DAY 70 SUNDAY 28th JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

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

*

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

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

DAY 71 MONDAY 29th JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

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

DAY 72 TUESDAY 30th JANUARY 2017. SIPI, UGANDA

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

DAY 73 WEDNESDAY 31st JANUARY 2017. SIPI, UGANDA

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

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

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

“Wow!” I exclaimed? “Ten!”

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

DAY 74 THURSDAY 1st FEBRUARY 2017. SOROTI, UGANDA

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

DAY  75 FRIDAY 2nd FEBRUARY 2017. KARUMA, UGANDA

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

DAY 76 SATURDAY 3rd FEBRUARY 2017. PAKWACH, UGANDA

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

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

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

DAY 77 SUNDAY 4th FEBRUARY 2017. MASINDI, UGANDA

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

DAY 58 TUESDAY 16th JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

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

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

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

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

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

DAY 59 WEDNESDAY 17th JANUARY 2017. KAPTAGAT, KENYA

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

DAY 60 THURSDAY 18th JANUARY 2017. KAPTAGAT, KENYA

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

DAY 61 FRIDAY 19th JANUARY 2017. NYERI, KENYA

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

DAY 62 SATURDAY 20th JANUARY 2017. CHOGORIA, KENYA

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

DAY 63 SUNDAY 21st JANUARY 2017. NAIROBI, KENYA

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

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

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

DAY 64 MONDAY 22nd JANUARY 2017. NAIROBI, KENYA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go to our embassy, round the corner.”

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

AAAAARRRRGGGGHHH!!!!!

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DAY 66 WEDNESDAY 24th JANUARY 2017. KAPTAGAT, KENYA

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

DAY 67 THURSDAY 25th JANUARY 2017. KESSUP, KENYA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

DAY 68 FRIDAY 26th JANUARY 2017. KESSUP, KENYA

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

DAY 69 SATURDAY 27th JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

 

 

 

 

DAY 50 MONDAY 8th JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

Day 50 already. Well, tomorrow I hope to blag my way across into Uganda at the insignificant Suam border nearby. Today was spent tying up ends of business with the recent Florida job (opening February 15th), getting copies of my documents and preparing the Mosquito for the very rough journey into Uganda. It’s one of the roughest roads I used last year, but very beautiful and dramatic. I take it with some trepidation, but also a certain thrill!

Rico is in touch with Olerai Ltd down in Nairobi and I will keep in touch with him. The documents seem to be getting nearer. For now, then, I will continue into Uganda for a while, a country I enjoyed very much last safari… I look forward to being amongst Ugandans again, said by many to be Africa’s friendliest nation, a claim with which I cannot argue.

DAY 51 TUESDAY 9th JANUARY 2017. SIPI, UGANDA

A new country at the top of the page today. Back to uniquely friendly Uganda. What’s more, I appear to be here completely legally and above board with the East African Community Customs.

But, wow, this is a hard way to get to Uganda! The direct road from Kitale is one of the roughest imaginable, through Suam River border post, a remote, untravelled road. I was only the fourth non-local vehicle to pass the border, said one of the smiling Customs police. “What, only four today?” I asked, surprised. “No, this year!” For the Suam road is punishing, rugged, horribly tough – but stunning, scenically, and that’s a superlative I seldom use. It involves 60 miles of the roughest trail riding around the slopes of Mount Elgon, Africa’s fourth highest mountain. Often the ‘road’ is hacked from the mountainside, rock and dust, with the most impressive views down onto the huge plains of central Uganda, dotted with volcanic cones like vast pimples, seen between soaring slopes, heavily worked by subsistence farmers into small fields. It’s green and lovely much of the way, with high forests in places.

As I ride, excited children scream and wave. I am a celebrity to be cheered along and greeted everywhere. Everyone is less inhibited than in Kenya, and I could use a third arm for waving, but have to make do with big smiles and a nod, for both hands have to grip the handlebars as they buck and weave, wrench and pull. Fortunately, on my bike I need only six inches of space to twist and turn between rocks, shimmy through thick dust and bounce through the holes and mounds. I have good trail tyres on the Mosquito; they give good traction, and the lightness of the little bike (that I despised at the outset) is a big advantage. The wide seat that Rico brought through Customs all the way from Congo makes the ride SO much better too. It’s wide enough to grip fast between my knees when I stand and dance across the dirt and convolutions of rock and dust. Today I have used every muscle in my body on the six hour ride, including half an hour in crossing the border – even on occasion, I reckon, the sphincter muscles! Tonight, as I sit with my first Nile Special beer I am weary; my arms throb with exercise; my legs are fidgety with tiredness – and I have a glow of satisfaction that I achieved this ride once again. It’s hard work for an old geezer -sorry, delete that – a middle aged geezer!

*

Philip, the Customs chief at Suam on the Kenyan side, said, “Ha! You have been here before!” for it was he who gave me a long lecture in March on how I had broken the law through at least ten border crossings in the East African Community by not possessing the correct local documents. Today I threw myself respectfully on his sympathy and explained that the original log book was in Nairobi (well, hopefully it will be soon…) and I wanted to take my piki-piki into Uganda. Laboriously, he copied out the details of the Mosquito from my photocopy onto his computer and eventually produced an impressive document, that he insisted in enclosing in a smart ‘Kenya Revenue and Customs’ envelope. Now, apparently, I can cross any border in and out of Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda without let or hinderance. It was all too easy.

I thanked him profusely, shaking hands many times, regaling him with big stories of riding from Cape Town to Lokichoggio (the top corner of Kenya), and twice across the great Sahara, as he worked. It always helps to impress, especially now I am considered FAR too old to be riding a motorbike anywhere beyond the very nearest horizon! It astonishes everyone and eases my way through countless potentially awkward situations, enlisting support for the old ‘daddy’, who probably should know better and be sitting with his feet up at home.

Maybe I SHOULD know better? But I’m damned if I’m hanging up those bike boots until I have to! I had SUCH fun today. I rode as if I was thirty again, when I used to trail ride with my friends. I know I’ve said it before, but trail riding in England was just never the same after the Sahara crossings and the countless miles I now do on African ‘roads’.

I’m not in the habit of taking ‘selfies’; I never understood the need to prove I was anywhere. I KNOW I’ve been there. However, I did take a selfie as an ironic joke on myself. I arrived in Sipi coated in the thickest red dust, my beard, eyebrows, helmet, jacket, and every exposed bit thick with red African dust. Doubtless, my lungs too… Tired, FILTHY and elated: not a bad way to be at the end of a day! “No point giving in,” Mother used to say. I’m glad I’m a chip off that block. Think young!

*

About five, thankfully, for I was now very tired and in danger of over judging things, I reached the tar road again at Kapchorwa, got Ugandan cash from an ATM where amiable guards grinned and laughed at my dishevelled state, and continued to Sipi ten miles on. I came here by chance on my last East African safari, finding the charming Alex and Precious running a simple guest house perched on the top of a cliff with a sunset view over what seems like half Uganda. They were such delightful hosts that we made friends and have now and again corresponded through the year. Alex wanted to be a doctor, but in Uganda, with its incredible ballooning population, he had no chance as one of nine siblings. He trained in hotel management instead and worked for a time, much appreciated by customers, but abused by management, in a fancy hotel in Kampala. Sick of exploitation, he resigned and returned to this simple guest house owned somewhere in his family. A few moments ago, as I sit here gazing west into the sun fast sinking into haze and as darkness quickly wraps itself around me, he brought me a plate of home made popcorn and groundnuts to accompany my beer. “Hey Alex, it’s like being in a five star hotel in Kampala!” I exclaimed, much to his gratified delight. The place may be simple as hell, but the little touches he and Precious add, and the absolute DELIGHT of their welcome, make it better than the most expensive, luxurious hotels in the world to me. I asked to sleep in the rather basic grass roofed wooden hut, for I know it will be peaceful and rustic. Alex has been attempting to get light in there, not that I mind candlelight, and has to bring a mattress for me.

As I rode the final dirt paths through small houses of stick, earth and zinc, banana trees and dense greenery, to his ‘Coffeeland Resort’, I ran into Alex himself, waving both arms from far off, thrilled beyond words to see me: a surprise as it happened, as he hadn’t got my email. “Go on, Precious is there!” he said. So I rode the last four hundred yards of the hard day into an absolute maelstrom of welcome from delightful Precious. I love the sincere, unselfconscious way that people in Africa express their joy. “Precious has been asking me every day, did you write to Jonat’an? Did Jonat’an reply? When do you think Jonat’an will come? Will Jonat’an come soon?” said Alex. Precious made the whole hard journey disappear in a heartfelt, exclamatory shower of welcomes, running at the sound of the Mosquito, dancing around me and smiling from ear to ear while ululating with joy. What a fine welcome. Why wouldn’t I travel through sixty miles and six hours of dust and filth for that?

I wonder why I have made such loyal friends with these two? Perhaps it is that, in a country where you expect to die by 63 and only 2% make it to 65 or above, I represent a father figure – OK, grandfather figure! With how many people of my age can they exchange ideas? Intelligent Alex loves to question about life in the West, and how it differs from the harsh life of Uganda. “Oh, the money you left us last year..! There was much hunger in Uganda last year; the rains were poor. With your money I planted Irish potatoes. We had food when all around us were suffering…” In March I left him a gift of just £35. So little makes the difference between food and hunger, sometimes life and death.

*

Stopping at one point on the ghastly ‘road’, I found something dripping copiously over my wheel and chain. There was a waterfall of apple juice from a carton in my bag. Fortunately, I had wrapped my papers and iPad, which travel in the top bag, in waterproof covers. How stupid to reckon a cardboard juice carton could survive this punishing road! I need to find an aluminium drink container. Now I have sticky luggage that needs washing. It will wait until tomorrow, unlike me, who needed a hasty, thorough wash down in a bucket of cold water in Alex’s zinc bathroom and privy below the ‘resort’. “Give me a brown towel!” I asked Precious. “I’ll never get all this dust off in one wash!”

So here I am back in Uganda; back in Coffeeland Resort with two delightful friends. It’s now pitch dark. The cliff edge has disappeared as I am blinded by the light of the iPad. From far below – the cliff must be 500 feet or so – I can hear the distant beat of music; there are a few scattered dim lights: probably fires and a few solar lights in village houses down below. Above, the sky is a dappled pattern of cloud and faint light. In the far distance, only visible when I close the iPad cover, glimmer a few specks of luminance: far distant towns that some day I may visit. There’s the slightest of breezes but not enough to go into my grass-roofed hut for a jersey. Alex, a terrific cook, is tinkering with pans in his basic kitchen hut and all is peaceful. I feel very relaxed and deeply satisfied that I have had the sort of day that keeps me travelling – when most of us old blokes ARE putting our feet up! There’s nothing better than this sort of glow of contentment at the end of a great day enjoyed to the absolute full; a weary body – and the anticipation of a probably delicious supper being cooked over sticks in Alex’s crude kitchen. My entire body has relaxed after its efforts, into a comfortable cane chair (that might be in a somewhat run down Kampala hotel) on the rocky lawn on the edge of the impressive Ugandan cliff and I feel very much at ease.

“I am embarrassed,” says Alex, fiddling with bare wires in the cobwebbed hut where I will sleep behind me, his phone in his mouth for light. “There is no electricity!”

The clouds have dispersed now. I sit in complete darkness; no light pollution anywhere and the moon hasn’t risen yet. “Don’t worry for me! This is all part of the magic!” I call – ignoring the inconvenience to him and revelling in the romance of an African night above this huge invisible view of Uganda, now just a few twinkling lights below. For now, says Alex, I am one of the family.

This is why I travel. This is why I love Africa: it’s all so immediate; so genuine; so warmly generous.

So entirely wonderful.

DAY 52 WEDNESDAY 10th JANUARY 2017. SIPI, UGANDA

Around four, I came out of my odd hut for a pee in the most silent of nights. By now the quarter moon was up, enough in this dark place to form shadows. Unknown stars, the equatorial sky, shone overhead and the valley below was almost entirely dark. I was too physically tired to sleep as soundly as I expected under my sheet and thin blanket, but the night was deeply calm, until a gentle breeze rose around dawn, rustling the leaves on the thatch of my roof and sending me into a deep sleep for the last couple of hours of the night.

Breakfast from generous Precious is always a challenge. Her assumption of my appetite is prodigious, while in fact it is modest. “Are you ready?” she asked, as I sat in the cane chair again, before the huge view to the west. She brought me a covered plate, lifted off the upper one to expose enough boiled potatoes (Irish, no doubt) with vegetables to feed a family of four, with fried meat enough for two. As I reeled at the responsibility to make a decent effort to show appreciation, she proceeded to bring me a fried chapati folded over an omelette. “Goodness, Precious, it’s TOO much!”

“When you are here I want you to eat!” And then she brought a saucer of homemade popcorn and a slice of bread with a huge flask of local coffee. I hate to waste food, especially in Africa where it is such a vital resource. I trust that Precious and Michael, the askari, ate what I left later.

*

Later, with Alex and Nicholas, his 16 year old brother, staying here in his family homeland before going back to school in Kampala in three weeks, we wandered the narrow dust paths between banana trees, that make every direction seem the same. Everywhere I went, children called and ran to greet. This, the ‘youngest’ country on earth by demographics, has 50% of its population under fifteen years old, so there’s never a shortage of calling children fascinated by a mzungu passing their homes. Alex is a sensitive guide to his community. Educated, caring and very bright, he is carving a niche as a leader, by example and by his innate intelligence. We visited his elderly aunt, who went down on her knees to respectfully greet her visitors, as is the old custom for Ugandan women, and then prepared local sweet, black tea for us, lighting up a fire of sticks in a deeply blackened, smokey kitchen hut, as usual without chimney.

Somehow the subject of Nic’s forthcoming circumcision came up. It’s a cultural rite still practiced on teenage boys. “Oh, you can’t sleep!” exclaimed Alex. “I went through it myself. There is singing for three days and nights. You may get two hours to rest each day. By the third day you are exhausted. I can’t forget..!” and he started to laugh. “They take a big knife and they CHOP!! EH! They pull and they CHOP!” My eyes were watering by now as he gesticulated to demonstrate. You begin to squirm and sit tighter somehow. “When it is over, you have to hold up your arms to show you are still alright.” He held up his arms in a sort of triumphant gesture that made me wince. “Then,” he said, shaking with laughter, “I had to ask, ‘Uncle, Uncle, is it still there?! I couldn’t look. I was afraid my whole private part was gone!”

“It’s something you can never forget..!”

I bet…

*

Culture takes some strange forms. A year ago, when I visited, Alex was working, mainly voluntarily, as a ‘Male Champion’, working with the local health and reproductive centre to attempt to change the mindset, particularly amongst men, that the bigger your family, the more virile your reputation; that ‘carrying on your name’ is vital in Africa, and that more and more children are a blessing (unless they are all girls of course…). The Male Champions were community leaders doing good work to attempt to encourage planned families to begin the gigantic task of reducing Uganda’s appalling birth rate (over 7 children average per woman). They were a close knit group of young men; 24 of them, doing vital work, largely unrewarded but sustained by US Aid, mainly for management, office expenses and an occasional ‘celebration’ with a few bottles of soft drinks.

“Then Trump came… The funding was withdrawn, and now we have had to disband. We try to carry on the work as volunteers, because it’s important, but since Trump, no money…”

Later we visited the Sipi Health Centre, a well run, impressive set up with a couple of doctors, midwives and nurses. Health care in Uganda is provided by the government and is of a surprisingly high standard for Africa. Betty, a tall, elderly nursing sister, showed us round the whole place. An excellent English accent and a forceful, capable, characterful woman – who would have made a notorious ward sister in the old days – she took us from consulting room to delivery room, anti-natal clinic to the wards. There are an average of 21 births a month, according to a chart I spotted, and HIV is tested, diagnosed and prescribed for, while accidents and blood tests, domestic violence and disease bring them plenty of business. A young boy had horrible burns from scalding porridge across his buttock and thigh; women were waiting to go into labour and a woman had been attacked by a youth with a knife. She sat on the bed, bursting into tears at any sympathy. “Don’t cry, my dear, don’t cry. All will be well,” said Sister Betty, visibly distressed by the woman’s tears.

“We do what we can. But we lack resources. It’s difficult… And since Trump came, all our funding has stopped. Our government is doing what it can to make up, but we are struggling.”

“Trump is just the worst terrorist in the world!” exclaimed Alex angrily. “We used to respect people from USA, but not any more.”

Trump is seen as a figure of derision by all the Africans I have met, respect for the power and influence of the US washing away; and these are people used to extreme corruption and entirely cynical, unsympathetic despots. Here in Uganda almost everyone is angry at the president, forcing a change to the constitution that prevented a president serving past the age of 75. “Huh, he has the control of parliament; he buys support. Millions!” says Alex. One of the richest presidents on this corrupt continent, he will now be assured of a seventh term, taking his presidency to a stultifying 35 years, and who knows how much longer. Then the Zimbabwe Corruption Commission is investigating Grace Mugabe’s PhD, that she received in a record three or four months from the University of Zimbabwe. All PhD theses are published in Zimbabwe – except Grace Mugabe’s… But then, it’s no longer restricted to Africa: Putin is smug in Russia as he bans his opponents and stands, uncontested for yet another term; here in Uganda they have had unseemly fist fights and punches thrown in parliament in rejection of Museveni’s reelection; and then the bumbling Theresa May has made a pathetic reshuffle of her cabinet of unknowns, some of whom refused to leave their offices in a shambolic change described by the Guardian as like a ‘referee without a whistle’! Is there anyone in world politics who acts on the people’s behalf, not their own? However, the despicable ‘my-nuclear-button-is-bigger-than-your-nuclear-button’ Trump cutting aid that, amongst other good works for mankind, was working to reduce population growth in this hugely ballooning small African country probably takes the prize for sheer mean-spiritedness…

“Oh well,” I said, “Mugabe has gone. Miracles still happen!” Everyone has so much respect for the way Zimbabwe peacefully removed the old dictator.

Fortunately, the Netherlands have stepped into the breach to an extent, and Alex now works – still largely voluntarily – with a group trying to stamp out female genital mutilation – still practiced widely in this part of Uganda. Their remit is also in encouraging girls’ education, equality and reducing gender violence. Sexist, misogynist Trump wouldn’t care much about any of that anyway, and anyway, they’re all black…

*

Frank is a tall, quietly spoken social worker, who also works to prevent FGM. We chatted last night at Coffeeland. “It is hard. I have PASSION! I have passion to help others, to improve their lives, but as a graduate, it is difficult to get work. There’s no money to pay us, especially since Trump,” he said, offering me his own bottle of beer as I waited for mine to be brought – for beer is only bought when it’s needed in Alex’s simple economy, and there’s no fridge at Coffeeland anyway.

“It’s made more difficult because I am one of seven brothers and sisters, and my family suffered to send me to university to study social work. Now I have a responsibility to support them, but we can’t get work.” He feels morally obliged to help his extended family as one of the educated. In the eyes of his family, his education brings automatic reward. Sadly, in African reality it brings responsibilities but few opportunities or financial rewards.

*

I brought Precious and Alex a copy of my most recent photo book, published online. I brought them as gifts for William and Rico’s family too. I have seldom given a more excitably appreciated present to anyone, as this book to Precious and Alex. She danced and exclaimed to see herself in print, with Alex’s photo on the cover. When he returned from errands in town, she was still poring over the pages. Alex was thrilled and the book will become a family treasure: “Keep it carefully, Precious; put it in my box. I want this for my children – and grandchildren! When I have a real hotel, it will be on reception! It’s wonderful! And what you say about me, I thank you! Maybe we can use this photo for a new signboard at the roadside! Now I have been published three times!” For Alex proudly appeared twice on TV last year, interviewed about his voluntary work in the community.

It is so lovely, the way pleasure, gratitude and joy are expressed unreservedly in East Africa. I really have no reason to refute the belief that Ugandans are the friendliest people in Africa, in which case they must surely be some of the friendliest peoples on earth? With all their privations and problems they have the ability to smile, laugh and show the greatest warmth and open generosity.

*

I am completing writing in bed in my thatched house. A strong wind has risen, reminiscent of the first night I found Coffeeland Resort last year. It is rattling and beating a loose tin roof sheet on the other building, where Precious and her baby, Keira, and Alex’s sister, Gloria, also on a visit, have just thrown themselves onto the beds beneath the bashing zinc sheet. “Oh, I will sleep!. When I put the blanket over, I will sleep!” says Precious with her irrepressible giggle. We all sat on the beds to eat supper together a short while ago, easy as a family. Precious served MOUNDS of potatoes and rice with fish, of which I got by far the lion’s share as the guest. Helpings are prodigious and my small appetite a wonder. Young Nic, 16, ate twenty ‘Irish’, plus a pile of rice and scraps of fish. Precious ate about fifteen of the boiled potatoes. I managed five by struggling to appease her hospitality. Doubtless, by now they are all asleep under the crashing tin sheet. For me, in my cosy wood and thatch room, with the wind blowing through the gaps in the walls, it’s time to get my head down and put in the ear plugs. It’s a privilege to be here on this cliff edge in Uganda. I am completely safe and secure, generously welcomed, cared for and contented, and my company seems warmly welcome, much more than just my business.

DAY 53 THURSDAY 11th JANUARY 2017. SIPI, UGANDA

The older I get, still travelling, the more important it becomes to be with friends. Travelling is no longer just rushing along trying to see as much as I can; get to as many places as possible or experience everything, however briefly. Perhaps it’s a patience and calm that comes with age? I’m also sure that the older I get, the more I enjoy my travels. Perhaps that’s partly at least because I am able to trust my instincts so much more confidently?

It was instinct that attracted me to this delightful couple: Precious and Alex, 22 and 29 respectively. He’s a man of great integrity, intelligent and totally trustworthy. She is a much simpler person, warm-hearted, less educated but ‘what you see is absolutely what you get’. They made me welcome as soon as we met and we have developed a warmth that transcends cultures and languages. “I want Jonat’an at my wedding!” Precious told Alex as they prepared a complicated, delicious meal: barbecued beef with rice and vegetables, all cooked out of doors in a rising, cold gale, in the fire pit that is all that remains of last year’s kitchen hut, the rest destroyed by a storm.

“So you haven’t married, then?” I enquired.

“I have to pay the dowery!” said Alex despondently. “This is Africa. Precious’s father, he keeps wanting the marriage. And Precious keeps pressing me…” Life for a young man like Alex is very difficult. I often wonder just how people on this continent make ends meet. It’s a mystery, except that our Western ‘wants’ don’t become ‘needs’ here. Now I find that since we met last year, when finances were stretched and Alex was stressed (he was forced several times to ask me for some cash up front to buy my beer or foodstuffs), he has been forced to take a job in Kapchorwa, the local ‘big city’, ten miles back up the road. There he works in the Noah’s Ark Hotel (‘Only for the use of VIPs’). Jobs are scarce but he is popular with the customers and becoming indispensable to the owner for his hospitality skills. He earns £50 a month and is struggling hard to save money to invest back into renovating his Coffeeland Resort – which has deteriorated since last year.

Alex values my advice, opinions garnered from many travels in Africa. This place has so much potential, but it is so difficult for him to realise it, despite imagination, determination and a flair for the ‘hospitality’ business. The site alone is so wonderful, with its expansive sunset view from the cliff edge (the ideal place for a ‘sundowner’, they’d say elsewhere). My advice is to try for a another market and to think of Coffeeland differently: ‘Come to Coffeeland Resort, a cultural experience. Warm welcome, home cooked food, and the best sunset views in Sipi!’ Instead of constructing concrete chalets, build local thatched round houses, nicely fitted and decorated with local mats, using Precious’s flair for simple, inexpensive fabrics as he did in the room I rented last year, where cheap sheets were covered by zebra-striped blankets and the walls draped with colourful cloths to hide the zinc and boards. It was charming and I overlooked the lack of ensuite or ‘self contained’, the pit latrine and bucket shower, happily enjoying the warmth of my welcome and the attention to detail. Aim for customers who want a more ‘ethnic’ place, who send their photos to the inevitable Facebook of themselves having an ‘African experience’ with a beer in hand! I have promised to sponsor his first thatched room: I like this couple so much, they deserve a break of good fortune on which to build.

“The way you like smiles,” said Alex, “if you had been here in July, you wouldn’t have seen them. People were hungry! There was no money and prices went up for any food still available. The government even sent food, but only for widows and those without children. Precious and I, we bought one big bag of flour and we ate chapatis,” he shrugged. “I said to her, make one each in the morning and one at night. We ate only chapatis – but then we were saved by your Irish! Without the money you gave us…” his voice tailed away as he smiled at the memory of the potatoes he grew with the money I gave him as I was leaving Uganda. These are the realities of life with climate change in vastly crowded Uganda. “But already, people will have forgotten. The trouble with us Africans is that we never plan; we never think ahead or store food for tomorrow. When we are hungry we eat and forget that the rains may be bad again this year too!”

“There weren’t even matoke (bananas) left on the trees. The maize failed – I planted two plots, one at home here and one over there,” he pointed across the deep valley to the opposite cliff to the side of Coffeeland. “Then thieves came and broke into the room where you are sleeping. There were no guests at that time, so I put all the mattresses into that room. The only one they couldn’t take is the one you are using. It was too big to get out of the window.” So from someone who has so little capital, even that which he had – foam mattresses and cheap, cheerful blankets and sheets – was taken. Now he is grateful for £50 a month, a few tips and the little he can glean from occasional guests like me. He has so many dreams for his guest house and no means to achieve them.

One guest at the Noah’s Ark Hotel, where he now works, was so impressed by Alex’s service and friendliness that he wouldn’t leave until Alex was fetched the ten miles by boda-boda to receive a ten pound tip. Alex took four but unselfishly shared six amongst his colleagues.

For now, his Coffeeland is run on a shoestring but lovely to me for its human warmth and goodwill – more valuable than all the ensuite bathrooms, fluffy towels, sixteen pillows crowded on beds in the modern nonsense or fancy napery around my place setting – which is a wooden chair balanced on the rough ground before my broken down cane chair. It is silent and sleeping here is a luxury, so much so that getting up in the morning is a struggle!

*

Alex and I went on the Mosquito to Kapchorwa to roam about, visit his work hotel and meet his colleagues. Everywhere I go, I am greeted with cheer and happiness. Children follow me like the Pied Piper – and in a country of 50% children there are about seventeen million of them to follow me, calling “Mzungu, muzungu! How are yoooooo?” Alex explained the origin of the word: when white men first came to East Africa, they were seen to be always in a hurry, rushing hither and thither, busy. Mzungu, the customary description for white people, derives from the Swahili word to rush about!

There are few visitors at his work hotel today, so Alex has been able to spend some of his time with his own guest. Back at home, he began to cook our supper – for me and for his small family of Precious and baby Kiera (“We got the name from an American visitor.”) His tee shirt read: ‘Linking men and youth to prevent gender-based abuse and encourage equality for girls’: his new voluntary occupation (alongside hotel work and his resort). He has no kitchen left and cooks on charcoal: a small stove and the cement fire pit left from his wooden kitchen, chopping vegetables like a professional chef on the shaky rustic tables of the resort.

Michael, the watchman with a wonderfully smile-creased face arrived, with his wife Rose and one of their five children, Joseph, nine. Rose has one of the most expressive faces I have seen in all my African travels, and those who know my collection of portraits will understand that that is quite an accolade. Perhaps because she is deaf and dumb, she has found another way to communicate – with her astonishing, attractive, equally smile-creased face. They look like an ideal and happy couple. Deciding to stay another day, I have promised to clamber down the cliff to visit their shamba far below.

*

“I’m afraid there’s been no progress…” said Rico from the other side of Mount Elgon. “We got the password and PIN number, and Adelight went again to the Post Office, but it seems they were the same password and number they tried before, that don’t work!” Looking back through these pages, I see we tried them before on January 2nd. “We may have more news later, ring me again.” I’ll give it until tomorrow lunchtime, for wheels to turn – or not. I’ll leave Sipi on Saturday and ride back to Kitale and see if I can get to Ethiopia using the photocopy logbook and transfer of ownership document. I’ll ride to Nairobi for the visa and see what advice I can get. It was, after all, simple to get across the Suam border the other day. Perhaps I am unnecessarily concerned.

*

By evening the east wind rose again. Alex climbed to the roof and pulled a heavy door over the flapping zinc sheets. But the wind became cool. Recent weather has been strangely unseasonal: heavy clouds every afternoon threatening rain that never falls. As Alex cooked, Precious was wrapped in jumpers and my waterproof jacket huddled by the cooking fire and my nose ran with cold. Any climate change deniers should come to Africa, where the pointed end of our greed is most evident. Listen to the stories from this continent and you will understand that the climate is changing – rapidly.

But then, you come to understand a lot of things as you come to know Africa.

DAY 54 FRIDAY 12th JANUARY 2017. SIPI, UGANDA

The trouble with clambering, almost vertically, down three or four hundred feet of steep mountainside is that you must inevitably come up again. At one point in our lovely hike – which my companions were certain would kill me: mzungu are expected to expire at the first hurdle of exertion, let alone ‘old’ ones – we descended a home-built ladderway of boards and trunks. We were climbing down into the horseshoe of deep valley that runs round behind Coffeeland’s great view to the west. Coffeeland sits on the point of the cliff, with the edge of the valley delineated in a huge hoop a mile or so wide. Waterfalls spin and sparkle over its rim into the heavily forested and cultivated slopes below, into a scattered area of shambas called Chemukase. Far down from that runs a curling red dust road that you can follow by eye from our eyrie. The bowl below is filled with banana trees, coffee bushes and thick greenery, people scratching fields wherever they can; patches of tomato plants trapped between huge boulders that tumbled from the cliffs aeons ago.

We were climbing down: I was with young Nic, and Michael the watchman, to visit the latter’s home and shamba that we can see somewhat plan-like far below and to visit his family.

Rose, Michael’s deaf and dumb wife, needs no language to express her joy! She came running up the dusty path waving her arms and exclaiming in her own way – and tackled me like a winning rugby player. She was so excited that it was overwhelming. Without language, her innate Ugandan sense of joy and welcome is exaggerated. She clutched me, almost lifting me from the floor in an ecstatic frenzy of pride and rejoicing. It was a while before she let me go and allowed me to slither the last part of the climb to her home.

We sat in the tidily swept yard of her zinc-roofed stick and mud home, finely painted with brown and pinkish decorations, natural colours made with clay and cow dung, and she made big mugs of very sweet tea. It’s no good asking for unsweetened tea here: no one would understand the concept. She brought filling greasy chapatis while fine chickens and pretty white rabbits scavenged around us. Shady banana trees, cotton and coffee bushes obscured the view, except upward where the red cliff swept around in a wooded curve. Children came and watched through the plants of the thin bright hedge. This is the activity I enjoy above all others in Africa: sitting companionably in rudimentary compounds, apparently bringing honour to the the owners by accepting their generous but simple hospitality.

We scrambled on for a dutiful look at one of the waterfalls that fall and spray into dewy dells below the red cliff. It is the Sipi falls that attract a trickle of tourists to the area, but for me it’s just water falling over a cliff and the interest lies in the walk and the people I meet, not the destination. Somewhere we picked tiny sweet blackberries, wild in the undergrowth. It’s unsettling to get fresh blackberries in January; to see extravagant hot house pot plants – in Europe – growing as abundant bushes, or to find white jasmine, the very one that grows in my Rock Cottage ‘shamba’, as I joke with people, flowering and fragrant in Kessup in January.

*

Rico tells me the managing director of Olerai has confirmed that the Mosquito is still in their name and that it can now be transferred to Adelight. That’s progress of sorts (after a year!) but I made a small change of plan and will stay another day in Sipi, ride home to Kitale on Sunday and perhaps pick up the document myself when I get to Nairobi.

Why another change of plan, such as I HAVE any plans? Just because I enjoy the companionship of these charming people so much and it’s such an enriching part of my journey. “But I haven’t moved about with you!” complained Precious as we ate a late supper, huddled on the beds in their small room out of the cool breeze. “You have walked about with Alex, and with Michael and with Nicholas, but not with ME!” So it’s no hardship to comply – and to indulge in another deep, deep sleep of the sort you remember years later!

Alex, working hard the whole day, was late back, so by the time we had taken a walk to look at his and Precious’s own house, on a plot ten minutes’ walk back up the banana fringed paths, it was late to start cooking on the charcoal fires in the dark night above the view of Uganda. We ate late and then sat for an hour discussing more ideas and plans for his Coffeeland Resort. He deserves success, this diligent young man and he’s using my experience – and my design skills – as inspiration. Tonight we designed new signboards for the roadside and discussed ideas for new structures from local materials, that independent travellers like me would find a memorable experience, rather than the luxury safari chalets he cannot afford to provide.

*

As a consequence of our late night and lack of power once again – which for me just adds to the magic in the starlight – I am completing writing over my breakfast. Precious is easy with me now and just enjoyed a great joke: bringing me a plate piled high with ten matoke (steamed savoury bananas that are Uganda’s staple). Staring down at my keyboard, it was a moment before the plate registered. How she laughed. How we both laughed. Anyone around me could eat this plateful at a sitting and it’s impossible to persuade them that I really, really AM more comfortable with just a chapati fried with a couple of eggs inside! I’ve long had a theory that with their every task undertaken laboriously and energetically by hand and our Western food being much more nutritious in smaller quantities, I just can’t take the bulk. Insistent, she has now brought me a large cake-like tough bun and a plate of onion and tomato salad. She is convinced I will fade away. As for me, I hate overeating as much as I hate waste! What to do with a generous young woman who can eat fifteen ‘Irish’ or ten matoke at a sitting?

How she enjoyed her matoke joke, though! A pleasure to share the laughter… Alex claims, phoning to find out if I am happy, that she ate 23 matoke last night, a slight exaggeration, I trust!!!

DAY 55 SATURDAY 13th JANUARY 2017. SIPI, UGANDA

Accident! Only a few flesh wounds, but unfortunately mainly to poor Precious’s lower leg, some lost skin and abrasions. She was wearing the usual East African riding dress of a skirt and sandals. Protective clothing anyone? Huh. For me, a few more scratches and scuffs, but anyone who rides motorbikes about Africa is used to dings and bruises! But of course, I felt worse about hers, for I was responsible. We were on a notorious (it turns out) short steep hill that is so thick of churned up dust from the cabbage and vegetable lorries, that when I walked across it after we tumbled, I fell right over again – twice. With her on the back, I was sitting forward and unable to lock my arms as I would usually do, descending such an obstacle. Under the snowdrift dust must have been a stone, and down we went.

A boda-boda rider helped pull the bike off us, and after a pause carried Precious down to a private clinic in town, where a doctor of some sort, looked her over and pronounced abrasions, did not wash or clean the grazes, but prescribed a pain killer injection (would you trust an injection given by a bloke in an anorak?) and – almost inevitably I fear, a course of antibiotics… The life of the 20th century wonder drug, that has so transformed our lives, will be short indeed: in Africa if you get a cold, you ask for antibiotics and resistant strains of disease are increasing fast, in what one expert recently called a ‘medical time bomb’. What we needed was some clean warm water and antiseptic ointment. Later, back home, when I gave Precious some antiseptic to spread on her grazes, she exclaimed, “We didn’t need this doctor! You had medicine better than his! It feels good already.” The clinic’s bill was only £3, including the drugs, probably not much more than the tube of Savlon cost me in Boots.

All’s well that ends well, and by the time we had eaten, Alex, Precious, the baby and I lounging in their small bedroom comfortably, the laughter and conversation was flowing again. I’d had a trying ride home the ten miles from Kapchorwa in increasing dark, the potholes invisible and oncoming lights – like my own, pointing every which way – dazzling me further. Alex and Precious followed together. I’d left them money to find a car, but none being available, they ended up together on a boda-boda. More motorbiking for poor Precious to end her dramatic day.

What a shame our fun day ended thus. I stayed on so that Precious could take me out for the day too…

*

In five weeks I have been invited to view three dead Africans in their coffins! “Have you ever been to a Ugandan burial?” asked Precious. No, but I’ve been to a Ghanaian one and a Kenyan one in the very recent past.

The mother in law of one of Alex’s cousins, Tom, died three days ago in a village, seven miles ride high above Kapchorwa, the town ten miles up the road. “No point going by boda-boda when we have our own,” I said, unaware of the bad dirt road to get to the distant village on the slopes of Mount Elgon. Later I wished I hadn’t. Boda-boda boys know their roads and have a very low centre of gravity on their small Chinese flea-bikes. Oh well, we went on the Mosquito.

The funeral ground wasn’t up to speed when we arrived so we walked to discover the area, for Precious, originating from western Uganda, hasn’t seen much of the outlying parts around here. We were in a fertile region where large fields, unlike the scattered shambas of so much of the region, spread across hillsides, filled with cabbages, potatoes, onions and tomatoes in small commercial quantities. Backing it all was forest, for we are high here, and water tumbled down a glissade of rocks, and would later fall over the cliff edges in Sipi. We admired some fine local houses, just the sort I am suggesting Alex constructs at Coffeeland: round earth houses with neat conical thatched roofs.

*

We made our way back to the funeral place. People were gathering beneath a temporary shade of sheets of tin and plastic over poles. Wooden benches had been set in lines, one leg dug in to accommodate the slope of the hill, an uncomfortably low seat for the next two or three hours. The coffin was carried out and put across a couple of low tables. It was a locally made affair of eucalyptus boards, painted an ugly mustard yellow and scribed with wavy black paint lines. An old woman danced a traditional dance beside the coffin, and another wailed and cried rather unconvincingly, dabbing her eyes with her cloth awhile. African pop music played over a rickety PA system run by a humming generator fifty yards away, connected by the usual Ugandan knotted, exposed ended, 240 volt cables.

“Will you open and view?” asked Tom, who kindly translated some of the proceedings for us both. I didn’t understand until I saw that the coffin had a lift up lid at one end, fitted with the customary glass panel and a cheap chrome handle. “It’s heavy. Pull!” And there inside lay the corpse, my third in five weeks. It’s obviously the custom to make sure the right corpse is in there!

We sat on a bench in the middle of the gathering crowd. I wonder what people make of the appearance of a mzungu here? I’ll never really know.

The proceedings began. Intolerably long speeches were made and to my shock the whole event seemed to be hijacked by local politicians to harangue the gathering. They obviously fancied themselves as great orators, but weren’t, to judge by the wandering attention all around me. As they lectured, a crowd of women prepared food behind an old lorry tarpaulin hung between the tin roofed, mud walled house and a round thatched house. Suddenly, mid-monologue of one of the tedious councillors, a crowd of outlying listeners, mainly young people, rushed to the cooking place, where plastic plates were filled with food and handed, hand over hand along a hilarious (to me) human chain to the mourners. Occasionally the chain would change direction to deliver plates to other areas. The MC approached to ask if I would take food. I thanked him; we mzungu aren’t expected to take local food or drink unbottled water. To the gathering’s surprise, I was served – a broken-edged blue plastic plate of posho (pretty much the same as ughali in Kenya, pap in South Africa and all the variations of ground up maize or grains made into heavy stodge throughout Africa), beans, soup and a piece of boiled beef complete with shreds of white bone to which it hung. “They are bringing you fork,” said Tom. But in this situation, much though I dislike grease on my fingers, I insist on eating with my hand like everyone else.

*

To backtrack a little to the most interesting part of the proceedings: to the more personal addresses before the unimpressive politicians… Disrespectfully, it seemed to me, quite a lot of this part of the event was given over to raising grudges and blame. One man ranted about the cow he was owed from the dead woman’s dowery and another was a man with a sour face, who claimed to have been arrested because of the dead woman, protesting his innocence. I didn’t understand the allusion until it appeared that most people gathered believed the woman, mother of five, and 54 (just about spot on for life expectancy) had been killed by spells and curses. Her youngest daughter described her mother’s last days: she had died over a few weeks, with the poor woman carried about between the hospital, the ‘church’ and the witch doctor. She had died, it was claimed, of evil spirits and demons in her stomach, set by anonymous foes.

“She probably died of sclerosis of the liver!” exclaimed educated Alex later. Alex, I think, is agnostic at best. When I fell into a discussion with a self-proclaimed ‘pastor’ the other day, he feigned sleep to avoid the conversation, laughing so much afterwards. Quite wisely in a small community, he keeps his powder dry on such topics. “Sclerosis is SO common nowadays. It’s the wirigi, the local spirit. They say if you take it for eleven years you are certain to die of the liver. Less than that and there’s hope…” The African problem with alcohol again.

When the first pastor began their part of the bizarre ceremony, by which time the coffin and its contents appeared completely forgotten and irrelevant, he began by repeating the accusations of witchcraft and evil spirits. At the top of his voice (in an appallingly ill-fitting suit and a floral kipper tie) he berated the people, “Why did you not pray for this woman. If she was bewitched, PRAY! PRAY! PRAY!” Then began lots of nonsense shouting about Adam and Eve, fruits of evil and Original Sin, and lots of “ALLELUIAS”. Thankfully, by now chilly and increasingly bored herself, Precious whispered that perhaps it was time to go. I agreed, but could see no way to extract ourselves tactfully. Then I thought, what the hell? I can’t hide anyway, so I may as well just get up and go. As we left I heard some rant about “…these people leaving us…” in a critical tone from the ‘preacher’. I am certain he would be shouting and ranting thus for the next tedious hour, and no way did I want to engage with that dreadful road – that was soon to be our undoing – in failing light.

Back at the bike, parked on the grass above the funeral field, the engine just wouldn’t start. I kicked and kicked to no avail. In the end, it took a push and a bump start to get going – on our disastrous ride home. Later, Precious said, laughing, “Perhaps the bike was bewitched!”

“Maybe it was those fake ‘pastors’! They didn’t like us leaving!”

“Yes, and when we left, others followed!” It seems our exit caused something of an exodus. It seemed a strategic mistake to serve the food before the burial service. Africans will always stick around when there’s food to be had!

*

Only at the funeral did it register that Precious understands little more of the Kalenjin language than I do. “So what language do you and Alex speak together? I know there’s a lot of English..?”

“Oh, he speaks a thousand languages! We speak English or Rukiga together. I don’t know his language, Kalenjin. I speak a language from the west of the country, Rukiga. We have many languages in Uganda. Luganda is our common language. But when I speak with neighbours I usually use English.” As with Kiswahili and English in Kenya, Luganda or English are the languages common to many who travel from their tribal lands. “I wonder what this girl will speak?” Precious jiggles fat Kiera on her lap. “Maybe I won’t understand her!”

*

Well, an unfortunate event to remember, but a cheerful day with delightful Precious, and a congenial day’s end with both my two lovely Ugandan friends before a luxurious sleep in the grass-roofed hut and the silence, the deep, deep silence, of this cam, relaxing place on top of a cliff somewhere beneath Africa’s fourth highest mountain, with all Uganda sleeping to the west.

DAY 56 SUNDAY 14th JANUARY 2017. SIPI, UGANDA

Lazy Sunday in Sipi, another day spent for the company of my congenial friends and the very odd fact that I so look forward to sleep here! Going to bed is an anticipatory pleasure. I tend to sleep well in Africa generally (no stress, warm weather, often fairly energetic days) but nowhere better than in Sipi.

Precious sat with her feet up, resting her grazed leg; Alex managed to take a day off from his hotel work and I just sat about, read and enjoyed the calm, the warmth and the quiet friendship. They both spent much of the day finding anything of my dusty luggage they could wash for me: my waterproof jacket, my shoes, my boots, my camera bag – even my motorbike. Alex cooked potatoes in a tasty sauce for lunch (still eating ‘Jonat’an’s ‘Irish’) and baby Kiera, terrified of the mzungu, played and cried. She has big lungs that one, when she is upset.

In the afternoon I spotted a group of children sitting outside the wire gate of the Coffeeland compound. It was obvious that they were hoping to see the mzungu. I went to greet them. “We want photo!” said Anisha, the eldest. So I went for my camera: that’s the wonder of digital photography: I can take 50 pictures and not worry about the cost, unlike the old colour slide days, when every picture cost about 50 pence. The children decided amongst themselves to entertain the mzungu. The next half hour was very charming.

Four of the boys disappeared for a few minutes, reappearing with their faces streaked with grey ash, waving fronds of greenery, and proceeded to dance round the huts for me in some sort of traditional dance. Then they enacted what for me would seem a very painful event that I’d try to hide from: traditional circumcision! These boys have several years before they have to – as I would see it – ‘suffer’ the rites, but they are already anticipating their entry to manhood. They mimed the chopping with a stick, holding the flies of one another’s trousers and throwing up their arms in the triumphant gesture that shows they have survived the ordeal. As each was ‘chopped’, they sat on a rock, exchanging a piece of bedsheet to signify the success of the whole unsavoury operation… These boys were actually looking forward to their day in the spotlight of their communities! Ouch!

Earlier in the day, a sound of drumming rose from somewhere in the great bowl of the valley beneath us. “Hey, they are going for circumcision! WHY!? It is January. They do it in December!” said Precious in surprise.

“No,” says knowledgeable Alex, from this culture, “the neighbouring tribe…” (and we are talking of people within earshot across the valley), “they do it any time.”

God, culture and tradition take some strange paths…

“That woman,” said Precious from the old cane settee, where she was reclining, a blanket over her grazes, despite my advice to keep them moving or the skin tightens up, “that woman who died… The one who was buried yesterday. She was circumcised, they said, what year, Jonat’aan’?”

“Oh, I think they said 1983,” I answered, remembering the bizarre fact, told with a certain pride as a milestone in her life, from Tom’s translation of her biography.

“No, not possible,” corrects Alex, grounded in the local ways. “It must have been 1984. They only circumcise women in even years. Genital mutilation: we have to stop it.” Hopefully, his voluntary efforts with his new project (funded by the Netherlands now the US has withdrawn its funding), will slowly have results. But tradition changes so very slowly. Especially in Africa.

*

“This woman who died; you told me an uncle is still demanding a cow he is owed from the dowery. The woman is DEAD! It’s no more than a tax on the orphans! We Africans, we love money. Why should I have to BUY my wife? She should not be my property, she is my wife, a partner.” Alex is a modern, extremely bright young man. “This dowery, it’s tradition we should stop. But Precious’s father, he wants cows…”

“At least ten!” Interjects Precious, laughing.

“If she is my property, I can beat her and abuse her like my donkey, is that it? It is better I take that money for our own children, our future. I can invest it better. Her father is established, what does he want with this payment..?”

Life’s difficult for an intelligent young Ugandan: a young man who, in his spare time, tries to change attitudes to FGM, female abuse, girls’ education and equality. ‘Tradition’ is always the African excuse for delaying change, especially when the status quo favours men – as it usually does.

*

I’m writing as the sun sets on a relaxing, cordial, amiable day. The temperature is dropping quickly and I’m already looking forward to another deep, satisfying sleep. I came here partly as a promise to Alex and Precious, for maybe three nights, and have stayed six, very contentedly, and promised to return before I head for home. These really are two of the most charming people I have met in all my African travels. They have become warm, instinctive friends. How wonderful to be able to have friends of 22 and 29! My idea of hell has always been to be marooned in a ‘community’ of ‘seniors’. Actually, I can refine that: my idea of absolute hell would be to have to live in a gated ‘community’ of senior citizens in Florida, the strongest argument for euthanasia I can imagine!

There’s something African tradition HAS got right: care of its elderly; well, here in Uganda, the two percent that make it past 65…

DAY 57 MONDAY 15th JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

And so back to Kitale to begin the next part of my safari.

I returned via Saum River border again, greeted like a returning friend by the officials. I suppose, with me being only the fourth non-local vehicle six days ago, I am something memorable for them. I came that way because, despite its tough, rough quality the road is extremely beautiful and rewarding to ride. But, goodness, it’s an energetic ride! I bounce and twist, dance and leap – from rut to hole, rock to bump, amid dust and dirt. All the items so generously washed yesterday look just the way they did before: completely filthy.

The middle part of the ride is wonderful, and worth all the physical effort of the whole. The dirt trail begins just a kilometre past Kapchorwa town and doesn’t end until Endebess, in Kenya, 102 kilometres later. The high middle part runs through many small straggling villages and for a while through magnificent forests of tall trees. The road is often rocky and it’s difficult to imagine that trucks and even a few saloon cars can come this way, but they do. How they make it up and down the various steep rocky hills, more like staircases than a road, is astonishing, but this is rural Africa and transport is still required in these remote areas. Lorries grind along, people clinging to the tops, raising voluminous clouds of dust that settles in my beard and turns my face and clothes, bike and luggage red. Everywhere as I ride, I can hear the excited screams of children, even through my ear plugs; but I can’t give them much attention, for my eyes need to be constantly on the trail ahead: a moment’s loss of concentration can be disastrous! I must avoid some of the holes if possible, be vigilant for thick, slippery dust, pick a route through the battered track ahead, watch for donkeys, goats and boda-bodas sharing my way – and, when I can, enjoy the spectacular views of mountains; extinct volcanic peaks like giant pimples; haze-filled vistas of a great plain far below to the left; the grass- and zinc-roofed villages of dust-covered twisted shacks filled with curious, unoccupied observers waving; the shambas, houses, signboards, scenery and still the ‘road’ ahead. It’s tiring, but I love it!

I don’t ride fast, although sometimes I could. I am very, very aware that what I am doing has dangers and I am in no hurry. It would take only a moment to ruin my entire trip on such a road: a small injury could wreck everything, this far from home. So I am fairly timid in my riding: it’s not a race. “Oh, I can make it to Bukwo in two hours from Kapchorwa!” an acquaintance of Alex’s told me dismissively a day or two ago. I doubt it, actually, on his 125cc machine, but so be it: it took me a bit over three strenuous hours; the whole journey from Sipi to Kitale, about five and a half hours. It’s about 90 miles, including the delay of crossing the border.

Immigration at Uganda, as I exited again, was like a disco. The young woman officer (no uniforms anywhere) had a large screen TV blaring music videos in her outer office as she sat with her feet on a chair. There aren’t many customers at this remote post. She struggled to make the computer talk to her passport scanner as I struggled not to put my fingers in my ears: I have often commented that almost all Africans seem to have a greater tolerance for volume than I do. For some bizarre formal bureaucratic reason I had to have my fingerprints scanned and then a photograph. “No one will ever recognise me!” I laughed. “My beard should be white! look at it!” But then, no one will ever look at it anyway.

Back through the rickety pedestrian gate over the insignificant international brook to Kenya. More papers that no one will ever look at and the information that I can travel to Ethiopia with the same document I have now, but that my multiple entry visa will expire when I leave Kenya and I will have to purchase another one (US $100) to get back in. Huh! And then the slightly better graded dust road to Endebess, and the tar road, with increasing traffic and speed humps, back to Kitale, a welcome from Rico, a much needed shower (“Mum said I should give you a new towel,” said Rose. “Wait until AFTER I shower! I will never get all this dust off in one go!” And I didn’t…), and beer on the porch, also much anticipated.

Today I am half way through my time out of Britain. It’s been a journey defined by spending much of the time amongst friends, rather than randomly exploring new places, but from here I shall be back on the road to the unknown for a few weeks. It’s great to know, however, that I have good welcoming friends to return to at the end of the journey.

Alex phoned to check that I had arrived safely. People are so loyal and concerned for my wellbeing on this largely dismissed continent. The appalling, despicable Trump has just set Africa ablaze by calling it full of ‘shithole countries’. It’d be humorous if it wasn’t so tragic – and so WRONG. Sadly, many of his arrogant, totally ignorant supporters would, of course, agree. They know nothing except the imagined superiority of their shallow, materialist lives. I’d FAR rather be here than anywhere near the pollution of Trumpistan just now… The reality is that so much of Africa is generous and friendly on personal levels beyond their understanding. But you have to be open to a wider view to see how much the human values of mutual support, care for your fellows, and generosity of spirit outweigh the narrowness of judging by what you OWN rather than what you ARE. Few of us have the privilege of becoming familiar with this forgotten continent, but it’s enriched my life beyond measure.

Precious said, “I will run to my room! I don’ want you to see me cry when you leave..!”