utensils clatter, and the watchman and his friends chatter below. My ears still sing from the desert ride and I am still thirsty but the water is most unattractive, with a vile sulphurous smell, doubtless a souvenir of the volcanic nature of these lands. Fortunately, it doesn’t taste quite as bad as the smell.

The local boda-boda mender sent me to town, by the biggest mosque. There I asked about, riding my bodge rather proudly. Soon I met Mahat, in his broken down lock-up, the frontage deep in oily sand and discarded bike parts. Most things can be mended in Africa; it’s how everyone exists. With parts from two Chinese clutch cable packages, he fashioned me a working clutch – actually better than before. By the time we were done, me greasy fingered and weary as hell, it was almost seven and darkness falling as we worked with the aid of our phone torches. Mahat asked for 300 bob for the clutch we cannibalised, another 100 bob for the new cable and 100 for himself, a total of £4. I gave him five and we parted the best of friends. In Addis, maybe I can find a replacement from Suzuki – or I might just carry that as spare until this one breaks!

As Mahat and I worked, a young Somali boy pestered around. “Take me to Engerland. I want to go to Engerland. Why don’t you take me to your embassy?” It’s the universal dream. This boy tried the ‘Libya route’ but turned back when he saw the danger and cost. My words of unemployment in England, the cold, the expense, the contempt in which he’ll be held by many. I was reading rampant xenophobia in my Guardian, from Dover residents only this morning. The saddest sign of changed times being that the liberal, understanding Dover folk all asked for their names to be withheld, while the racists were proud to publish their ignorance. My words have no effect. The streets of the North are still paved with gold. The old colonial fairy tales refuse to die. Reality is still perceived as me being mean-spirited. And of course, I AM the one with the ‘big’ piki-piki and the ease and money to tour Africa on a whim. It’s an unequal world.

****

Now it’s 9.15. I am exhausted with the heat, the tension, the bike repairs, dehydration and a grim meal of chicken and beans that I took quickly before returning to my guest house in the pitch dark, my headlight shining up at the roadside trees. I shall sleep on top of the bed tonight, ignoring the centimetre-thick Chinese blanket. 

And the best news of the day is that this morning I dropped my iPad on a tiled floor (I am usually SO careful!) and seem to have cured the immensely frustrating problem I have had since the ‘repair’ of the screen. Only this morning I emailed the Apple repair place in Nairobi and told them I would have to bring it back sometime and meanwhile would try to purchase an external keyboard in Ethiopia. So far tonight the only typos have been mine, not the independent mind of the device. I will watch with interest. The old adage: if it doesn’t respond to care, bash it! 

It’s 9.38 and the whole town is silent, asleep. But those miserable muezzins won’t let anyone sleep in. Earplugs by the bed… (Just as well. The power came back a few hours later, bringing back all the radios and TVs in compounds around, everyone asleep by now, and no African sleeps as lightly as me. They would blare until dawn…).

DAY 22. WEDNESDAY JANUARY 2nd 2019. AGERE MARYAM, ETHIOPIA

Ethiopia. A complete new book. And right now, I feel utterly lost – not unduly ill at ease, but with no bearings at all on which to start. Culture shock is a well worn phrase, but apt tonight. I don’t know how to begin. Of course, in a way, it’s a reflection on how complacent I have become in East and southern Africa, where English is so widely spoken and the culture has so many echoes of the British. It’s easy to travel in all those countries; this is something entirely different…

It’s been a very long hard day and my confusion adds to my exhaustion. And for once I do feel rather alone. Few people speak English (why should they?) and I appear to be a somewhat exotic species to most I pass. Everyone waves and gesticulates: it’s astonishingly friendly – just a complete unknown and I am floundering. Doubtless, I will begin to pick up the cultural signs in a day or two. I’ve enough experience after all. For now it’s new languages, a new script, different calendar, new norms, new currency, new everything; out of my depth for once – hopefully briefly.

I’m sitting in a sort of bar in the yard of a cheap hotel. The light bulbs are about 20 watt, all over the hotel. I’m a little out of sight, keeping that way as I seem to attract so much attention when I’m more visible. I’ve got my second 60p bottle of beer in front of me and just ate a bizarre meal of injera, the Ethiopian thin pancake made of slightly fermenting millet, and what I hoped would be vegetables… Well, remember, the only Ethiopian food I ever ate was in that rather smart Nairobi restaurant on the first night of this trip. Then I was served a big injera with various very tasty vegetables, beans, small piles of delicious meat and some good tastes like salsas. Tonight I ordered injera and vegetables – and got the 15 inch, thin pancake and a huge helping of spaghetti, with some small shavings of carrot and cabbage and chilli pepper! Oh well, after a day entirely sustained on fruit juice and water I guess it’ll keep the body going for another few hours. I can recommend travelling as the ultimate diet, largely because, on the road, you eat to live, and sometimes there’s just nothing available. Today was such a day. No breakfast in the basic hotel, nothing I wanted to eat in Moyale, and then no currency to buy food.

Now, half dead from fatigue, I am determined to record my reactions, here in the warm dark evening. Music pounds from the street; everyone shouts rather than talks; music plays tinnily from a handful of phones; there are people everywhere, far more than I see in Kenya. About ten candle-power illuminates the whole sprawling hotel, rooms ranged round the car park, and a largely empty four storey block in which I have one of the few occupied rooms on the third floor for some daylight and fresher air. The larger block has no running water but has light and a view – essential for me, but not for Africans, who exist in these dull, gloomy, internally-windowed lodging houses. Actually, my room with a sort of view over the incredibly scruffy town, is cheaper than the ones round the noisy, fume-filled car park on the ground floor. It costs £5.30. Eat your heart out, all those faceless £100 Hampton Inns of my American travels! At least this has character!! I know I’m here – in Ethiopia.

****

My sleep was fine in that simple Moyale guest house, but I wasn’t sorry to leave the misery-soaked Moslem women who ran it. They seemed to wallow in their gloom, headscarves pulled around unsmiling faces. I didn’t bother to ask about breakfast, the body language told me there wasn’t any. I bought a carton of juice, filled up with fuel and headed for the nearby border post, visible in the valley. I’d imagined a chaotic crossing, remembering ones like South Africa to Zimbabwe and the pushing mayhem at pokey windows. This is the main highway – the only viable highway – between Kenya and Ethiopia, yet I appeared to be about the only vehicle crossing. In an hour and twenty minutes I was in Ethiopia. It might have been an hour and five, had the only printer for the customs officer’s computer (“There are problems with the network. Please be patient…”) not been a 200 metre walk away down the station in another building.

No banks were open on the Ethiopian side (“There were problems last week…” I took from that that there were disturbances) and I brushed aside dozens of irritating money changers. I’d use my card at an ATM in the next large town. I thought… The next ‘large town’ was the ill-named Mega. A straggly dump so small I rode through looking for the town! There was an ATM in a crowded bank compound and it actually worked, even if I did my business amongst a crowd of intrigued spectators and had no idea how much money I had in my hand having withdrawn the largest amount available. About £115, it turned out later when, in this town, I called in to a bank to ask the rates, and was ushered behind all the cashiers and their tills by polite people eager to help, even though it took time to explain that what I wanted was the international exchange rate. (“There’s problems with the network, I am sorry, you must be patient…”).

****

My journey was long and hot, the desert giving way to bush land, not unlike northern Ghana. Houses were round and mud built with conical thatched roofs, walls brightly and proudly decorated with painted bands of colourful triangles and diamonds. Later, these gave way to houses of sticks and thatch. People waved and stared, astonished. I felt that I was a rarity, but I can’t believe that I am, except that I did see four smart Land Cruisers pass – Ethiopian drivers and white passengers flashing by, separate. Perhaps individual white men ARE a rarity; ones who wave and smile and react.

306 kilometres, on a bike that does 45mph downhill… It’s a very small machine for these immense distances in a country twice the size of France. Even now, 190 miles into Ethiopia, I am still 300 from Addis Ababa. That’s why I persevered. And I have to return by the same bloody route, too. Bonkers. What am I trying to prove? Just that I am an obstinate bastard? 

****

I am happy I did carry on so far this evening. After long slow climbs, the landscape changed back to something much more like the highlands of Kenya, with mighty cedars here and there, mixed into the more tropical growth. Finally, I thought, the extremely large desert was receding. I’m climbing higher, towards the altitude of Addis. 

Now, at 8.20, I am wiped out. The noise outside is incredible. Music pounds and hundreds of people shout and yell, lorry klaxons, motorbikes, people, people, people. Astonishingly, whenever I go anywhere near the hotel gate, people call to me, come and introduce themselves in very basic English, or wave, smile and gather in crowds around me. It’s very tiring – but very engaging too. 

Ear plugs! And I left it too late to wash in the bucket of – cold – water. It’s getting cool outside. I’ll sleep in my dirt tonight. No one will notice here. The smell of bodies is quite prevalent. And the threadbare bedsheets are grey with age already. 

My god, the NOISE!

DAY 23. THURSDAY JANUARY 3rd 2019. HAWASSA, ETHIOPIA

It’s funny how a day can change in a few moments. This was a HARD day, and by mid-afternoon I was sinking into depression and defeatism, wondering if this really was a viable proposition, riding this very small motorbike about such a vast country. I was getting bad tempered, only returning about one in ten of the extravagant waves from everywhere, feeling completely bushed and rather beaten. It was all too much. This Ethiopian trip was a mistake… 

On a whim, I decided to stop for a cup of tea in a hotel I was passing in this large town of Hawassa. The tea was very good, a bit sweet and red, like rooibos tea. It was also restorative, and the waiters quite charming, a group of young men with the widest smiles. Then a fellow approached and spoke English, a bit difficult to decipher, but basically the language I understand. He was the first person with whom I have spoken any sense in two days. Balguda was kindly and asked what information I needed. We chatted for a while and then I realised that I was absolutely knackered and probably incapable of even the 25 kilometres left to the town I had picked for my night. Balguda told me that the rather smart hotel where I was seated would charge me a large sum – almost £12 – but he had a friend with a guest house 300 metres up the main road where I could get a room for less than £6. He would guide me there in his car. There he introduced me to the owner, Defige, who, wonder of wonders, speaks good English and once spent three years in Dublin. My spirits lifted. The room is acceptable – a bit rough and tattered, but it will do. It also has hot water, which I really need tonight! For an hour we three sat on stools in the yard and talked, largely about Brexit – since no one here can understand the national suicide that Britain contemplates, or Theresa May and her shambles. 

But I’m in Ethiopia, who wants to think about the stupidity of British politicians?

****

Now, before I say anything disparaging about the struggles of my day, let me make one statement right out: alongside dear Lesotho, I don’t think any nation has made me more welcome in Africa than my early experience of Ethiopia. Sometimes I write, particularly in Lesotho, that I have waved to hundreds of people. Here I can multiply by ten, partly because there are SO many people, but also because almost all of them shout out, wave, gesticulate, stop in astonishment, ride faster to ride alongside to look, point me out, flash their lights, gather in crowds when I stop, and just react with pleasure and excitement. I feel larger than life, even when I am so emotionally and physically buggered that I can hardly think straight. It’s a wonderful gift to be the focus of so much genuine goodwill. 

And at the end of a bloody day, that’s actually my reaction, having just eaten a very good meal – beef goulash unlike any goulash I ever ate before but very tasty and garlicky, watched by a small boy, about three years old, playing at my table. His mother keeps calling him off, but I smile that I don’t mind. I’m charmed by it. I feel so much better.

****

The day wasn’t all this contented… A couple of beers has helped no end.

Agere Maryam was pretty ghastly. I dislike the words, ‘Third World’, but I can’t think of any other description that describes how rugged life seems to be in southern Ethiopia. I’ve ridden through a huge tract of country that was like going back a long way after the developed infrastructure and social development of Kenya and Uganda. This was rural Africa at its most basic. It was also – and I despise my own prejudice – a largely Moslem region. It’s easy to see why Islam gives such a negative image. And I have travelled in many Islamic countries, and enjoyed their hospitality, but there is something ultimately depressing about the repressiveness of the religion, its subjugation of women (in the region through which I have just travelled I noted that the pack animals were donkeys and women, about equal in loads, both driven by menfolk walking casually behind), its appalling miserable intonations of prayers, and all its own prejudices of we infidels. My minor rant here is the result of that moaning lament coming from three separate mosques sometime around 5.35 this morning even percolating my ear plugs. It was a bad start, after a poor sleep, trying to digest about a pound of spaghetti and anxiety about the task I have set myself and my ability to either achieve or enjoy it.

I had just got over the ghastliness of that dismal droning when the watchman started beating on my door. It was shortly after six. I ignored it for some moments, but at last had to pull on trousers and open the door. He stood outside expectantly. “You go?” he asked, with a gesture to the road.

“No, I don’t bloody go! It’s still DARK!” For, indeed, the sun was just coming over the shoulder of the hills. “Go away! I want to sleep!” It wasn’t a happy start to my day. Later, sitting on my bed, packing my panniers, one of the attendants looked through the window and indicated that he wanted my (very grey) bedding for washing. OK, so there wasn’t much finesse about the place.

But the coffee… The coffee.

Coffee originated from this southern region of Ethiopia; originally eaten, but later – around the 13th century – becoming the beverage we know all over the world. Here I was at the fount of all coffee. In Ethiopia it is a ritual drink as much as a common beverage; the coffee ceremony is intricate and formal. Every hotel, cafe, office building and so forth has its little altar to coffee – in the form of a small booth containing a low table covered in small coffee bowls, a brazier and incense burner, all attended by a woman versed in all the intricacies of making and serving the national drink. Even my rugged hotel had its ‘buna’ stall. Rico has told me fondly about Ethiopian coffee, and I took it all as slight exaggeration, knowing how strong and bitter Rico likes his coffee. I gestured to the young coffee girl that I’d like a cup. She acknowledged my look and put her elegant black clay pot with its long curved spout onto the brazier. She brought me a small dish, sugar and the pot. I stopped the second heaped spoon of sugar (into a small coffee cup) and she poured the thick black liquid from her pot. I waited for it to cool and then tasted it suspiciously. It was absolutely DELICIOUS! I have NEVER tasted such coffee! Rico, I take back my doubts. This coffee was unlike I ever tasted: it was rich, chocolatey, tasted subtly of charcoal smoke, and perhaps it was my imagination, but it even seemed to have infused a trifle of the incense. Three tiny cups is the ritual, and I had no hesitation in enjoying the other two! No coffee will ever be the same.

****

Breakfast wasn’t quite so successful – some sort of spicy meat mixed with egg and sort of scrambled, dumped unceremoniously onto a large injera on a tin tray. Paul Theroux, whom I have been reading, likens injera to the consistency of bath mat, but I think it’d be more accurate to say one of those ‘Spontex’, I think they were called, kitchen cloths. It’s kind of grey and bubbly and saggy.  Oh well, it filled the stomach ready for the worst road I have ridden in some years. Broken tarmac, badly broken tarmac, and road building makes for the worst ride. I had to endure about sixty miles of this punishment. It was horrible, and the traffic, although thin, is undisciplined. Passing through straggly, unkempt towns and villages there are hundreds of Indian three-wheeler ‘tuk-tuks’ (cockroaches, as Rico calls them), small taxi motorbikes and the worst pedestrians I have ever experienced – anywhere. It became quite cold as I was now at altitude, rolling over mountains – and my mood drooped. This wasn’t why I’d come to Ethiopia: I’d come to witness the pride and wonder of one of the only countries in Africa never to be colonised, with a more immense, intense depth of history and culture than much of the rest of the world. I hadn’t come for decrepitude, mess, ugliness, heavy traffic and bad roads, even if tens of thousands of people flashed enormous smiles, waved wildly, and their calls and greetings permeated my ear plugs over the bashing and crashing of my little bike.

Then I discovered that Ethiopia has a fuel war going on. Basically, there isn’t any… Almost every petrol station is dry, with queues of motorbikes and cockroaches 150 or 200 long. There seems to be diesel for the buses. In Agere Maryam I bought four litres of black market fuel from plastic bottles at an exorbitant rate. It was enough to get me to Dila, where I was told there was petrol. At this point I didn’t know it was a national problem. In Dila the queues stretched far down the road at the only station with a supply. What was I to do? If I queued, I’d be here for two or three hours. I took out my map. A crowd gathered around me. I play-acted my need for petrol. 

Several young men encouraged me just to go straight to the pump. What to do? Did I maintain my equality, or abuse my privilege as a visitor? One look at the queue reaching back 300 yards up the dusty road made the decision immorally simple! I rode to the pumps. Two policemen and a police woman guarded the only functioning pump in town. No one, not one ungenerous Ethiopian objected as the pump attendant FILLED my tank. Now THAT is ungrudging and tolerant, two qualities I think I will find many Ethiopians embody, now that my mood is less mean and weary. Everyone laughed and good-heartedly enjoyed my amazement. What’s more, it was cheapest petrol I ever bought since the gauge on the pump appeared defunct. It must have been less than 40 pence a litre! Earlier, the black market price had been £1.50… The real price, when available has been about 50 pence I think, and that’s the problem: government subsidy has made fuel half the price of neighbouring countries and the suppliers object. I’m not sure how I will go on, but Balguda and Degife this evening reckon that as a tourist I will be able to find fuel despite the month-long shortages. We will see.

So, a day that began rather badly, and continued as a struggle, seems to be ending more equably. Perhaps a decent sleep – this is a Christian town, so less mosques – may restore me to travel mode. Maybe I need a rest and should pause tomorrow. In a week, since I left Kitale, I have ridden a little over 1000 miles – at about 35 miles an hour! I am deeply weary. 

DAY 24. FRIDAY JANUARY 4th 2019. ZIWAY (AKA, BUUTAA, it seems), ETHIOPIA

Without doubt, Ethiopia is the most welcoming and friendly country I have visited in my almost 100 countries around the world. I have fallen, in just three days, for these astonishing people. They are unique. Everywhere I go, I meet generosity and smiles, greetings and curiosity. It is truly wonderful! 

But… and there’s a big but. I think I came to a decision this afternoon. There is no way I can achieve my original plan to see a huge circuit of the country. I’ve been riding for over a week now, and covered about 1100 miles. I am exhausted. I haven’t even reached Addis yet! The circuit I had in mind, will take me a further 1000 miles around the country – and then I have to ride this same, exhausting road back to Kenya. Even my obstinate determination balks at the idea. My Mosquito is just too small. Then, of course, I have to buy all my fuel on the black market, which seems quite possible, as it’s the way all Ethiopians are still travelling around. Well, actually, most of them are queueing at immense lines at the few petrol stations still selling their fuel – those that haven’t sold to the black marketeers! I am fortunate in having the money to purchase at a premium (£1 a litre, still cheap for me…). The availability of fuel is influencing many of my routing decisions. 

Another consideration is the traffic. Having now ridden in 22 African countries, I am appalled at the standard of driving and the free for all that is driving in this country. This is the second most populous country in Africa, after Nigeria. There are eighteen-wheelers, matatus, cars, tuk-tuks, motorbikes, bicycles, clapped out trucks, overloaded donkey carts, sheep, goats, cows – and the most ill-disciplined pedestrians I ever witnessed. The latter are perhaps the most dangerous! The roads – the much dreamed-of Pan African Highway, is broken and narrow and FULL of those bloody donkey carts. Everyone pushes and tries to get by. It’s mayhem – and very stressful. I’m probably one of the most observant on the road, but it’s still a huge strain to ride thus. No way do I want to volunteer for an extra 1000 miles of it…

When I get to Addis Ababa, I will review my journey. Perhaps I can find some reasonably priced internal flights to the far north to see some of the sights. I need information, and that’ll only be available in Addis. I may have to stay a few days in the city, since Christmas is coming.

Yes, I did write that! When I crossed into Ethiopia, I changed to the Julian calendar. Today is the 26th day of the eleventh month of 2011. Christmas comes on the 29th of this Ethiopian month. Monday is Christmas Day!

****

I rode only 70 miles today, although it feels like 170! A huge gale blew directly in my face. Apparently it’s pretty much a daily occurrence at this season, the mountain winds attracted by the relative cool of the several large lakes here in the Rift Valley. With the wind came clouds of tiring dust. I was sand-blasted most of the journey, stressed by the traffic conditions and worn out by the wind and distance. It wasn’t fun. I had to wend my way through various crazy towns and any view was veiled by white dust. I was heading for Meki, another 20 kilometres up the road – my friends of last evening had recommended it as a quiet place. When I finally reached this town, variously named Ziway and Baatuu – in the manner I keep finding, in which my map disagrees with the locals – I decided to stop for coffee. Spotting a likely place – there are thousands, as coffee drinking is a cultural thing – I decelerated quickly to go back.

It was then that my front chain sprocket flew off the Mosquito! 

At least it happened in town. Within moments a young fellow was proffering the lost sprocket, and instantly people gathered. One man, with a bit of basic English, pointed up the road, indicating that there was a mechanic two or three hundred yards ahead. I pushed the Mosquito, it’s light enough, fortunately. Ignoring hoots and crazy traffic, I pushed the silent machine to the mechanic, who operated from a tin shelter beside rough-block single storey buildings. In about three or four minutes he had found a suitable nut and washer from an old tin trunk in which he kept his few battered tools, and screwed back the cog, tightened the chain and checked the bike. For this, Bariso refused payment, but I insisted he took a pound. Some of the gathered boys procured eight litres of black market petrol from around the corner. 

Bariso’s brother had arrived almost instantly; the presence of a white man seems to be an instantaneous item of news, without any apparent messages being conveyed; they just seem to know. Eyasuu, spoke some simple English, proudly showing me his certificate from a hotel company for the 42-hour basic English course he had completed in 2006. He, too, was friendliness itself, as were all those around me. I felt instantly comfortable and warmly welcomed. It’s a lovely feeling; very much a feature of this country.

“I need buna (coffee),” I told Eyasuu. “Let’s have coffee!” There was, of course, a coffee house within ten yards. I left the Mosquito, confident that it was completely safe, and we entered the coffee shack. Then ensued the most enjoyable, delightful hour and a half. It’s for times like this that I travel, and it’s times like this that put the horrible journeys back in focus; makes them worthwhile after all. 

Bamboo settees ranged along the walls, which were draped in striped fabric, with cultural posters of the buna ceremony hung above the casual men seated inside. On the floor were spread fresh green palm fronds. Lema, a very beautiful young woman (Ethiopian young women are frequently spectacularly pretty) was enthroned on a small pedestal, sitting on a sort of stool like a throne, a low table decorated with balanced coffee cups before her. It IS like an altar, and the coffee is treated with great respect, giving the whole ceremony religious tones. To one side was a brazier of charcoal in which she heated her black, pottery coffee pot with its long curved spout. Wide red trousers, a white top and a light scarf thrown across her neck, with deep, dark eyes and a lovely light complexion, it struck me that in her rituals and her command of her small shack from her raised podium, she possessed all the qualities of a priestess dispensing religious rites, her beauty and confident poise obviously an attraction for the gathered men. 

Two buckets of orange roses, grown in hot houses for export down the road, stood on the small bamboo tables. We were nine men seated, chattering and laughing, a few words of English from one or two of them making conversation possible. Some of them chewed qat (pronounced chat), the mildly addictive drug that is harvested hereabouts and one of the main earners. It must be eaten fresh, so the roads are crowded with racing suppliers, and much of it is exported by the plane load to the Arab states, not far away now. It brings a state of mild euphoria and I suppose reduces appetite like coca leaves in South America. To everyone’s amusement, I tore off a couple of leaves to try. It tasted like privet (not that I ever chewed privet, but it’s how I imagine it tastes!), and of course you must chew for some days at least to begin to feel the effects. Many people have badly brown-stained teeth, dark brown. Eyasuu told me his were a result of the water from the nearby lakes but I doubt qat helps much. I don’t think I’ll take it up with my very expensive recent implants! 

It was a delightful time, a feeling of complete equality, curiosity about each other, warmth and smiles and jokes. My angst fell away and I drifted into a comfortable satisfaction. And of course, the coffee was fabulous. It’s worth coming to Ethiopia just for the coffee. 

****

At last I felt I should move on. By now there seemed little point in riding the last twenty kilometres just because I’d been told that Meki was quiet. Eyasuu and his friends recommended a hotel 500 metres up the road, and Bariso jumped on his bike to lead me there. I’ve a half-decent, slightly tired room with a very comfortable bed, a bathroom with warm water, a small terrace and there’s a bar and restaurant behind the palm trees across the dust. It’s not bad. Extravagant for Ethiopia – at £10.30. The road is still noisy 100 yards away, but I just have to accept that in Africa’s second most populous country, it’s going to be noisy wherever I go. I’ve never seen so many people everywhere. 

With luck, and no more breakdowns, I’ll get to Addis tomorrow. It’s just 100 miles or so now. There I will have to take stock and decide how to go forward. I do want to experience more of these delightful people, but I really doubt I have the stamina to ride almost 2000 more miles – and enjoy the process… 

DAY 25. SATURDAY JANUARY 5th 2019. ADDID ABABA, ETHIOPIA

Sometimes things just go wrong… Today’s just gone totally tits up from beginning to end. Late this afternoon, I found that my passport is missing. On these journeys it lives in my wallet in my inside jacket pocket, and all day I didn’t remove my jacket until I reached the place I am staying tonight. I used it yesterday afternoon to check in to the hotel in Ziway. Tonight, I don’t have it… Honestly, I’d rather lose my camera or iPad – the only other valuables I carry. At least money can replace those. A lost passport is a gigantic hassle, plus it’s Sunday tomorrow and Christmas Day on Monday – and British embassies only work about half a year and take ALL holidays, ours and the host’s. Even the Queen’s birthday is holiday for them! Probably the Queen of Sheba’s too.

The hotel in Ziway is not answering their phone. If it’s lost it must be there, but if it was stolen or mislaid (by falling upwards out of my inside pocket?) I suppose I just have to accept the hassle and a long stay in Addis. Well, unless it’s in Ziway, that’s the only option.

So tonight I write in a rather depressed state…

It was another wearing, unsettled day anyway – even before this disaster.

****

Riding north, I decided I may not be riding any further around this enormous country. The traffic is the worst, most undisciplined, terrifying I have ever witnessed. The roads are broken and narrow and the vehicles pushing to make any progress. Frankly, I decided I value my life more than seeing Ethiopia from my bike at thirty miles an hour. I hate the sense of failure but I have travelled long enough to follow my instincts. I’m just not enjoying riding here. I love the people; the culture’s fascinating, but moving around Ethiopia is beyond me. I thought perhaps I could make some trips internally by air – but that was before the passport fiasco… Now that takes precedence over everything.

 

It was a ghastly ride. One of the worst I can remember. Even Kampala didn’t upset me the way this journey did. Competitive traffic, no one ever looks behind: they just pull out; cows, donkeys, mules, sheep, dogs, camels and goats crossing everywhere; pedestrians who seem to have a death wish; minibuses that scream past, then stop right in front of me; ancient trucks lumbering up hills belching filth in my face; holes a foot deep in what’s left of the tarmac; the appalling three wheeled tuk-tuks, whose casual drivers go wherever they like, many of them texting or checking their phones and not one of them checking their mirrors, turning in the road at will; and the donkey carts that hold everyone else up and make everyone take even more risks, even a cyclist I knocked off when he rode straight into me! Uganda is skilful by comparison. And I thought THAT was bad. I really don’t want to ride here any more. Except I have those 500 miles to get back to Kenya.

****

These journals are written every day. There’s no time to rationalise my reactions. I just write as it happens. I’ve always thought that was their value. When I am happy, it is reflected in my entries; when I am gloomy, tired, upset, angry it’s also in the words. Tonight’s a low. Even my iPad has decided to start mis-keying again. I thought the drop on the floor had repaired that. 

I am so obstinate that I HATE this feeling of despair and failure. Disappointment too. I had such high expectations for Ethiopia and I DO think its people extraordinary, friendly and charming. But travelling here is beating the fun out of me. 

Maybe I’ll be better for some sleep, although I think it’ll be hard to rest tonight. I am too anxious. 

I was going to upload an episode of my journal tonight, but I think I’ll keep it until I HAVE rationalised things a bit. This is too depressing an entry to leave it here. A journal cliff-hanger too far… 

DAY 26. SUNDAY JANUARY 6th 2019. ADDID ABABA, ETHIOPIA

MY PASSPORT IS FOUND!!!!! Phew… So now I can update an episode so that I end on a high note rather than that downbeat cliff-hanger!

Around dawn, at last I fell into a fitful sleep, having fretted and worried for hours, going over and over when I last saw my passport and every minute detail I could remember of what I had done since. I even, almost superstitiously, got up in the early hours and searched the room again with my torch. Of course, to no avail. I just had to accept that I am here for days with hours and hours to spend at the police, the embassy and Ethiopian immigration. What’s done is done – but it’s difficult to accept. I lost attention for once, after 130-something trips with a passport, amounting to about twelve years out of my home country.

I woke at almost nine, still anxious and depressed. I’m staying in a slightly hippy, Lonely Planet sort of guest house – places I generally avoid as I prefer to find local places, not those that attract all the white people. But Rico recommended this place, as I would be able to get information about mechanics and would find other over-land bikers here.

Bullant is from Turkey, straggly grey hair, perhaps in his late fifties, and has been on the road on his motorbike for two and a half years, from Australia through Asia to Africa. He greeted me and asked how my night had been – and I told him, bad, because my passport is gone. We commiserated for a while, then, using his international phone (mine only has a Kenyan sim card and I need a passport to get an Ethiopian one..!) we tried the number of the small hotel company that owned the hotel in Ziway (pron: zw-eye). I spoke to a charming fellow called Tedla, explained my predicament, and asked HIM to phone Ziway on my behalf as I doubted they spoke much English.

Half an hour later, Tedla phoned back, “Your passport is found!” I almost burst into tears of emotional relief! I could hardly thank him. “But we can’t bring it to you until Thursday. It is Christmas, but the regional manager will bring it to Addis on Thursday. You should phone me on Wednesday and we can meet at the Heber Ethiopia, it’s a traditional restaurant on Bole Road.” Since I want to get work done on the Mosquito, that’s not bad, except I must stay in this city for five or six days. Oh well, I will try to find the local atmosphere and relax. I can’t face those last sixty kilometres back towards Ziway, the worst I have ridden – and motorbikes aren’t permitted to use the parallel expressway, probably the best road in the country, so I’d rather wait to meet Tedla and the regional manager here. 

****

Soon after the news came through that my passport was safe and sound (and my EU passport is valid for another five years and I DO NOT want a Brexit passport) I met Alice, a charming, talkative young woman who cheered my day entirely. Alice is of Malay Chinese extraction, from Melbourne, Australia and a committed traveller, aged 30; in fact she’s 40 years and a day younger than me. She has been delightful company all day, arriving as she did from Egypt early this morning. I’ve relaxed in good cheerful company for the whole day, mostly talking ten to the dozen in the guest house outdoor bar area. It’s a wonderful thing that, like motorcycling, travel enthusiasm can bond people over wide variations of culture, class, race and even age. I spot many similarities of character between us. She’s a smart, open minded young woman who travels all over the world alone – recently all over Pakistan. She’s lived in England and looks at her more conventional friends with no scrap of envy as they drop into their round holes. It’s been a very enjoyable conversation, with just a short walk about the quiet Sunday city. Alice helped to restore some travel spirit in me. 

Seldom do I stay in hostels like this, filled with white people from all over. But I am getting information about travelling in this country, from people travelling the other way and so on. I am told that the road north is one of the best in the country. Rereading my last few days of travelling, I can see the gloom into which exhaustion cast me. Perhaps I will see it all more positively in a day or two, especially when I can be sure the Mosquito will continue to carry me reliably. Somehow I will see some of the northern sights, perhaps combining the bike and a flight or two. All to be decided when I recoup some energy and get information. Watch this space.

Happy Christmas, again. Tomorrow is Ethiopian Christmas so I expect another rather slow day. Probably that’s just what I need…

DAYS 9 to 14. DECEMBER 20th to 25th 2018. KITALE, KENYA

There’s been something of a hiatus in my diary writing. My iPad travelled to Nairobi while I waited up here in Kitale. Fortunately, the infrastructure of Kenya is such that I was able to very efficiently courier the device door to door (with G4S) to an Apple approved repairer in the capital, where they fixed it in a day and returned it by the same courier. I sent it on Thursday and received it yesterday, Christmas Eve, the previous day being Sunday. Four days, in East Africa: that’s efficient. It did cost £250 for the repair but that’s the international price. 

Now I have my device back (lacking sensitivity, however, and forcing me to type much harder and it’s making many mis-keys. Bah…) and the journal can continue. 

The days pass quietly here in Kitale, home for now. Adelight and I are comfortable company, we can go to town companionably – she doing her shopping, me observing street life patiently. At home we eat simple breakfasts and lunches – sliced brown bread, eggs, jam, margarine, peanut butter and so forth. At night we eat rice, spaghetti, ughali with meat and sauce, filling food. Finances are tight, always tight in Africa. There are many demands on scant resources: endless school fees and costs, services and repairs; mouths to feed, clothes to buy, even if they are second hand. It’s not easy to balance expenses against irregular income, and Rico the only wage earner just now. Adelight and Scovia have a scheme afoot to start mushroom farming. With Scovia probably able to sell ice to Eskimos and sand to Arabs, it’s a practical proposition to create some independence. 

Early each evening, Rico and I enjoy our beers on the porch. We met 31 years ago and of course we don’t think we have changed at all! The conceit of age. He turned 70 this year, me next year. For both of us Africa has been the largest influence of our lives, he living and dealing with it every day, almost since that first Sahara crossing in 1987/8, with a large extended family, and me returning so frequently, so much of my thought and character shaped by my experiences on this varied and wonderful continent. It’s an easy friendship, based on many shared values and our appreciation of African life, a significance the very start of which we shared on our first African journey together. Pity the beer’s not better, but I can’t expect everything and for now the contentment of family life is enough. We are a small household right now, just Adelight and Rico, Marion and Scovia and baby Maria. The other girls are mostly away with their birth families, so it’s quiet. 

Today is Christmas Day, my sixth Christmas running in Africa. It’s warm and sunny but there’s really no spare money to celebrate. Everyone is accepting of this, thankful for what they DO have, rather than what they would like to have. There are no presents this year. I’ve given the two girls some money; we all went for drinks and chicken and chips at the Kitale Club yesterday, that strange colonial hangover, its old golf club officials with British names until the last few decades. Photos of old colonials twist and curl in fading frames, the service is terrible, the food mediocre, but it’s a place to meet and relax beside the greens, gazing across the clipped grass, so unAfrican, to the blue slopes of Mount Elgon behind blossoming trees. The sun is bright up here at 6000 feet and the clouds white against the blue of the equatorial sky. Some men putt on the nearby green, a pump roars behind the bouncy castle; there’s a blue pool and children play as we drink and chat, and gaze at the horizon. Cows graze the distant fairways. Scovia and Marion enjoy a glass of wine, “Only for birthday, Christmas and 31st!” laughs charming Scovia, 20, large round earrings glinting in the sunlight. 

And today I made personal history: I went shopping for groceries in town – on Christmas Day, much the same as any other day in Kitale. Food tends to be fresh, unprocessed, unfrozen and bought every day. You can’t store fresh food in this climate, you must eat it as much from field to plate as possible. We needed more beer, a chicken and the endless supply of two bread loaves (all cased in plastic of course). I added a pineapple and a bottle of Kenyan rose wine from Naivasha. It is Christmas after all, a time for treats, however small. Adelight has cleaned the house, the girls helping, for everyone has their task. It’s pretty much an ordinary day, except for the fir branch in the corner with its winking lights. This is not the material festival it has become in the ‘wealthy’ North…

DAY 15. WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 26th, 2018. KITALE, KENYA

Christmas is over and done once again. Now it’s time to begin to think about my safari… 

Our festival was low key but happy and content. Adelight, having cleaned the house and washed all the floors, cooked apparently contentedly in the kitchen, to the sound of non-stop Christmas music. Soup for lunch and chicken, beef, samosas and chapattis for supper, with our Dutch neighbour and old colleague of Rico’s, Cor, and his wife Nancy joining us. No presents were exchanged or emotionally struggled over, prices compared, generosity weighed, the embarrassment and angst: that doesn’t happen in lean years. No one complains, they just enjoy what there is, a cheerful family being together, sharing what they have. It is refreshing indeed to spend the holiday thus!

DAY 16. THURSDAY DECEMBER 27th, 2018. KITALE, KENYA

This will be my last day in Kitale for now. I won’t stay to see in 2019 because my Ethiopian visa is limited: I have to be out again by February 12th. And Ethiopia is both a long way from Kitale – at least three full days’ riding, maybe four,  and a huge country – twice the size of France (or Texas)… So I will leave tomorrow morning. Most of today, then, was spent setting up for my journey, sorting my scant luggage, repairing bits of panniers, checking things and preparing for what I hope will be a fascinating journey – into a new country for me. Now that my safari is about to begin, I am both really looking forward to it, and feeling nervous – the usual state.

Delightful Scovia took me for a ‘nature walk’ as she, so recently finished with secondary school, called it: a walk around the neighbourhood. Not far behind the many, and increasing number of private houses in this residential area, spreading already six kilometres from the town centre, lie shambas and fields, a few small eucalyptus groves and scruffy grazing.  The big curved shoulder of Mount Elgon spread-eagles across the western horizon, the border with Uganda running over its peaks. We walked and chattered comfortably, Scovia a self-assured young woman. Then a heavy shower soaked us and we laughed happily, waving to others sheltering under their rusty zinc eaves as we slithered on the instantly muddy surfaces. 

DAY 17. FRIDAY DECEMBER 28th, 2018. ELDAMA RAVINE, KENYA

The big journey begins! I’ve only managed 150 miles of it so far – with maybe 1000 more to go, even to get me to Addis Ababa! Wow. When I look at the map, I see how little of Kenya I have seen… The vast empty desert quarter to the north will take me at least three days to ride. I skirted its southern edge last year; I remember the expansive view from the northern slopes of Mount Kenya, stretching far, far beyond the eye could see, somewhere immensely far beyond the horizons. In the foreground fields of vibrantly yellow rapeseed, beyond just pinks and greys until they faded into the immense arc of the African sky. That’s where I am heading – somewhere into my own unknown. It’s exciting. I’m actually happy that it is so far; it seems more exotic somehow. It’s a challenge I relish. (At the moment!)

Despite being just a couple of miles north of the Equator tonight, it can be chilly riding at these altitudes and I am surprisingly tired. Much of the afternoon I rode at above 7000 feet. The air is clear as crystal, cool and fresh. It’s a delight. Most of my journey today was on roads I know well; indeed, I stayed in Eldama Ravine two years ago, in the noisiest hotel of my African experience! The disco downstairs vibrated the entire structure and my ear plugs just seemed to swell the bass beats. The disco continued all night, and I think it was also a Friday – so there was no way I was stopping at the Chambai Springs Hotel in town, but ahead of me I saw dark rain clouds so I cut short my ride here. Off the road, up 300 yards of appalling track, I found a big hotel. As I pulled into the yard, heavy bass beats filled the yards. Maybe all Eldama Ravine rocks on a Friday? “I’m looking for a place to sleep,” I told friendly Sharon behind a rough reception in a corner of the concrete restaurant. “You don’t have a disco tonight..?” 

She laughed. “No, the music will be only an hour more! We have a party of students by the pool!”

She showed me a couple of rooms, which, apart from dire mauve and purple decor, were inoffensive and good value at £11.80. I moved in with a smile. My needs are few: a clean bed, a warm shower and a long sleep to relax the bike-shaken bones. 

****

The police usually stop me out of curiosity, no other motive. Lovely Zimbabwe is the only place I am hassled by police. “Where do you go?” asked the young traffic constable. “Oh, I’m on my way to Ethiopia,” I replied, anticipating a reaction. “By plane..?”

“No! On this!” I become a wonder, a story to be told. I ride away the centre of amazed faces, of good natured jokes and the focus of many wide white smiles. They seldom then ask to see my papers. For most of them, it’s a wonder that I have ridden from Kitale, 10 miles away.

****

It was almost eleven thirty before I left Kitale, reluctantly taking my farewell of my Kenyan extended family. I’ll return in about six weeks, but Rico hopes to be on contract in Zambia by then. I hope he may be back before I leave Kitale in March. I feel so warmly welcomed there now, my third Christmas holiday with them all. We posed for a cheerful photo, eating our pieces of Christmas cake, which has become a small tradition: my friend Pat Mill’s delicious cake, a kind gift she has given me for the past three years. 

Then I was on the road eastwards into the rolling hills towards the ugly city of Eldoret, which I miss by a few miles and head back towards Iten, the runners’ town above Kessup on the very lip of the dramatic Rift Valley. I know all these roads well. All but six or seven miles are on good tarmac, sweeping through magnificent highland hills, clothed in tall dark conifers and waving eucalyptus. The verges are wide; there’s plenty of space up here. Standing way back from the road are fences of vertical spilt logs, smallholdings and small fields surrounding tin-roofed dwellings. There are cattle everywhere; children too, many of whom wave. I climb slowly higher and higher, cooler and cooler. I consider stopping to put on another layer, but I know that eventually I will descend and it’ll warm again. I pass one of my favourite hotels, the old faded colonial Kaptagat Hotel in its old gardens, a tattered hotel where I enjoy the aroma and warmth of a cedar fire in my bedroom with its polished boarded floors. Pity I can’t stop tonight: I’d be warmly welcomed, but it’s only 2.30 and I have a thousand miles to ride. I pass the top of that wonderful serpentine down into the valley and the fluorspar mines, but I rode that magic last week. I sweep along; stop at a viewpoint where the enormous valley suddenly comes sight – it’s evasive most of the way. Women and children sell fresh muddy potatoes from small stacks, amused that the mzungu has stopped. They immediately gather round me. It’s just curiosity, something to pass some time, an event on the usual endless day sitting at the roadside staring into space. You must get used to this focus of attention, the nearness of people discussing every feature of you and your possessions. But everyone smiles happily and waves me on my way. 

Then Eldama Ravine, not a pretty town. It sprawls across a hillside, new concrete mixed with faded concrete, rusted zinc and garish shiny paintwork advertising all the phone companies. The African norm is not maintenance but eventual replacement, so new structures fade and crack, peel and stain, break and crumble back into the scruffiness of age. Someday, they’ll be pulled down and left gestating as heaps of rubble for a decade or two. Then a newly hopeful project will arise – and slowly succumb to the same fate. It’s the African cycle.

****

Solomon, shaking my hand, tells me he’s the owner of this hillside hotel. He made his money working for Anglo-American Mines, he says, in various parts of the world. He is one of twenty children; his father had three wives. Father was uneducated but made money, initially, as always in Africa, cattle, then buying trucks, then local politics – astute moves. “He managed to educate us all. Fifteen of us to university. I went to study in Romania. I speak Romanian, and French. I worked in Congo for ten years. But this is my home. My father, he gave each son twenty acres. But so many children was a lot of stress. He had diabetes, his legs amputated. He died in 2003, aged 73. We have a reunion once a year. There are about 100 grandchildren! If we meet here, we can fill the hotel.” Exponential is a word you come to respect in African demographics.

And then it’s 8.30 and I realise that I am exhausted, full of not bad chicken curry, served with sour local vegetables and a couple of greasy African chapattis. A bottle of Tusker and that’s it for another day. Now all I ask is a comfortable bed and quiet… Another day on the road.

DAY 18. SATURDAY DECEMBER 29th, 2018. NANYUKI, KENYA

Another 170 miles nearer Ethiopia, but still a long way to go! Tonight finds me in Nanyuki, on the western slopes of Mount Kenya, a town known for its British army training centre, which gives it, I think, a price of its own – higher than usual. The Kenyan government makes good money from the British government for this intrusion. But despite the abnormal costs of Nanyuki, not a pretty town, I just did the best hotel deal of my African travels!

Quite shameless after all this time, I usually manage to get a good rate by a bit of bargaining and play-acting my disappointment when tariffs are too high. I don’t think I EVER managed a 74% discount before though, down from £59 a night (at which this place would still be over-priced by about double, I reckon) to my budget limit of £15.75! Haha! Done it again. Well, the middle-aged mzungu owner happens to be a biker so the old fraternity, that crosses all barriers of race, creed, age and culture, works once more. “Don’t tell your friends what you’re paying!” My dinner will cost me double, but that’s a small matter. For this discount I can’t really argue and go and eat at a street stall! “I’d rather have the room used for two thousand shillings than empty for nothing, at this time of evening anyway!” This after he’d recommended a place down the track that’d rent me a room within my budget. This place seems to cater to the international trade, booked ahead from the internet, those tunnel-vision organised animal safari guests, racial blinkers firmly in place, who feel more secure with a white man in charge; and showy middle class Kenyans impressing their circles by paying three times the real rate. Oh well, I’ll take the hospitality for a quarter the tariff! To judge by the fifty-some year old overweight mzungu who just entered the dining room with a pretty twenty-some floosie, in high boots and short skirt I can guess at the extra ‘trade’; ‘leering’ is a word that comes to mind, watching as he moves alongside from the opposite side of their table. Oh well, a 74% discount’s fine, even if I am generally more comfortable in more ‘local’ places. 

The owner was born in Kenya when his British father was sent to oversee some details of independence in the early 60s. He’s a rolling stone, it seems, settled for now in Nanyuki, after years in Australia and Switzerland. He intends to lease his place to Americans next year, import another bike, do some riding round and look for the next resting place. It’s interesting to find that the mzungu ownership does mean the taps don’t swivel, the cistern works and the curtain poles don’t crash to the floor. 

Now, after supper, I’m relaxing before a log fire, happy for its warmth tonight. Face burning from the sun and later the chill air, I can reflect slightly soporifically on my day… 

****

It’s been a long day, a feature of which was crossing the proliferations of Equator at least six or seven times. There are a lot of Equators in Kenya. I know it’s only an imaginary line, but I still feel a frisson of excitement when I see the signs, although I suspect some are just where there’s a good place for souvenir stands. I left Eldama Ravine, and headed down to the sun-filled Rift Valley again, heat increasing pleasantly as I rode. Solomon, last night’s hotel owner, told me of a short cut by which I could cut out two sides of a traffic triangle I really dislike, that takes me through the congested, crazy city of Nakuru, on the main, horrid highway across Kenya. “Don’t cross the rail tracks, turn left beside them.” 

It was a rather insignificant rough gravel and rocky road across the valley, about 20 miles. As I rode, I thought smugly of the chaos of Nakuru, where anarchic traffic is amongst the craziest in the country. My road was convoluted, generally following an old, long-defunct railway track between cactus, thorn trees and scrub, past invisible landmarks redolent of old colonial engineers: ‘McCall’s Siding’, ‘Milton’s Siding’, buried now in red earth. In the valley below were huge areas under dirty sand-faded plastic. It’s from these regions that out of season flowers come, flown (ridiculously) in jumbo jets to the flower markets of Europe every day. I bounced through isolated villages, across an unmarked Equator or two, pursued by a thousand eyes and smiling faces, past hundreds of shambas, through road blocks of flocking sheep, dodging cattle everywhere. At last I emerged onto a tar road, took a wrong turning and wasted ten kilometres until I stopped to ask my way from Joseph, a friendly boda-boda rider. Then it was the long, long climb up to the top of Kenya, as far as roads go at least, to Nyaharuru, the highest town. And it IS a long ride with only 200ccs to power me to the heights. But it’s a magnificent journey, up and up into the green heights, getting colder every twist in the road. Crossing yet another putative Equator, at 2350 metres high, I stopped to look back across the intervening valleys, zinc roofs glinting in the high, bright sun, then, finally, rode on into Nyaharuru, an untidy hill town full of traffic. 

The old Thomson’s Falls Hotel is stuck in the same time warp as the Kitale Club, spinning around in about 1960, with fake painted half-timbering, wide red zinc eaves, it’s waiters dressed in crumpled, ill-fitting second-hand black suits, unsuitable for the culture, let alone the climate. I stopped for a quaintly amusing hour to drink masala tea (tea with ginger and spices) from one of those ill-designed utility teapots that never pour without leaving a puddle on the table. Nearby, the falls roar over a rocky edge, tumbling into a gorge, watched by a couple of hundred local tourists, this weekend day. Souvenir stands abound outside but one of the best ways to see the falls is to buy a pot of tea in the old colonial gardens of the hotel! 

From there it is a tedious ride on a busy highway, idiots returning to the capital from their Christmas breaks, driving erratically over the long hills and sweeps of the wide road, the lovely scenery ignored in haste to be in front. Away to the south is the range of the Aberdares, tightly clothed in dark forests, the parks and reserves where big game roams in protected safety. To the north, now beneath heavy rain clouds, stretches a vast tract of lowland. Rain was closing in; I stopped to put on my waterproof coat against the cold. When the sun stops shining, the smile goes out of the African landscape. 

Soon I had to stop to don my waterproof trousers for a heavy, cold shower. I pulled off the road to shelter with boda-boda riders beneath one of their stick and tin shelters, most emblazoned with the generosity of the local politician who, vote-hungry, provided a little sun and rain cover for his struggling constituents as he appropriated their limited rights into his own bank account. 

These boda-boda men, a couple of them in their middle age, but most in their twenties, probably think themselves lucky to make a pound or two a day: there are so many of them. Yet they have an apparently unlimited capacity for welcome and friendliness, especially with a fellow biker and a mzungu who treats them as equals. I enjoyed twenty minutes waiting out the worst of the shower with them, curious about my journey. Their bikes are worn out, covered in stickers, battered, dented and most likely unsafe, but they provide a living of sorts in a country where, through vast over-population, unaffordable education, misappropriation of funds, exploitation by the outside world and bad government, most struggle along on a few Kenyan bob a day, made however they can. Many of these young men – and the matatu drivers – don’t own their vehicles. They are ‘rented’ from richer Kenyans, many of them policemen and politicians… Life is hard for the average Kenyan. Yet they still have that fine capacity for open, generous friendliness to a passing mzungu, a being from another world entirely. THAT is the wonder of Africa! 

DAY 19. SUNDAY DECEMBER 30th, 2018. ARCHERS POST, KENYA

Going back to places in Africa is so rewarding. I met and stayed with Rebecca almost eighteen years ago. She was a relative of Rico’s first Kenyan wife, Anna. She’s an impressive woman, forging her own path in the man’s world that is Africa. I have so often written here that if the women of Africa could be empowered, this wouldn’t be the basket case continent that is its trend. Rebecca is a case in point. About 25 years ago she and a few like-minded women formed a women’s cooperative, against a lot of male opposition. She’s just as impressive and powerful all these years later. The cooperative now runs a school with 200 pupils, that was graded sixth out of 31 local schools, maintains an ethnic ‘village’ open to tourists, and now a fine bar with a few bandas (grass-roofed huts for rent) beside the river. They have stood out against female genital mutilation and rigorously supported the rights of their girls and women. In 2001 the project was in its early days, now it is well established and Rebecca tells me she is even to make a speech at this year’s International Women’s Day in Italy shortly. I’ve just drunk three bottles of beer with her and Sophia, the vice chair of the Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission. “The only person we can’t arrest is the President!” (He being perhaps the first they should arrest…). “I’m second in command.” Sophia is a local product too, her intelligence encouraged, she tells me, by the catholic church. For a woman from a northern tribe to become a high ranking, respected member of the administration is a reflection of her determination. Impressive women…

****

Today was an easy day, just 100 miles or so. I left Nanyuki late, chatting to William, my host of last night. It turned out that we had a lot in common, apart from the biking. He built scenery in Australia, understood my bizarre profession and loves to travel. Not surprisingly, we had a lot to talk about before I finally got away at 11.30.

The road north is busy this weekend; it’s still a major holiday with traffic returning Nairobi or heading for a few last days at some of the attractions in the northern region, game parks and reserves. My companions at breakfast, a Nairobi couple with a small daughter, chatted over our fruit and scrambled eggs. He works for one of the national media companies, print and TV. He told me that it takes him up to two hours to get to work. He rises at 5.00am and gets home at 8.00pm. “Nothing to do but work eight hours a travel another three or four!” That’s life for many professionals across the continent. Their holiday was an obvious relief.

At last I got on my way, on a good road that skirts around the lower slopes of Mount Kenya, Africa’s second mountain. Away to my right, the peaks of the mountain appeared from the bright white clouds, snow and tenacious (reducing) glaciers visible on the highest, jagged points. The light up here is so extreme that it seems to wash out the natural colours of the soil and vegetation to faded pale colours. It’s a lovely landscape, spoiled rather by square kilometres of dirty plastic hot houses, producing vegetables and flowers for our greedy European markets.

Almost a year ago I stopped for coffee at a cafe and restaurant in this northern country. They had a real coffee machine, a rarity in Kenya. When I stopped today, a young woman appeared to greet me. “You stopped here before!” said Lucy, correctly. Amazing, at least eleven months on, and she remembered me. A bright, friendly young woman, with her sister, Isabella and their friend Kananu, they were delightful company and conversation for a relaxed hour over good coffee and cake. Fancy remembering me! But then, I suppose white-bearded mzungus on motorbikes don’t call every day.

****

My first view of the great expanses of the north came soon after. Suddenly, the hills dropped away to reveal a hundred miles of pale green landscapes and distant blue mountains. There’s been a great deal of rain this year; William said they’d had an exceptional four and a half metres of rain in the last three months in Nanyuki. Even today there were light rain showers as I descended to the dry bush lands, heavy rain streaking the skies to the west. 

I am now entering the Africa that you know from picture books. The hills fall back to make occasional tall punctuations to level lands. Flat-topped thorn trees abound and the soil is rocky, volcanic stones like sponges lying on the dry earth amongst spiky undergrowth.  Women sport layer upon layer of rings of beadwork around their necks, each intricate layer indicating their status. Herdsmen, with large flocks of goats, wear colourful cloths like sarongs and distinctive hairstyles. These are desert people, cattle herders living in simple homes of thatch and stick. The sun beats down uncompromisingly, a harsh, steely light.

****

Archers Post is a low lying, sandy town of small lock up shops and rude housing. I remembered roughly where to look for Rebecca. In 2001, Rico, his sister and her husband, and his cousin and wife, and I all stayed in her small concrete block compound, in which she’d build, “With my OWN hands!” a few guest rooms, hot, basic spaces. It’s still a rough guest house, now owned by her divorced husband, Fabien, and his soon-wed young wife. Samburu men, or any other tribe of the 3000 odd in Africa, have little time and much jealousy for strong, independent women. “Oh, he tried to spread the stories! How I was going with wazungu! How I took men. But I don’t need them! I have my work. I represent my women. I love my work! Have you seen me with men? I asked; have you? My sons, they came back slowly. There, that is my son there…” A burly fellow, now in his thirties, whom I once met, aged about fifteen. “Oh, I love my work! It is enough!”

She now manages the campsite, a fine bar overlooking the fast flowing brown river, and the cultural village amongst thorn hedges. It’s a well kept, tidy operation, secure and popular with wazungu guests visiting the large national game parks. “You will stay here tonight! I am happy you came back!” Rebecca likes her beer, downing bottles of White Cap lager through the hot afternoon beside the river, holding court, this matriarch of the community. 

“Tell me about Rico. Is he happy? I love Rico! In Kitale? That’s good, Turkana is a tough place.” Rico lived some years in Turkana, way up in the tribal wilds of the far north. It IS a rough place… Rico’s first Kenyan wife, a Turkana woman, Anna, was a cousin to Rebecca; their fathers were brothers from here, but Anna’s father fled to Turkana as a young man. There he took various wives and produced a large family, shunning his home people. It was Anna who found her lost family again, a few years before she died. Rico and Rebecca got to know one another then. But after Anna died the relations soured somewhat, through misunderstandings. 

Earlier, I rode into the thorn-hedged compound of the spread-eagled guest house on the sand and parked the Mosquito in the searing sun. “I’m looking for Rebecca,” I said to the large lady in a full length pink Sunday dress, half-recognising her. “I am Rico’s friend. I stayed with you almost eighteen years ago, and we agreed, ‘if I am passing through Samburu, I must look for you’!” Within moments, after a huge enveloping hug, I was seated with three bottles of beer and Sophia! 

“How is Rico? Oh, I love Rico!” It seemed the misunderstandings were a regret for Rebecca. “How Rico has looked after that family!” and she explained the circumstances of Anna’s dysfunctional Turkana family, with its jealousies and rejections, how Rico took in and brought up so many children. “I LOVE Rico!”

“I want Rico to visit me again. I am happy he has a good wife now. I love Rico!” This cheerful, capable, large woman, now in her late 50s, exclaimed again and again slipping in and out of her local language and English as she told Sophia the stories. The river flowed quietly past, the pale green of the desert stretched to the southern horizon, flat. Music blared, as if from six feet away, but actually 300 yards away, from a phenomenally loud bar where disco lights flashed across the thorn scrub. “It will go on ALL night! I hope it won’t disturb you. They are bad neighbours! What can we do?”

“It WILL disturb me! I am the lightest sleeper. Just as well I have ear plugs. Maybe you should mobilise your women! There you have power!” I know what the threat of withdrawal of conjugal rights can do in this culture – but it has, of course, to be done in unison to avoid punishment. It’s not a light path for women to take in Africa! 

We drank and conversed. The river flowed on by. “Where does it go?” I asked. “It’s a lot of water.”

“To Somalia,” a man told me. “It goes underground and to the Indian Ocean,” said another. Maybe it’s one of those African rivers that dies in the desert?

****

The conversation ranged on. Now I was on my third bottle, still in my boots and riding trousers, uncomfortable, head beginning to throb. Sophia, downed her Belozi lagers, a strong-featured woman in a long black dress, her head wound in an orange and red cloth, falling away and swung casually around her neck. 

The talk turned to a topic that is important to these women, FGM. They have stood bravely against the customs and rituals of their community and prevented the barbarism on their own daughters. But it was too late for them. “Ha! We went on TV!” exclaimed Sophia with big laugh, this obviously commanding woman, who has risen so far and garnered respect on the way. Doubtless, she is a well known national figure. “Oh! I surprised them! The viewers were glued to the TV. I told them what they did to me. I TOLD them! EXACTLY!” She made discomforting slicing gestures in her lap as she laughed. “Not for MY daughter… our daughters!” These are brave women. “Our daughters won’t be abused like that.”

****

My fourth bottle of beer was taken under the bright stars. It was a long time since breakfast now; my head ached from sun, the pounding of the disco across the thorn bushes, concentration on the road and too much alcohol. But the stars provided a wonderful still relief as I tried to relieve my aching neck, gazing into their brilliant depths, more stars than ever visible in Europe. Various people joined our dark table, including an English woman, Wendy, who discovered her love of Africa through VSO. In due course supper was ready, chicken, rice, vegetables and chapattis. “When I was here, they arranged a trip for local people to some of the safari lodges,” said Wendy. “About six or seven matatus lined up, full of elders and local people. I was asked to film their reactions…” Bear in mind that local people never get near these exclusive, expensive places unless as servants. “It was FUNNY! They couldn’t believe it. When they saw the rooms… the bathrooms, they lifted the seats up and down, disbelieving. When we told them the cost, they were so funny! The elders just shook their heads. Wazungu come direct to these places, see the animals, live in seclusion, and think they’ve seen Africa!”

****

And now, at last, I can repair to bed in my round mud and thatch hut, shaking to the beat of the distant disco. One benefit of motorcycling is ear plugs! It’s warm, just a sheet for cover tonight under my mosquito net. It feels more like the tropics this way. Tomorrow is all new country for me. I am still 300 miles, two days, even to the border…

DAY 20. MONDAY DECEMBER 31st, 2018. MARSABIT, KENYA

There are times when you can feel very alone in Africa. Today’s long ride was one of them. Like the Karoo Desert far down in South Africa, the northern deserts of Kenya just seem to stretch endlessly; I am on my own in this infinity, insignificant, sharing the horizons with a few haughty camels, noses disdainfully in the air as I pass, or a flock of ostriches, nature’s joke on the avian world. I ride and ride. Nothing moves but the fluffy white clouds drifting aimlessly about in the deep blue sky. There’s no shade. The sun beats on my helmet. My road goes on and on, no relief. Ancient volcanic plugs rise from the endless level horizons. Red earth. Flat-topped trees. Heat shimmering. 

****

There’s a sense of the exotic about it up here, way beyond the other Kenya now; the Kenya of ‘civilisation’, traffic, cheerful people, boda-boda boys, newspaper sellers, coffee and tea places, people waiting for matatus. Up here, even the matatus are few and far between, boda-bodas almost non-existent: the distances too far. It’s another country. Raw. Harsh. Uncompromising.

It’s the Africa of the picture books; tribespeople from National Geographic. Young women swathed in bright cloths, mainly red, orange and blue; beaded necklace rings, shoulder wide, young teenage, babies at backs. They wave, a flash of bright beaded wristbands and a light brown palm against the dark black of their skins. Young men, tribesmen, decorated, glittering like Christmas trees, tall, thin, athletic. A red cloth wrapped around the waist, torso bare, black skin, beads everywhere. Bizarre headdresses, beads, feathers, pointed bones through their upper ears. Self-aware, parading, exotic. 

****

My lips are parched; I stop to drink some water, my metal bottle filled from the bore hole water at last night’s guest house. “It’s salty!” Rebecca warned me. The bore hole was donated by women in Europe, admiring the work of her cooperative. In Africa water is life. I alleviate the odd flavour with a gulp of juice from my other container and ride on. Still a long way to ride on my little Mosquito at 45mph. 

‘Caution. Animals crossing 200 metres’. Warns a rusted sign with a picture of elephants. But it’s more likely I’ll see cows to dodge on the road, or one of the enormous flocks of sheep common here with these tribes. Or donkeys that never get out of the way. Further on, it will be camels clomping across the tarmac. 

****

Now it’s noon. I’m riding on my own shadow, daydreaming my way towards Ethiopia – slowly. The clouds are thickening, still high and white, but an occasional drift of welcome shadow across the road. A scrappy town on the horizon, a red and white communication tower, a completely dry red river bed beneath a bridge 100 metres wide. This road is new; the bridges in good condition yet. Merille; it’s not even on my map. Tea! I’ll stop for tea. I want to stave off the headache I’ve had the last four afternoons: dehydration, the hot helmet, my tensed neck. 

There’s a ‘hotel’, ‘Travellers Choice’, no apostrophe. Well, it wouldn’t be my choice anywhere else. ‘Hotel’ here means tea house, greasy food, heavy ughali, some broken bones with scraps of flesh. Plastic chairs from China. I pull up in the red sandy street. People look at me. No smiles but no danger either. I’m just sort of totally off their map. They don’t see wazungus here. They rush past in a pother of dust in over-equipped safari vehicles, windows up, remote. Slightly detached people these, some Sudanese here, it’s not far away now, that troubled land. I sip the sweet, milky tea, revolting but restorative. The tea tastes of smoke, but it’s really smoke, not lapsang, water boiled on a wood fire, tea served from an old pink Chinese vacuum flask. “What’s your team?” asks a young man sporting large thick black glasses without lenses. It’s the one thing almost every African, anywhere on the continent, knows about England: football. 

People pass the doorway like a film. Extraordinary earrings on the men, sock-like anklets of beads for the girls. I’m left in peace. I really do feel as if I’m off their radar here. Too exotic for them too, we have little point of contact. “Mzungu!” a child calls out, and I realise I am almost dozing off in the warmth. Beads and spears everywhere, bright cloth, shy smiles, Chinese flip-flops or car-tyre sandals. Bare chests, peacock preening, big belt knives and pangas in beaded sheaths, earrings, headdresses, beads, beads, beads. It does feel like Africa, though. 

****

On again. Still a long ride ahead. A herdsman, red cloth round his waist, bare very black chest, beaded and feathered headdress, balances on one foot watching a multitude of sheep at the roadside. He keeps his balance by leaning on a fine seven foot long, hand wrought spear. He has a mobile phone to his ear. 

“You are brave,” people incorrectly tell me at home, imagining, I suppose, the fighting tribesmen, the snakes I never see, international wars beloved of the western media, the famines, ambush, robbery, marauding animals all behind fences now; who knows, maybe they imagine the natives dancing round the cooking pot! My only bravery is in bringing a mechanical jigsaw that I hardly begin to understand, to a lonely place so far from mechanics who do understand. I listen for the rattle, the misfire, the silence; worst, wait for the wobble that signifies a flat tyre – all of them presaging disaster to my lonely imagination. It’s the main stress of my days. 

A few decades ago, this was one of the most dangerous roads in all Africa. Shiftas, Somali warriors, shot on sight. Life is cheap in the harsh depths of the desert. Or it was marauding tribes hacking each other to death, with a few ‘collateral damage’ victims on the way. They’d not have wanted my camera or iPad, valuables to me, but probably my shoes, valuables to them. A life for a pair of shoes. It was a brutal reality. Now the road is tedious, smooth tarmac all the way these last few years, part of that long ambition of a Trans Africa Highway, a road from Cape Town to Cairo, that’s never been achieved, and that volatile African politics will probably never permit. 

****

I may not need courage, but I do need determination. At last Marsabit is in sight. It’s on a small volcanic mountain range above the desert and has it’s own microclimate, much cooler. I’d expected multiple choices of somewhere decent to stay, but 10 or 12 kilometres touring the place didn’t turn up much. Finally I found the Nomads Trail Hotel and did a deal with Kaseem for a first floor room with only a 25% discount tonight. But it’s a good room and a hot shower. The town’s pretty grim, heavily Moslem and most of it ‘dry’. And here I am on New Year’s Eve having to tour the whole town to find the hidden bar, tucked away on the fourth floor of one of the fading hotels, to even get a bottle of Tusker! I am entirely alone here, looking down over the rusted tin roofs and lights of the ugly town. My hotel – dry – is across the main highway. The bar girl, bored and listless, wanted to draw the curtains. “No, leave them! I enjoy looking out!” I said. 

“But people will see you!” I’m on the fourth floor of a hideous hotel with mirrored glass windows! But that’s the trouble with religious dogma – I feel guilty and a bit subversive to be drinking two not very good Tuskers on New Year’s Eve! Huh. Oh well, I shall be in bed LONG before 2018 is done… At least in an Islamic hotel there’ll be revelry to keep me awake.

About to begin the ride. We eat Pat’s Christmas cake.

Scovia

Maria

Lucy

DAY 1. WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 12th 2018. NAIROBI, KENYA

AFRICA!! What a lazy, vague description that really is. I am once again on this continent, which holds 54 countries, uncountable tribes (estimated around 3000) and at least two thousand languages. In our cultural idleness and, it must be said, arrogance, we club together this astonishing diversity into six lifeless letters. From Arabs in the north, through all the variously dark-skinned tribes of Sub-Saharan Africa down to that odd white tribe of the Afrikaners, this continent explodes with life almost irrespective of where you touch down on its red earth. It’s one of the greatest wonders of this extraordinary world. I feel so privileged to know so much of it and to feel so utterly comfortable and content to have spent well over four years exploring its backroads – and above all, smiling with its people in 22 of those spellbinding countries. 

Instantly a sense of warmth enfolds me. Of course, that’s a physical sensation; but it’s also something that reaches deep into my soul. It manifests itself in the universal welcome that I feel, the smiles that greet me, the cheerful greetings that return the smile so often spread across MY face; the casual, honest interaction with complete strangers; the compassion and curiosity that engulfs my every action. I may as well say it on page one, because if you’ve read my journals before, you’ll know well that my two most admired human qualities are just those: compassion and curiosity. If you are curious about your fellow and neighbour you show care and compassion for their motivations, you take an interest outside yourself, you share what makes life valuable. 

In all my search this year for a longterm solution to loss of many teeth (and no, I’m NOT going to regale you with THAT life story here, about my huge dental works in Poland since that fateful day in Kampala back in March when it all started with a (rather good!) chicken pie); in all that uncomfortable experience what has driven me forward was the restoration of my smile. For if there is one thing that generally IS a standard amongst so many peoples on this continent it is the ability to look one another in the eye and smile. It’s the most fundamental form of human contact, the simplest of languages, but one we have lost so much to our cost in our ‘sophistication’ in the North. We are the poorer for our default sense of mistrust and doubt. Believe me, on page one, 99.99% of the people of this world are good and trustworthy. Instinct, if followed, will usually quite accurately introduce the other .01%. Something my travels have taught me is that an open, trusting approach is seldom abused. My default is trust.

****

So here I was, weary but smiling broadly with my new teeth, sitting drinking coffee in a smart arcade cafe in downtown Nairobi, watching a rotund “Hoho-ing” Father Christmas sweating in red velour and cotton wool, a large cushion strapped beneath his red cloak. With him was a very pretty elf. Without the costume, you’d immediately put him down as drunk! Haha! or maybe, Hoho. 

A slight digression here on the Father Christmas theme: did you know that the cheery red Santa was an invention of a New York illustrator called Thomas Nast, in the 1870s, cemented in public imagination by the nasty Coca Cola Corporation in the 1920s and 30s? Of such are our ‘old traditions’: dreamed up and invented in the overriding interests of Mammon, soon accepted and imbued with ‘cultural heritage’ status by a compliant public. Santa Claus is in fact a resident of strongly Dutch New York, invented around 1804 by an antiquarian who adopted St Nicholas, a fourth century saint, patron of children and gift-giving, as a benevolent symbol for the new young city. Now it’s worldwide, even in a Nairobi shopping centre.

****

Nairobi, a few years ago, was anarchic and shambolic. Today it is a modern African city, clean, tidy and with disciplined traffic – although crowded almost to extinction. A ride from the airport with pleasant Moses, was calm and quiet. No car horns, no pushing, no racing, one very nasty accident that had collected a vast crowd of onlookers who blocked the road (that’s another continent-wide habit); a lot of cooperation and some evident consideration. It is a holiday, it’s true, – something to do with independence I think – so traffic is much quieter than on weekdays, but I recollect this city just a decade and a half ago, and it has changed very much. 

But what’s so wonderful… everyone meets my eye and greets me: perfect strangers, passers by, street sellers, security guards, everyone. And I can smile back – (widely now)!!

So here I go again. “Aren’t you afraid,” all those fearful white people ask – presumably because ‘different’ is threatening. The ‘Black Continent’ – and we associate black with the devil, evil, bad things. Well, long may that perception last, as it keeps away the hordes – who infest Krakow (where I was last week in search of my smile), who vomit amongst the history of European cities between the ‘Bull Pub’, the ‘British Football Club’ bar and the burgers and fish and chips that have become the new culture of mass tourism. I’m so happy to be back amongst smiles. It was restoration of my smile that concerned me this year, much more than eating or vanity. In Africa a smile is a necessity. It is universal communication.

****

My ticket for the small plane up to Kitale definitely reads: ‘Flight 071. Nairobi/Wilson to Kitale. 10.45 departure, 13.12.2018. Trouble is, there isn’t a plane at 10.45, just the one flight a day – at 07.15! It seems they informed Rico, whom I was due to meet at Wilson airfield this morning, sometime while I was still flying from Europe. Well, I am travelling, and one thing all these years have taught me is that sometimes things go awry, and just the wrong response is to get stressed and angry. Moses, who usually meets Rico and family to transport them about the capital when needed, had already taken Rico from the guest house to Wilson for the early flight. But I decided to go there anyway. “My ticket DOES say 10.45!” 

Of course, the flight was long departed, but delightful Vincent, a true gentleman working for the small but busy internal airline, changed my ticket free of charge for tomorrow morning’s early flight. It all took time. Moses waited patiently and at last drove me to the guest house. I did suggest that the small airline should pay for my hotel and taxi expenses, but it was somewhat tongue in cheek. I must have thought I was still in Europe! In Africa, it’s completely counter-productive to get irritated and fight for what you see as your rights. Better to smile, make a joke, tread lightly – and doors swing assuredly open in all circumstances. The angry white man gets nowhere at all. They screwed up, but rather than blaming the operative behind the counter, enlist his support, tell a few stories, relax. And you get a reprinted ticket, despite the fact that these planes are often full. “You could always go by matatu!” joked Vincent with a wide, bright, ironic smile. Matatus being the crumbling, disintegrating and sometimes deathly minibuses. 

****

It’s 4153 miles from Amsterdam to Nairobi, just seven and a half hours. But my main reaction was boredom and discomfort (in an insultingly small seat on the Kenya Airways plane). My first international flight, in 1965, was SUCH an event! None of my friends had ever flown, let alone as far as America. Now..? The joy and wonder has gone from international travel, and I’ve done a lot of it this year: five trips across the Atlantic, four journeys to Poland and two more across the Sahara, this one about the 60th time. I’ve made 41 flight in nine months. The remarkable fact is that I can fly four thousand miles, into a completely different culture on a different continent in a third of a day – and I am underwhelmed… 

Nairobi’s at 5300 feet. At eight o’clock it is just pleasantly cool enough for a thin jersey. I’ve just eaten a Ethiopian plate as a taster for what I hope will be a fascinating ride in that country in a few weeks: a huge 18 inch platter covered in injera, a thin, soggy savoury pancake, on which sit various very tasty vegetarian concoctions of spiced beans, cabbage, kale, beetroot and salads; eaten with the fingers, it was filling and delicious. 

Now it’s time for bed; I’m rubbing my eyes. Day one of a new trip and I’m already intrigued and anticipatory. I LOVE not to know what the morrow will bring! Here I go again! 

DAY 2. THURSDAY DECEMBER 13th 2018. KITALE, KENYA

Day two of another trip in East Africa. It takes time and energy to move about the world like this and tonight, four thousand miles from home, I am exhausted. But I am here, and now I can stop moving for a day or two. A week ago I was stressed in Poland awaiting serious dentistry, and now I am a few minutes of angle above the Equator. All that travelling, combined with a before-dawn start today has been hard. But now I am welcomed warmly amongst one of my extended families, comfortably at home. I can relax once more.

Despite delightful staff, the guest house in Nairobi is a £12 African guest house masquerading as a £47 hotel. The city is expensive: one of the most over-priced towns I know in Africa. Even in Cape Town I could find better, more economic hotels, but Nairobi hasn’t those places. However, it’s only a bed for the night and I could quickly move on in the dawn, collected again by Moses, back to the Wilson airfield, where small planes roared and shuddered into the dismal cold rain clouds of dawn. This, as everywhere around the globe this year, is unseasonal weather and, indeed, Kitale tonight is cold. 

It’s less than an hour in a noisy 36 seater plane, sadly not one of the fun 13 seater Cessnas, up to Kitale on the far western highlands, where Adelight, Rico and baby Maria, now a delightful, cheerful one and a half, waited to meet me at the airstrip. Lovely Scovia has repainted ‘my’ house in the garden and prepared it comfortably for my stays here over the next three months, for I expect I will be back and forth, welcomed to use their home as my African base once again.

It’s not only happy little Maria, with a head of extravagantly wild black curls, that has grown. In Africa, given some rain – and there’s been plenty recently – the sun assures that things grow fast. The garden and shamba are green and lush, the nasturtiums vibrant amongst the tropical greens once again. We are a small family at home just now; with only Scovia and Bo of the Rico Girls at home. But Maria fills the space as any happy toddler does. She is so fortunate to grow up amongst so many sisters and aunties. She’s a bright child; you can see her observing and working things out already. Economically, life is always hard in this household. There are many school fees to pay and mouths to feed. Rico has taken in and cared for a multitude of young girls over the years, providing a real home to many who would have lacked that supportive love and family atmosphere. Like all such family groups, the dynamics vary. Just now, Marion and Shamilla are away with their mothers, Maureen is studying in Mombassa and Rose has a job in a shop in Nairobi. They grow and leave the nest and the range of ‘grandchildren’ increases. Despite their often disparate backgrounds, all these girls have become a close family, one of the warmest I know, largely content with their lot, which in material terms isn’t much at all. 

DAY 3. FRIDAY DECEMBER 14th 2018. KITALE, KENYA

These first few days are well and contentedly spent just relaxing back into the rhythms of equatorial life. Everything runs at different speeds here and I must forget my European insistence on minute by minute achievement and gratification of every passing whim. In Africa you have to learn to operate at a different pace. Things take the time they take. It’s not laziness and lack of drive; more a change of perspective. Social interaction is paramount, niceties of greeting and meeting, polite exchanges all take time. Time is not money here, sociability is the currency. The often intense heat in these climes forces a slower amble; energy is expended in every movement so you do things more languidly to conserve precious power. There’s so much less mechanisation, less computers (or slower, older ones connected sporadically to a shaky internet); there’s no wealth to invest in slow moving stock, so items are frequently unavailable; there’s poor transport and infrastructure. You just slow down and accept that everything will take longer, you won’t find the beer you want in the first supermarket; you may have to visit three; your card won’t work in the first ATM, you must walk to another that may be connected. Such is the pace and the visual stimulation, the people watching, the passing but cheerful interactions, the effort of moving through sun drenched, crowded streets, that I have often forgotten why I was there in the first place and leave the supermarket without the only item (toothpaste) for which I went in… But the reward is the manner in which everyone meets my eye and returns a smile or greeting. 

So not much gets done on these first days. I am very fortunate for a calm base from which to settle back to my travels, ripped out, as I was two days ago, from another culture and deposited into this. In a day or two I will summon the energy to get myself to Brooke, about 150 miles away, to collect my little blue motorbike, my ‘Mosquito’, from Nashon the mechanic. Two trips ago, I turned into a dazzling tea estate near Kericho, tea capital of Kenya, to photograph the closely cropped brilliant shoots, spread like expensive fitted carpets over the rounded hills. Thereupon, my Mosquito died. With considerable effort, I pushed it up the hill back to the road, where I flagged down a pick-up and negotiated for a ride back to the nearest town. My driver, a decent, educated man, deposited me outside a market shack, with an apron of oily mud and filled with bits of decaying and decayed motorbikes, piled apparently randomly – but this being an economy of necessity, in which spare parts are valuable, I later realised, as Nashon delved into the mound of rusting metal, that he had a mental inventory of all its contents.

Nashon seemed a man of integrity. A little older than many of the local bike butchers, it appears that my driver did me a huge favour in introducing me to this decent, kindly, polite man. He quickly diagnosed the problem – a broken starter gear mechanism – and warned me that if it was the case (it was), he would have to strip the entire engine to its component parts, wash them all to rid the motor of any metal flakes, and rebuild it again. I moved back to the hotel I had vacated a few hours earlier and spent the next two and a half days nervously watching Nashon and his workmate cousins strip my little bike, gear by gear, nut and bolt and seal, screws and miscellaneous bits and pieces, onto pieces of tattered cardboard on the hard packed, greasy mud of his lock-up shop front. Nashon even spent almost an entire day driving to the nearest big city to search, unsuccessfully, for parts. I imagined my ride was over, until he told me that the little bike would still work, but with the kick start alone. In a couple of days he had my now fully serviced bike up and running, better than before.

Last safari I rode the bike a further 8000 kilometres. Towards the end of my ride, I rode back to Brooke to visit Nashon, to his obvious delight. This politeness is so important – and so valued. I had honoured Nashon with my visit. He was proud, there in front of his workshop, amongst his peers and friends, that the mzungu had returned to pay respects. I met his family and neighbours and cemented another African friendship. I also had the idea to ask Nashon if he would thoroughly maintain the bike, and put in new (well, second hand actually) parts before my journey begins this year. He was pleased to oblige; it enhanced his credibility – and proved our relation had gone beyond a passing mzungu in trouble. In October we communicated back and forth; he estimated the parts he’d need, and Rico was to arrange to send the bike by road to Brooke. Nashon and Adelight were in touch… and Nashon announced that he would fetch the bike from Kitale – about150 miles – and ride it back to Brooke. This he did. I was interested that Adelight and Rico had no reservations about handing over my bike, the papers, the money and even lending him a helmet for the ride home. I was pleased to have my instinctive trust ratified by those who know the culture so much better. 

Next day, I was eating breakfast in Harberton thinking, ‘I must email Nashon to check he got home without trouble…’ As I sat there, an email pinged in: a picture of my bike already stripped into pieces at his workshop! It was before 10am, my time – then 9am in Kenya. 

Now I must travel to Brooke to fetch my Mosquito. Maybe I’ll do that on Sunday. By then maybe I’ll be on Africa Time and able to sit patiently in derelict matatus for the journey.

DAY 4/5. SATURDAY/ SUNDAY DECEMBER 15/16th 2018. KITALE and BROOKE, KENYA

Saturday passed in such a whirl of inactivity – relaxing happily amongst the family, and opening up my panniers and wondering at the aged jumble of decrepit clothes that constitute my African wardrobe: the ancient riding jacket that’d have been pensioned off several years ago at home; motocross trousers SO worn, restitched and faded that even I – even I – have bought (embarrassingly bright) new ones this year; mis-shapen tee shirts, faded by too much African sun – but perfectly fine for another trip or two, here where dressing down is pretty much the normal sartorial state, since almost everyone wears their clothes second-hand at their newest. Maybe that’s why I fit in so well! Those new trousers, garish and psychedelic in their red, white and black youth need some strong doses of equatorial sun so that they fade back and blend in like the patched and tattered ones I wear from 2002! 

****

“How long will you be gone to Brooke?” asked Adelight. 

“Oh, I guess I’ll probably ride back via Kessup to see William and get back by about Wednesday…”

“So three days without Scrabble..?” For Adelight is addicted to our quiet evenings at the Scrabble board. It was my Christmas present two years ago, but little did I know Adelight’s obsession when I stood in a big store in Eldoret before Christmas 2016 and asked what everyone might like as a gift from me. “Oh, Scrabble would be nice!” she declared, having perhaps carefully negotiated our route between the heavily stocked shelves to make it look like an instinctive idea – for there were the Scrabble boxes coincidentally beside us. You’d think that I would always beat her, for English is, after all, her second language and my vocabulary is pretty large. But quite often she beats me, this sharply intelligent, capable and warm woman. Sometimes she will ask, “is there such and such a word..?”, and occasionally it IS her invention, but often not. Her vocabulary is wide too. So many people on this continent are humblingly adept in several languages, unlike most of us lazy Brits…

****

And now, a day later – it’s a peaceful Sunday afternoon – I am sitting on the balcony of the large (and largely empty, as always) Brooke Hotel, gazing across a veritable ocean of luscious, tidy fields of tea bushes, trimmed to perfection in the harvesting of this rich crop. I’m drinking ‘mixed tea’, tea cooked with milk in it, as is often the way in tea-producing countries. Usually, I eschew tea as much as possible, but I AM in Brooke, and yes, that is Brooke as in Brooke Bond, a huge company that owns much of the land in this region and partially controls (with a somewhat mean, multinational iron hand) much of the Kenyan tea industry. Mixed tea is the caffe latte of tea; I prefer the masala tea, a brew mixed with milk, ginger and spices. 

Walking through the scruffy local market streets a short time ago, I suddenly realised how content I have become in just four days. As I walked, all eyes followed me inquisitively and at least twenty or thirty people gave me a ‘good afternoon!’, a ‘hey, mzungu!’, ‘hello, Mr Mzungu!’ and wide smiles. There is no sense of threat or discomfort in all this. There is no insult or ulterior meaning in the word ‘mzungu’ (white man); it’s just a statement of fact, and as the only one around, I am rather noticeable. Drunks (it IS Sunday afternoon) want to shake my hand, but it’s harmless; children grin and run away coyly. A fat lady reclining on sacks of old clothes smiles broadly. “You look comfy!” I joke, and she throws back her head and laughs. Two small boys in church clothes scavenge old nuts and bolts in the oily mud and in the ditch beneath the rough plank bridge. These will be their playthings today. A pack of young men walk past below my balcony as I write. They are all staring at me with open curiosity. All it takes is a smile and thumbs up acknowledgement from me and they all smile and greet me. No one ever turns away. 

****

For one accustomed to West African tro-tros, a Kenyan matatu – both of them ratty old many-seated minibuses that form the people’s transport in all of Africa – are a doddle. I’m sitting in a reasonably comfortable seat in one of the buses of the ‘Prestige Linner’ company (no Scrabble score for them, despite the fact that the spelling runs across their entire livery alongside a picture of a cruise linner). There are only eleven passenger seats in this bus, “One man, One seat!”, they’d cry out in Ghana to entice passengers, for eleven passengers is seven less than we’d be in the corresponding vehicle across the continent in Ghana, in an ’18 Condemned’. There are regulations here now, and the vans are quite well maintained; there are even compulsory seat belts these days. And this being Christmas, drivers must be aware of the rules, for this is the time of many road inspections – for how else do the police get their ‘Christmas boxes’? The radio is at a calm volume, the passengers quiet, leaning back in quite decent seats. We’re travelling a road I fervently avoid if I can, the main highway across the country, on which casualty numbers often reach forty of fifty deaths per accident. Sunday may be a slightly better day to ride; there aren’t so many commercial vehicles, but old, heavy lorries toil on the hills – and we are driving on rolling hills, crossing the Equator at well over 5000 feet. Lines of cars and matatus tail out behind each belching truck, jockeying quite cooperatively to pass. I sit and wonder, as I always do in a vehicle, how I have the guts and stupidity to ride a small motorbike on these African roads? But when I am out there, attention tuned, reactions sharp, it’s a different matter and none of it seems so terrifying. The anticipation is always worse than the reality, I find. Days before I travel to Africa, I am a bundle of nerves, imagining the ‘what ifs’ by which I always say I should never live life. For ‘what ifs’ limit all your dreams. The fear dissipates the moment I get stuck in; then it’s just a matter of living on my wits, the most exhilarating way to live life.

Adelight dropped me amongst the bustling lines of matatus in town, negotiating my ride towards the city of Nakuru on the main highway. I would branch at ‘Total’, a major intersection named for its petrol station, about three hours on my route. I took my seat and waited, the high sun beating on my arm through the open door as we awaited passengers, for we leave when we have a full compliment of eleven. It’s busy around my side door; itinerant salespeople spot the mzungu and attempt to sell me all manner of items: melons, biscuits, padlocks, socks, unidentified fruits, beaded sandals, purses, torches, odd roots of mysterious use, rat poison, key-holders, belts, bananas, glittery jewellery, chargers, watches that’ll stop tomorrow, newspapers with the latest lies of the corrupt politicians – “Ah, it’s not just Nairobi news! There’s news from Engerland too!” declares the salesman. “No problem. God bless!” and a wide smile when I explain that I have come four thousand miles to avoid that news. 

So long as I engage, smile, make a joke, am equal, I am respected. It’s embarrassingly easy to make friends and leave a good impression. It’s all oddly quiet and well behaved, calm and polite, here in Kenya, everyone going about their business of trying, against all sorts of odds, to make it until tomorrow. For these people have almost nothing materially. They eke an uncertain living selling small items to one another, each in their way helping the other to survive. A few Kenyan bob earned pushing a truck, carrying a bag, selling a handful of cheap commodities, may make the difference between supper and no supper. 

People walk loosely, languid, relaxed; greeting and touching, laughing and smiling. No hurry. There’s a fluidity to movement that you don’t see in the cold, ‘Time’s Money, and I’m Important and Busy’ North. I chuckle at my memory of old Akay in Navrongo, Ghana, Wechiga and Perry’s wise mother, MY ‘African Mother’ as she liked to say, clenching her buttocks and mincing across her compound in her imitation of a white woman, laughing at her own joke. It was surprisingly well observed.

Three hours in the matatu, and I was dropped at a giant intersection, the sides of the road lined by saleswomen with potatoes, carrots, fruits and goods, where I stood a few minutes, the centre of a lot of jocularity and kindly laughter until someone flagged down a passing private car, not another matatu, and arranged me a lift for the 50 kilometres to Brooke, with Cliff, a well-spoken young man, researcher with a medical organisation in Kericho, just beyond this satellite town of Brooke. We chatted away the short journey, exchanged contacts, and I promised to ring him when I come back to Kericho. He drove me right into the yard of the Brooke Hotel, accepted the 500 shillings (£4) I knew was the custom – for petrol and sharing the ride, and drove away with cheerful waves, happy to have made a brief friend. I WILL ring him too, when I return, as I expect I will at some point on my journey. It’s a small duty that is important, this return of respect.

****

At seven thirty I heard my Mosquito pull up outside the hotel. I’d tried to find Nashon unsuccessfully earlier. He’s just joined me, this rather shy, quiet man, for supper of chicken fried to a mortified crisp with ughali (doughy maize meal) and vegetables like dried seaweed. An unmemorable meal. When he emailed me last, he asked me to bring him a gift, something that would make him remember his mzungu friend when he saw it or touched it. I have given him two of my photo books, the one from the first of my East African journeys, in which he features, stripping the Mosquito to its component parts, and last year’s too. He has been proudly using the little bike back to his home village some way off. I don’t mind that; he’s an honest man. I saw him off just now, and the piki-piki sounds better than it has before. I think he’s done a good, reliable job and I hope for a trouble free safari this winter! Now it’s here, I am more eager than I have been through all the planning and getting away. At last I feel I am starting my journey. 

DAY 6. MONDAY DECEMBER 17th 2018. KESSUP, KENYA

‘William’s mzungu’ has returned to Kessup, the straggly village on the plateau above the huge, sun-drenched Kerio Valley, an off shoot of the great Rift Valley. It’s so funny to watch him control the guest house staff, running them this way and that to satisfy my every whim – or what he thinks will be my whim. I texted him that I would be arriving late this afternoon, and he arranged my accommodation, ordered food for us for tonight, and made sure that ‘his mzungu’ would be happy. Now he sits in the new bar house, apart from the new bar – a small round hut that we have already appropriated as ‘ours’, and calls the staff from the main bar on his phone. My visits bring him prestige, he assures me. “You wouldn’t come to Kessup if you did not come to visit your friend William!”

****

The highlands of Kenya are magnificent, but it’s impossible to dress correctly for riding in such landscape. Today I have ridden almost 150 miles, most of them up and down by considerable altitudes. My ride started on a delightful back road out of Brooke, which strangely I have never taken before; through agricultural hills and valleys. This way I could avoid the main road that noisily passes the front of the hotel on its way across these East African countries, one of two routes from Nairobi or the coastal ports to the interiors of Uganda and Rwanda. Unfortunately, there is a speed hump at the bottom of the long hill into town, right outside the hotel, so through the night there is the constant sound of air brakes slowing for the hump and the clatter and rattle of empty trucks. I make sure to get a room far back in the big empty hotel. 

Soon I was lost, as I so often am in Kenya, where sign-posting is a thing of the future (perhaps) and directions doubtful; even two police officers, who stopped me out of curiosity at a check post, arguing as the correct road to get to the town I never found. But it seldom matters much; it’s  all somehow interesting, even if, after an hour, I ended up back on the main road I was trying to avoid, bumping down a stony track from an unmade road and engaging in the intercity traffic of trucks and matatus. A short stretch of the main highway across Kenya and I was able to turn back onto quieter roads. Now I dropped into the edges of the great Rift Valley, ears popping, temperatures rising, into the depths of the desiccated valley, where cactus-like plants and aloes abound. Then the long, slow, winding climb back up into the cool, pine and eucalyptus heights, with vast views opening across what seems half Africa, lying below in the heat, thickly wooded with low trees, the large Rift bottom lakes winking far, far away in the distance. For some miles this road follows the very brink of a ridge, the huge views dropping away between the trees and thick undergrowth just metres away on either side as I climb. Then I am in scruffy Tenges, people waving and greeting the mzungu as I pass. Wide white smiles in happy black faces and waving pink palms have been the loveliest feature of my day – a special day, as I got used once again to the foibles and character of my little blue Mosquito, with its knobbly tyres, its lack of power and its way of decelerating at the slightest lack of concentration on keeping my hand tightly on the hand grip. 

Then down again, over ten miles this time, sweeping back into the gigantic valley, down to dry rocks and termite chimneys towering amongst the same spiky, thorny acacias. Ears popping again, temperatures rising sharply, the road curling and winding, me probably the only one not freewheeling all this way to save ten ‘pennorth of fuel. 

Across the valley bottom, past scattered dwellings and an occasional group of shacks and businesses at the roadside, gathered around junctions onto dirt roads that wind into the mysteries of the bush; scooting between loaded lorries, boda-boda (crazy motorbike taxi) boys, past women selling heaps of pawpaws and fruits, dusty fellows loading charcoal in huge woven plastic bundles, grey with ash; between the nothing to do onlookers that populate all of Africa; children everywhere in these countries with ballooning birthrates now that so many live to adulthood and new reproduction cycles; avoiding potholes and swearing at constant speed humps – although they do keep the speed of the shaky, fume-belching lorries and struggling matatus down, and I have better acceleration, even with my mingy two hundred cubic centimetres of ‘power’. 

Finally, up, up, up again on the road that clambers out of the warm depths, most of the way back to the western rim of the Kerio Valley, to Kessup, on its plateau, 500 feet or so below the highland tops. I have dropped and risen thousands of feet on each of these dramatic sweeps from heat to cool, and chill to sweat several times today. It’s wonderful, and my smile is wide to greet the hundreds who have spotted the mzungu and waved welcomes and thumbs-upped, shouted and laughed as I pass. I cannot be anonymous; that’s what I love so much as I ride. I am an individual, not just a passing bike; an interesting human being. “Why is he here? Did you see – a mzungu! An old daddy on a big piki-piki!”

And so to the rough track to the Lelin  Campsite and my usual chalet, ‘Mexico’, where I have stayed several times on these past couple of safaris here. William, waving from his hillside near the gates as he half runs past his cows on his small shamba to greet me. If you don’t remember from journals past, I met William here when, unusually, I accepted to take a guide for a walk to local features. I’m not sure why I did, but it turned out very happily. “I’m not interested in the waterfalls,” I told him, “but I am interested to meet your neighbours and walk in the villages!” Well, William, now 53, is respected and popular and introduced me, ‘William’s mzungu’ to many, many folk here. He’s a quiet, charming fellow, an ex inspector of police, who was so disillusioned by the violence and corruption he saw in Nairobi, and ultimately so shocked by the personal attack that left him hospitalised for months, with a possible brain operation looming; that slightly but not unattractively, disfigures his face, giving him a sort of half smile all the time – so unsettled was he by all this that he left the force and came home to his tiny shamba to eke a living, I know not how – just the usual African question mark – with his four cows and a patch of vegetables. Well, his needs are few, he agrees, and his treats few too. His daughter, whom he managed to get out to study in Australia – as a nurse – sends him some funds, when she can afford it from her student nurse salary. I have probably helped her by making William aware that she will be struggling, however glossy a face she puts upon her circumstances. He hoped she’d have built him a new house by this year, but that hasn’t transpired. She continues to show her generosity in thanks for the considerable work he put into getting her the visa and papers to go to Australia, though. William’s semi-derelict tin bothy up on the dry hill now boasts satellite TV on which he follows his favourite team, Manchester City.  

****

It was about eleven before I left Brooke, collecting my motorbike, now washed, from Nashon at his lock up in the market amongst his peers. It now has electric start and appears to run well. A few adjustments and I was at last on my way, the next safari begun, new places to see, new people to meet. 

****

My day’s been rather coloured by breaking, after all this rugged time, the screen on my valuable iPad. It’s so much part of my journey, writing it all down like this. Sometimes it seems like THE justification for it all. I’m worried that the cracks might weaken on the hard journeys it still has to take but I doubt repair is possible this side of the capital. I made the stupid mistake of strapping the bag, not my usual panniers, on the carrier of the bike for the journey with a ratchet-strap… 

DAY 7. TUESDAY DECEMBER 18th 2018. KESSUP, KENYA

Little Alan, six years old, sat at my feet stroking the hair on my leg. I love the innocent curiosity of this. My companions started laughing at a question he put. They translated, “he is asking where are the others? Are you only one? He cannot understand that you are the only one. He wants to know if you are real!” Without doubt I am the first mzungu with whom most people in these villages have had intimate contact, the first to sit in their compounds, investigate their shambas, drink their bulsa, the local fibrous cornmeal beer, the first to appear equal. Maybe they see white people, but always remote, aloof, behind the windows of expensive safari vehicles or soaring above their lovely plateau on their para-gliders – the expensive adventure sports market that ignores local needs or interests. “Oh, those people are NOT friendly!” exclaimed Solomon. The para-gliders land on people’s crops and in their fields and the rich Europeans take not the slightest interest in the people around them, trample their way over their fields with their expensive equipment and return to their cliff top hotel, owned by white people, for white people – keeping Africa as an exotic background for their Facebook pages and contributing nothing whatsoever to the community. So I am something of a wonder, content to sit on a rock or a homemade stool and drink bulsa from an old drugs’ container and water from their faded field container, to enter their simple zinc and timber homes and laugh with them as an equal. There is one millimetre of difference between us, and that is just the surface coating. I am made so wonderfully welcome. “People ask me all year, where is your mzungu?” says William with some pride. “When is he coming?” 

We visited homes and shambas across the plateau, meeting, greeting, shaking hands, answering questions. I said to William, “do you know, the question I am asked most often at home, is ‘aren’t you afraid?’ Imagine that anyone could be afraid of THIS!” as another group of small children call shy ‘hallooooes’ from distant houses on a hill, waving small hands excitedly. Then we meet another farmer, or an old lady whose husband I photographed last year, and William shuffles through the big envelope of photos. The lady expresses every wish you can imagine for my good health and future. Young farmers in their small fields break off from their weeding to come and greet; women tending small patches of dark green vegetables – black nightshade that I will eat for my supper – laugh and smile with us; people offer maize-dusty hands to be shaken. “How is your place? Your people, they are fine? Happy to see you!” And some even remember my name, for wazungu are rare here in the meandering village paths amongst small, simple homes and the cows and crops. This is an event: William’s mzungu has come again. 

Countless are the friendly people I meet, the hands I shake, the waves I return, the smiles showered upon me. Am I afraid..? Ha! This is how life should be – sociable, kindly, curious, equal. 

For an hour we sat and drank bulsa under some trees on the scenic slopes and hillocks of this plateau, the enormous view of the Rift Valley spread below, fading to blue-hazed distance in the equatorial sun; above us rose the dramatic red cliffs, dark pines clinging to crevices, the deep blue of the cloudless, searingly sun-drenched skies stretching their vast arc overhead, nothing but a few heavy leaves between me and the burning rays. Of course, today I have had too much sun, and now my head aches, my neck pulses from the red skin and I am drinking water in copious quantities in an attempt to rehydrate. It’s hard work here, even though I am doing little but wander up and down the red dust paths being friendly to a multitude of people. The sun is almost at its zenith now, just a week away from turning north again, and I am almost at the centre of the earth, passing time on the narrow paths where there is no shade. I feel a little breathless too, as we climb. I hope it’s the altitude, not my lack of fitness or, heaven forbid, my age – for of course, I am the old daddy here, way older than most I meet, where the life expectancy is perhaps two thirds of my age. 

And there are those who shorten even that meagre allotment. Alcoholism is rife all over this continent, the antidote for many to their hard, confined lives. With William’s best friend (“No, William, that must be wrong! Your daughter is your BEST friend, and I am the second!” I joke); with Atanas, who cares for William’s cows down on their grazing on the valley floor far below, and is visiting home for some small business; with Atanas, we drink bulsa and later repair to the beer bar in its pleasant gardens amongst scattered boulders the size of houses. He orders KK, neat gin, 70% proof, 40% alcohol by volume. 250 centilitres of this poison. Even on the bottle it warns that this liquid may induce bad health and cirrhosis. And it does. I have seen so many die from these harsh liquors, and countless more, who die ‘unexplained’ death, succumb to KK, wirigi and apoteshi and all their home-distilled like, across the continent. While William and I drink a couple of bottles of beer in the shade, Atanas is soon drunk and, despite his politeness and behaviour previously, is talking nonsense. In the end, we have to send him home. “Perhaps he’ll sleep it off in a ditch,” I say, but William reckons he’ll make it home automatically, as he weaves away across the gardens. “He is SO excited! Taking bulsa and sitting with a white man! For him, it’s wonderful!” Atanas has eaten nothing since we met, some hours ago, and will now sleep the sleep of the very drunk, with no sustenance at all. It’s SO common. Within minutes another man approaches and troubles us to the point we have to send him away too. “He’s a teacher. A bad teacher,” William says dismissively. “He has been transferred, but he had to spend six months in rehab first, and look at him…”. 

Perhaps my biggest influence on William has been that I stopped him from drinking these spirits. Now he takes only beer. Of course, it’s much cheaper to get drunk on KK and the like, at £1.60 for 250cl, while beer is £1.42 a bottle. I gave William my ‘Africa/ alcohol/ death of strong young men’ lecture soon after we met, and he acted on it. For so many take this violent alcohol on empty stomachs, choosing the effects of inebriation to forget their harsh lives – while, of course, making them harsher as well as shorter. “Atanas won’t make old bones!” I tell William, introducing him to another British aphorism. Atanas lives on maize meal, dried meat and homemade mead, down on the scorching valley floor. And KK when he has some money. KK before food…

“Oh, I am happy you told me. I followed your advice. I have left it! Left it! Now I only take beer when I have a little money; my daughter, she sends me some money, but she says it is groceries, for my satellite rental – NOT FOR BEER!” laughs William, always so proud of Lydia, working so hard in Perth. 

Walking back across the road to William’s shamba and my slightly run down guest house, we look again at the glistening three storey palace, all pilasters and gables, built by a local man who became Public Procurement Officer in the local city of Eldoret. “Oh, he got caught! He was sacked! Now he has a small job as a contractor!” William says it with some relish, for he despises corruption; he’s a man of integrity and I wonder how his time in the police force squares with this. “They liked me for my organisation! If there was to be an investigation organised, they would ask, ‘where’s William?’. I like time. Like the British! They like time!” William has a strong, and today, misplaced, perception of the honesty, uprightness and decency of all things British. Happily, he doesn’t see our new mean-spirited Brexit populism… I keep quiet; perhaps he should keep his dream intact.

Back for supper and William is hassling the staff to treat his guest with respect. Up and down, always fidgeting, upset that our meal is late. “We asked for 6.30, and it is already 6.36…” Finally, it arrives at 7.30, William irritated. There’re some greens that we bought for 20 bob from a neighbour, a carrier bag of local vegetable for 16 pence. “They haven’t cooked it all! What’s this? Not even half. I shall tell them we won’t pay.” This despite the fact that he shuns vegetables when there’s chicken and potato on offer, and the large mound of greens is just for me. “The manager, she is LAZY!” The other eternal African problem: bad management. So many good ventures fail through sloppy management; no one elevated to such a position ever expects to work themselves again, only to command, not lead.

So ends another day in this small corner of Africa. It’s time to sleep it off, the sun, the sociability, the conversation, unaccustomed flavours, the novelty and investigation, all the questions. There’ll be more tomorrow. And the day after…

DAY 8. WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 19th 2018. KITALE, KENYA

There’s one of those moments of real topographical drama as you leave the scruffy town of Iten, world famous as the source of many of the world’s Olympic and competitive runners, training there at the high altitude. As you leave town by a couple of serpentine bends, the Rift Valley suddenly appears, as if by magic. It’s a showy moment; a theatrical reveal. There, spread literally as far as your eye can see, is the vastness of the African landscape. Four thousands feet below – in some places the great escarpment rises six thousand feet above the valley floor – spreads mile upon mile of hot bush land, backed by the far Tugen Hills that form the other rim, ten miles away. To the north the valley stretches fifty miles and fades into the Rift Valley, a geographical feature that cracks the continent from South Africa to the Middle East. Below, in the haze the Kerio River, a meagre trickle with crocodiles and plastic bottles, dribbles through dry brown rocky country covered in low trees. In the midst of this valley there are elephants but cattle grazing on scant greenery are more common. A long, straight, white dust road, that I once rode, streaks along the base of the hills, disappearing into the mists to the north. That was a hard ride; fifty miles along that rocky terrain. Now it’s is a twenty kilometre twisting ride down the the depths. It’s one of my favourite rides. 

Part of the way down, I pass the Lelin Campsite, where I stayed the past two nights. I stop, on the way back from a bank in the town above, to give William a small ‘Christmas box’, shake his hand and continue on my journey downwards. As I ride, the mass is on my right, towering above as I drop off the plateau on which stands his home and those of so many of my new friends around Kessup. The high red cliffs rise sheer to the cloud-filled sky, the deep green of tall pines clinging to whatever thin soils they can find. It’s a huge, apparently impenetrable wall, but I know that one of my favourite roads, a rough track, will take me bouncing back to the top rim, a magnificent ride of thirty miles or more; a journey I am enjoying for my third time. 

A long white dusty road winds through the dry bush lands of the valley floor to Kimwarer and its fluorspar mines, a couple of mine-operated police barriers and a ford across the Kerio River. Beside the wide ford a rusted, peeling sign warns: ‘Crocodiles have been sighted in this area. Washing of vehicles in not recommended’. In the middle of the stream a boda-boda boy washes his Chinese motorbike unconcerned. When I have ridden through this deep ford, I have done so smartly, my chin on my shoulder…

From the river and its scattered mine offices – here they actually DO mine fluoride, the stuff in toothpaste, I find after a Google search to find out what it’s for – the track begins a long, serpentine journey back up the four thousand feet to the high ground again. At one time I stopped, astonished that the rocky dust road would find a way up the vertical cliffs. But I know it does; I have been down this roller-coaster twice, but it’s impossible to see where the road makers found a route. As I ride, the air gets cooler, and after I emerge onto the high lands above, a figure of some astonishment to the traders and boda-boda boys gathered at the small habitation where the track finds its way back to the tar road, I have to stop to put on my waterproof jacket for warmth. In due course, I will need it for rain too, as the unseasonable weather drops lumps of rain from a grey sky. 

Soon afterwards, in an attempt – ultimately successful – to avoid the crowded, ugly town of Eldoret on my way home, I am lost on farm tracks, greasy with the drizzle of drops. I slip and strain, trying to help two young men in a battered saloon car, polythene forming the driver’s window, behind which I can see just the driver’s huge smile and acceptance of misfortune. With the barefoot passenger, I try to get enough purchase to push the heavy car. The battery is dead, the car slithering on the muddy surface. Unsuccessful, I have to leave them to wait for four-wheeled help and they wave me away, amused that an old mzungu tried to help. It’ll be a story when, mud-covered, they get home. I follow their directions for a mile or two, the tracks dwindling  to field tracks. Eventually, a boda-boda slips and splashes towards me. Robert, the rider, the customary woolly bobble hat and wellies, draws me a very efficient map in my notebook. Obviously, he knows the terrain. He includes small streams and multiple side tracks, marked with crosses, that I should ignore. Fifteen minutes later, I do emerge onto the tar road to Kitale, but I have only avoided Eldoret by a few miles and got rather muddy in the process.

So back to Kitale. Home for now. I’ll be around for Christmas now, a family holiday in this cheerful household, who have been generous enough to share their last two Christmases with me.