DAY 68 – 72. TUESDAY – SUNDAY MARCH 3rd – 8th 2020. KLOOF, DURBAN. SOUTH AFRICA

After meetings with the client in Golden Gate on Tuesday, we drove home to Kloof, about four and a half hours through expansive scenery. It’s such BIG country, so much of South Africa. We rode for hours through farming and grass lands, over rolling miles of big-sky country. Here and there we drove over high lands and then through the lovely steep green hillsides of the landscapes approaching Durban. Finally home to this odd white suburb in which I have stayed often now.

But I’m never comfortable here, not mentally at least, although my friends – and their friends – make me so warmly welcome. It’s just that I identify so deeply now with indigenous black Africans and find this separated, white enclave of some of the nine percent of South Africa – for the white population is about that size – so oddly unnatural. Here is a European style of life, imposed on the so much more natural African ways. And it never sits comfortably, as if the white people try too hard to keep the differentiation alive, maintaining that ‘safe’ distance from the ‘threatening’ multitude that seems always in danger of swamping their privileges. For there is no doubt that this small percentage enjoy a VERY privileged position in South African society. Despite their constant complaints. They would argue that it is they who have brought this European veneer of development and wealth through their innate entrepreneurism, superior knowledge and hard work. Maybe it is, but is that right? I don’t begin to try to argue the justice or injustice of all this. I merely feel extremely uneasy and always conscious of my white skin, unlike any time I am in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana or any other African countries.

This is not the crazy, chaotic, invigorating, smiling Africa I love so well. This is reserved, divided, racially uncomfortable, generally unsmiling and suspicious Africa. The division of wealth is startling. I see huge SUVs everywhere, driven by white people. I see boats, jet skis, sports cars, top of the range motorbikes, palaces, swimming pools, pet grooming parlours, acres of green lawns with no blade of grass out of place. I see shopping malls like those in the most exclusive parts of the so called developed world. I see razor wire barricades, security companies with ‘armed response’, electric fences, surveillance cameras. Why, even the multitude of churches – both black and white have strong streaks of religious conservatism – are ironically protected by ‘devil’s fork’ fencing! And I also see uniformed black domestic staff walking (walking…) home, or gathering in groups at street corners awaiting communal transport back to the basic villages in the hidden valleys beyond the hills. I see people scratching a living as car park attendants, dependent on small gratuities from wealthy white diners – who complain of the positive discrimination against the ‘pale male’ (women don’t get much mention. I said it’s a conservative white society…) and about their youth who cannot get jobs – the jobs given to less qualified black-skinned people. (“Who do you think they learned THAT from?” a broadminded Afrikaner asked me in a bar back in 2002). I am aware – all the time – that the staff who cook my food, clean the kitchens, transport the foodstuffs – are black, while we all out front – the customers, and often the waiting staff (on the whole, they relate better to white diners) – are white skinned.

I think of my families around this wonderful continent. I don’t think of them as black skinned – just my dear friends, some of whom I love as family. Yet here they’d be waiting on me, in all likelihood – not my equals. It makes me constantly uncomfortable. It’s two ethnicities, two vastly different ways of life, two almost opposed attitudes to life, meeting and trying – on the whole rather unsuccessfully – to rub along together in the same patch of the continent. The one resents the attitudes and behaviour of the other. The whites are ‘arrogant’ and ‘dismissive’, the blacks ‘lazy’ and ‘undisciplined’. I can’t see how these two extremes can ever live happily alongside one another. It’s just two totally opposed views of life – capitalist ethics of hard work and reward, material comfort and advancement; against a certain easy going way, a devotion to family, community, tribe; a laid back attitude in which the here and now is of supreme importance, planning is alien, outward show largely irrelevant, ambition modest and personal interaction the most important aspect of life. How can these two ever understand the other?

Privilege accrues to the hard working ethic of the materialists. The laid back majority want the material wealth but don’t comprehend that in a capitalist society it comes from dedication and graft alien to their more relaxed ways. Resentment builds. Violence erupts. Retaliation ensues. Distrust is rife. And so it goes on. In an endless circle. Privilege, resentment, wealth, poverty, razor wire, security bars, robbery, disillusion, fear, anger, envy, division. Finally no one talks to the other. No one understands. The two sides become enemies. An uneasy truce becomes the norm. We whites put on the central locking and live behind bars. The blacks become service personnel, largely invisible to whites. Everyone devolves to them and us, ‘they’…

I’ve been so privileged to broach this divide so much in Africa. To be considered equal by so many from another, or many other, cultures. It enhances my deep discomfort to ‘served’ by this somehow invisible majority of people who happen to have black skins – and to think that they might be the Wechigas, Adelights, Scovias, Alexes of this continent if I knew them better.

And if white South Africans tried harder to understand their black neighbours, they might also find the of joy accepting equality, and love, with people of other cultures that enriches my life so much and directs my appreciation of this extraordinarily diverse, absorbing continent.

But they maintain their superiority. Keep their distance. Distrust their neighbours (I could say, hosts…). I don’t think I will ever be comfortable here. When you build walls, you can’t see your neighbours. And they can’t see you. How will you ever commune if you construct such high walls? Only by shouting simplistic slogans…

****

The weather back here in Kloof, where I have stayed many times in the past few years, is warm and sunny, 27-30 degrees, now that a period of unsettled weather has passed. Like many others, my friends are in the process of selling up. They’ll move back to Europe, as is the current trend amongst the more privileged with a choice of foreign passports. Two of their three children are moving also. I’m not sure it’s not a case of greener grass myself. Right now, the whole world is going through crises, wherever you live. We’re going through shameful political times of control by autocrats or self-interested political leaders. I don’t think Africa has the monopoly of this any more. Frying pans and fires come to mind. Yes, this country is desperately badly governed, there’s the rising tide of xenophobia on all sides and all parties, and employment is uncertain and frequently prejudiced by skin colour. Despite that, the sun shines and white people live a generally pretty good life, except it’s often behind self-erected bars and in fear – generated by a paranoia amongst their own community. Well, I guess I don’t live here and maybe I see only the surface, but I have to say it appears a comfortable surface… And leaving here, where the economy is poor, the Rand is weak, values low, to go to Europe with its eye-watering expense, and similar social inequalities is difficult indeed. And employment prospects really aren’t much better. (Mind you, there’s plenty of evidence that we in Europe, Britain at least, maintain a colour prejudice against ethnic minority applicants (ie. black and Asian) – just as they used to here..!) A large palace in these white suburbs will only really exchange for a small terrace, a flat in a suburban town, a place with no land – instead of wide lawns and tropical growth cared for by gardeners.

I could sell little Rock Cottage and buy a VAST mansion round here (as has often been suggested by white people here) and be looked after by cleaners, gardeners, drivers. Needless to say, my moral conscience and socialist ideals wouldn’t let me.

Well, moving away from South Africa is the choice of many white South Africans of this area of KwaZululand around Durban. For me, I’d just move to an area of this rather lovely country that was less white and paranoid, down towards the Cape perhaps, and start again away from the poisonous atmosphere of Durban – the Zulus have always been aggressive and bellicose. I never liked this part of the country. The Zulu resentment to the rich whites I find palpable. In my limited experience, the rest of South Africa rubs along better than here amongst the proud Zulu nation.

“They hate us,” say you white people, nominally South African. This is an accusation of ‘them’, the black people, the indigenous South Africans, the black ones. “They hate us…”

I think, but dare not say, ‘Why should they like you? You came here for a good life during the poison of apartheid, not with any political conviction to help repressed Africans, but for a good life in the sun, as a superior race. Why should ‘they’ feel sympathy, now they have a degree of self control, an ability to forge a life for their own race? Of course they will make life difficult for you. You didn’t show much sympathy, empathy, support during those vile periods. ‘They’ see the extreme division of wealth, your SUVs, swimming pools, huge homes, comforts. Most of ‘them’ live in meagre houses, little better than bothies and pick the crumbs from your tables’.

“But the blacks who get rich are even worse!” you exclaim. “They cheat, exploit, treat their fellows even worse!” Yes, some do. And who were their role models? Where did they observe how to exploit their fellow men?

‘“For goodness sake,” you say, “apartheid finished 25 years ago! It’s time they got over it!” But institutionalised racism and injustice on that scale, that lasted for most of the past century, doesn’t go away in a mere 25 years. We’ll be lucky if it disappears in another century. Such evil memories run very deep. Resentment festers. It’ll take generations’.

“You don’t understand!” you say. “Our children can’t get jobs. That’s why we’re leaving. This country is a shambles…” The jobs go to black youths instead. Positive discrimination. It’s not right, maybe not fair – but I recollect that liberal Afrikaans farmer all those years ago, who asked me with amused irony: “Who do you think they learned that from..?”

This township is ranged round the lips of the Kloof Gorge, a magnificent place of wooded hills and plunging cliffs. The white settlers have bagged all the best clifftop sites for extravagant homes – ostentatious house like something from Florida – only with better taste (and hills). And, like Florida, cheek by jowl live those in abject poverty. Nearby, local people live in shacks and small homes down the less accessible steep slopes, probably without services. The gorge is largely preserved as a nature reserve, and is pretty fine scenically. I’ve stayed here on many occasions, but this is the first time I have ventured to walk in the reserve – in search of strength for my damaged ankle. There are rough paths through the grasslands, uneven steps down the steep slopes and rill-filled gullies, terrifying rocky promontories over sheer drops of hundreds of feet into the even hotter valley bottom.

Felica is a charming ranger, sitting beneath a tree, passing the time on her phone at the entrance to the reserve this morning. She’s here to take an entry fee. I don’t tell her that last night I came in for nothing as she takes my £2.50. She’s handsome – so much more pretty than 99% of the washily pale white women I see here. Her smile alone marks her out for my admiration. Hair woven neatly into furrows, a khaki uniform. On the way in, she welcomes me. On the way out I ask if there’s any way I can get to the road on top of the hill, pointing upwards. “Is there any way I can avoid walking up that boring road between the big pretentious houses with their barking guard dogs and swimming pools?”

“I’ll walk up with you and open the top gate! My shift is just finishing and I live in the staff quarters up there.” Felica points out a path running steeply up the grassy slope. She packs up her receipt book, puts away her phone and walks in front of me. I feel she sympathises with my distaste for the houses up the slope, with the glinting pools, expansive shady terraces and expensive patio furnishings. I tell her that I have come from Kenya and Uganda and find this place uncomfortable.

She agrees, chatting over her shoulder. “Here no one sees one another. Fences and razor wire. Where I come from on the south coast, we are all extended families. Here, these people are private. We have a problem, we shout about it, and we share it. We help each other.”

That’s how life should be, not this tight-arsed fear and anxiety and division. She fetches a key and lets me out onto the top road. Wishes me well on my journey. “Oh, I love Lesotho too!” she exclaims. “I’ve been there twice.” She’s worked in various national parks across the country. A smart, intelligent woman, overlooked by many of the people living around us in this exclusive green suburb amongst the clipped lawns, aloes and palms.

I see no one as I walk home through empty streets past white people’s secretive, protected homes. In Uganda or Kenya, people would be greeting me and calling out, waving and asking how I do. Here, cars pass with the central locking on and windows rolled shut. Unsmiling white faces behind them. As I walk the silent, steamily hot roads, past high walls with spikes and razor wire where no one but me is on foot, a white car driver passes and waves at me. But I KNOW he wouldn’t acknowledge me if I had a black skin.

****

I’ve been relaxing on the porch, a slow visit. I’m looked after and have attended a few meetings with Mike’s museum team, provided a bit of sage advice and a few ideas and solutions. My foot, meanwhile, grows in strength. I hope I’ll get some rougher walking in Lesotho next week. It seems to be the rougher walking that helps the muscles – more than walking on the smooth roads of this suburban area, using the very narrow strip of pavements provided, it appears to me, for the legions of black staff to walk to their communal minibus stops.

My hosts, old friends of 40 years, make me very comfortable and welcome. I am at home. But I am not in Africa. Not the Africa I have come to know and love so much.

Mike begins to talk of inviting me back later in the year to make use of my skills and experience in installing and dressing the new museum exhibits. Last year, when I came for some creative brainstorming, his company paid my expenses. “This is South Africa,” he explained ironically, “we can’t really pay any fees, but we’d love your input if you’d come for a week’s holiday and attend a few sessions!” Well, that’s fine with this obsessive traveller. Next time, I suggested, they could pay me local rates as well as my expenses. It’d be another chance for a Lesotho visit, after all!

We drove out to look at the sculptures that a Zimbabwean, Lazarus, is creating outside Durban. “It was your input that persuaded us to take this route,” Mike says as we pull into Lazarus’s workshop, from which he generally makes and sells garden ornaments of considerable creativity. Welded steel, much of it recycled. All of it with very ‘African’ characteristics. Some of the dinosaurs are currently stored amongst his other wares in his extensive grounds. They are terrific! And the whole team, and clients are thrilled by the look of them, the African quality and the folk references. Lazarus has worked to sketches and briefs, his results signed off by the palaeontologists at the university. I’m happy I encouraged this lively, artistic sculptural solution. And I’m happy to help a skilful Zimbabwean too. I admire that nation above almost all other Africans.

DAY 73. MONDAY MARCH 9th 2020. HARRISMITH. FREE STATE. SOUTH AFRICA

Whatever next? Jonathan has rented a car! Don’t tell anyone else. And, my goodness, it’s boring driving about in a tin box, when you’re used to being out in the fresh air, part of the landscape, experiencing things so vitally, as you do on a motorbike. The bike is a tactile experience. The car is separate, isolated. Everything seen through glass. Set apart from the people I pass. It’s not for me, enclosed in a box, away from the stimuli of nature. Shaded. Cooled by ridiculous air conditioning instead of the wind. Sitting as if in relaxation. No sense of thrill. No sensation of movement. The landscape passing by, a divided thing. Like sitting in front of a screen. About as exciting as television. Not for me. I am a biker, through and through – especially when I travel. On a motorbike you are part of the process of movement. Your weight is crucial, balance, adjustment, man and machine together, making a dynamic force.

Still, not much I can do about it right now. I have no motorbike down here any more. And it’s funny, but these past days have almost persuaded me that I don’t want one here. I came here with half a plan to find another South African registered bike to enjoy Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Zambia some more. Now I begin to think perhaps my compromise might be to use the one I have, the Kenyan one, and to investigate air freighting it to more distant places instead of being forced to keep coming back to this country, to which I am reacting rather badly this visit. I’m not sure I want to be a white man here any more. I don’t mind being a white man in other African countries. Here it embarrasses me.

Yvonne drove me to the car rental place this morning. I’d done the booking online, assuring myself I can take The Box to Lesotho. I haven’t driven a car more than 100 miles in the last year (my own old banger having been lent to my old friend, John for the past 18 months and scrapped in October). I’d thought about renting in Johannesburg, but couldn’t bring myself to drive four wheels out of the capital city. Somehow, suburban Durban is easier, and I’ve ridden the roads I drove today a number of times, a big sweeping highway that South Africans think busy and dangerous, but to me is tame and empty! They warn me of South African driving – forgetting that I am accustomed to Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya… They know nothing of bad driving. Why, even the minibuses here have tread on their tyres, doors that close with a handle (not knotted wire), windscreens of glass (not flapping plastic sheeting) – and there’s not a boda-boda to be seen in the entire country! These people are so sheltered in their exclusive, bland version of Africa. It’s an exotic background to a comfortable life – with animals and sunshine – for many whites who moved here in the past half century. To me Africa’s a vibrant, vital, place of real life, in all its complexities, and a place with people for whom I increasingly care. People I hate to hear dismissed as ‘dangerous’, ‘aggressive’, ‘undisciplined’. There’s more life in the backside of an African village than in all the closed white suburbs around Durban!

I pulled away from Pinetown at 11.15. I’ve paid an extra sixty quid to return The Box to Bloemfontein airport in two weeks. I don’t want to see Durban again. I’m not very sorry that Mike and Yvonne plan to sell up and ‘escape’ to France. My Durban days are done – unless Mike gets me back for the final throes of the dinosaur museum later in the year. Assuming he’s still there himself. No, this short visit has been instructive. I have seen, with eyes refreshed by the reality of Africa, that South Africa falls short of all my moral beliefs and liberal views. Rereading some of my last South African journal from 2016, I can see my disillusionment setting in. On all my earlier visits I was always thankful to get across the borders into Lesotho, Zimbabwe or neighbouring countries. Now I am sad that Lesotho, that I love so warmly, is enveloped by this beautiful but socially unacceptable land.

And my distaste is only increased by my visit to the Mandela Capture Site museum as I drove today. I’ve stopped there on my red bike in the past, but there’s now a new museum on the site that makes you think, once again, about the appalling injustices to which so many white people turned a blind eye, or worse, were complicit in perpetrating. IN MY LIFETIME… I suppose my political awareness began a bit late, after I left art school in 1972 perhaps, encouraged by early travels (USA, Central and South America in 1973) and fanned by my long time friend and deeply politically aware friend, Tony Gibson, a huge influence – a tutor at Goldsmiths and later my mentor for more than forty years. His views of social justice shaped my increasingly liberal stance, an awareness I’ve never lost when I travel. Rico, reading my journal of my first African introduction – our journey together across the Sahara to West Africa in 1987, of which I gave him a printed copy at New Year – pays me a compliment in an email, in response to one of mine the other evening when large whisky had made me somewhat argumentative with white South African residents:

‘The way you write in 1987 during your discovery of black Africa, is basically telling me that you are very appreciative of what you find, there in Burkina Faso and in Ghana. You are not at all judgemental towards the people that you encounter for the first time in their own world. That is you! I think that your whisky has made you realise that you are more uncomfortable with the situation in ZA than you would normally admit to yourself. As I said the other day: “Drunks and Children speak the truth”’.

With a big Irish whiskey inside me, I had become argumentative with my hosts about entrenched attitudes and sweeping assumptions amongst the white settlers. I became offended by implications that black-skinned people are unreliable, criminal, opportunistic, aggressive. With your windows wound up and central locking on, fearful and obsessed by instant ‘news’ updates day and night, that increase anxiety, fear and distrust, how will you ever learn about your neighbours, beyond your paternalistic condescension to your domestic staff?

And it’s funny… Driving in The Box today, I began to look at people around me in a different way. I was detached. I saw threats. I locked the car whenever I left it. I had been made distrustful. When I am on my motorbikes, I smile and greet, chat to sellers in traffic jams, smile at drivers of every race and colour, joke with pedestrians in congestion, relate to parking attendants, have faith in people’s reactions, smiles, comments. Not in The Box, I didn’t. On my bike I have no central locking. I have only my default: trust that 99.9% of mankind is decent, trustworthy and wants much the same as I do from life. On my bike I’ve no choice but to trust. I am in the thick of situations, unprotected, not in my own isolation behind glass. My smile is my passport and my protection. It’s difficult to be aggressive with a man who smiles at you.

****

I’m back in the ghastly Afrikaans bar across from the jaded, faded, attenuated Grand National Hotel in Harrismith, the hotel about which all my (white) acquaintance have been ribbing me – for none of them would consider staying in a place so lacking in glamour. But it’s cheap, very unpretentious and perfectly adequate. The bed is comfortable and clean, there’s warm water, it’s quiet. Admittedly, the carpet would be better off in a skip, but there’s a door with which I can lock out the world for a few hours and relax. What more do I want or need? Tonight the bar – and the hotel – are thinly populated. The town’s calm in its workaday mode. I made a gesture at looking for another hotel. A brief gesture. The only other place was twice the price (£30), out of town and gloomier than this. And I couldn’t face an Afrikaans B&B. I know the mauve chintz furbelows and sentimental texts too well! So the dingy Grand National gets my business again.

As does the awful Afrikaans bar. Smokey and loud. Rough and brash. Amusing to observe. The exercise ball, white bearded hulk still sits and downs his litres of Carlsberg, still wears the same faded green vest and baggy grey track suit shorts that he wore last Saturday, his vest hanging from the generous curve of a wobbly belly, nicotine stained moustache, loudly greeting me, recognised. No doubt classified as the effete Englishman. Friendly though in his way.

White South Africans, British by origin or Afrikaans, are amongst the last bastions of unconverted heavy smokers in the world, the last to ignore those dire warnings and stomach churning illustrations on the packets. Yvonne and Micael included. What will they do when they return to Europe, as currently planned? Cigarettes will be five or six times the price of those here. Five or six times… Imagine… 40 a day in France will be a serious consideration. A serious alternative to compromising and staying here, I’d have thought.

I’m glad I’ve made this trip. I haven’t committed much to it, just 24 days and a limited expenditure. Better that, than committing to purchasing another expensive motorbike – and I could expect not less that £2000 for only a half-decent machine that would probably eat up another several hundred to fettle it for more journeys. No, I shall investigate what it takes to air freight the little Mosquito, for all its faults (lightweight and underpowered) to some of the places I appreciate so much: Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, even Lesotho. My allegiance is now securely to East Africa, my families there and the lifestyle and acceptance of East Africans, without the tension and jealousies of this uncomfortable juxtaposition of black and white at the foot of the continent. I’ve bitten back my opinions too often. I want to interact honestly with cheerful, smiling Africans again.

Happily, I’ll be in Lesotho in a day or two. Back in Africa. Where so few South Africans venture…

DAY 74. TUESDAY MARCH 10th 2020. BLOEMFONTEIN. FREE STATE. SOUTH AFRICA

Bloemfontein, capital of the Afrikaans nation. A place apart, in Africa. It’s a bit like being in – aggressively white – middle America. One of the oddest cities on earth. But, as is the way on this different journey of 2020, I am here to visit my friend Steven, one of the kindest of men, with whom I’ve stayed on various occasions since 2002.

In 2002, on my major five month trip with my African Elephant from South Africa to Rico in northern Kenya, I first discovered Lesotho, drawn there by the mountainous shades of my relief road map, and a note: ‘highest road in southern Africa’. I had to investigate. I can’t remember which way into the country my bike and I used, maybe the supposedly infamous Sani Pass, a relatively tame rocky zigzag that counts for ‘adventure’ for so many South Africans, and the limit of their experience and knowledge of Lesotho for very many more. Lesotho is, of course, completely landlocked by South Africa. It comprises a single range of mountains and is about one and a half times the area of Wales – every inch mountain. It has the highest lowest point of any country in the world, at 1400m above sea level. My first ride was a revelation. I fell in love with the small country and its delightful people. If you’ve followed these journeys, you’ll know I’ve been back many times and gushed enthusiastically every time. Several pages of my passport are filled with stamps between the two countries.

Sometime on that trip, I entered by one of the remotest border gates, so unused I had to look for an official to stamp me into the country, a young woman coming from her house to check my papers. Then I rode a goat track for many miles over the roughest ground and narrow passes. After some miles I came to a fast, wide, but not very deep river. An old bridge stood marooned in the middle of the water, which had long found a way round its stanchions. My approach was down a ten foot muddy embankment that would prevent any chance of return. I had no idea how the track would deteriorate later so had to take a gamble when I crossed the river. For the next hundred and fifty miles perhaps, I rode on rock, mud and dirt over the highest mountains in the little country. It was magnificent – and one of my favourite riding memories. The air was crystal, the scenery astonishing, what people I met laughing and smiling – and I’d overcome my fears too. That’s a heady mix.

In the late afternoon of the second day I reached the little capital city, Maseru. It wasn’t much bigger than Otley or Totnes, sprawled about lower hills, friendly and to me exotic. I found a hotel, took a rest and decided to ride out for supper. It was then that I found I had only second gear left to select in my gearbox. A tiny spring had broken, thankfully not in the remote fastness of the high mountains, but in the little capital. Finding repair for anything much more complex than a donkey cart wasn’t an option in Maseru in those days, so next morning I limped back over the South African border to Ladybrand. Making a call from a street-side phone booth I heard a BMW pass. And that was how I met Steven, big, shaven-headed, rally badges all over his jacket, Afrikaans accent that would curl your toes, generosity personified.

It was New Year. All his friends were away or busy. He couldn’t raise a trailer to get my injured bike to the nearest BMW workshop in his hometown, Bloemfontein. “Well,” he said with a laugh, “we’ll have to ride there!”

“How can I ride 75 miles in second gear?” I wondered, reasonably.

“Slowly!” And we did. It took five very companionable hours, sheltering under any scrap of shade to let my overheating engine rest, talking and chattering. Even this evening, Steven tells me how warmly and in what detail he still remembers his slowest ever journey from Ladybrand to Bloem. I stayed with Steven and his (then) wife Judy for several days. The BMW dealer mended the gearbox, serviced the bike, asked for stories of my journeys – and charged me very little for their kindness. My opinion of Afrikaners rose high. Steven became a friend. A friend with whom I have stayed on many occasions now. And a friend I deemed it fun to come and visit again on this tour of my African friends. Here I am.

The Box and I meandered across the eastern Free State on backroads all day, some 250 scenic, rural miles. I passed right through the Golden Gate park once again, past the doors of the new museum, where I was ten days ago. I drove on empty, sweeping roads through big landscapes, red and cream bluffs and cliffs, worn volcanic plugs against the blue skies, blowing grasslands rising over the heights, a few antelopes and wildebeest grazing in the distance. The roads were quiet and I drifted along at 50mph enjoying the scenery. Doubtless, my white acquaintances would have been horrified when I picked up a couple of farm workers in the middle of nowhere and gave them a ride, and later an elderly woman with a shopping bag, waiting patiently for a lift by a remote road on which a car might pass every ten minutes. I stopped for coffee in an old town with early 20th century houses, and rode past rolling farmlands for hour after pleasant hour. For fifty miles or more I took an old potholed road that I have used before – in fact, I had ridden all today’s roads on my motorbike in other years – through remote farms and cattle ranches. The landscape of South Africa is huge, and this central portion expansive beyond imagination. I hope next week that I can get a ride over the Karoo Desert, my favourite landscape of this country – limitless expanses of low, bush-covered emptiness, the road cutting across it apparently endlessly, horizons far distant, the sense of space and freedom energising.

Some of the remote towns are sad places out here. Run down by crippling poverty – both black and white residents – streets more holes than tar; cheap Chinese-owned supermarkets supplying the only goods, while tying up one of the few entrepreneurial opportunities; broken down tin-roofed houses and battered vehicles. People sit on street steps and gaze at nothing. The only life revolves around the drink-wankels – bottle shops. I get the feeling people would leave, if they had somewhere to go and some money to take them. Instead, they are trapped within an endless cycle of poverty and dependence on some poorly paid farm work or booze. It’s depressing out there. The endless expansive scenery, filled with delights for me as I pass through and go on my way, doesn’t do much to support modern human life. Especially if you have no land and no rights to those tied up in huge white-owned farms and ranches.

Every town in this Free State region, the toughest bastions of apartheid back in the day, has a satellite town of black-dwelling shacks and shanties of zinc, timber, plastic sheeting, car doors and recycled materials. The towns have separate names to the wealthier white neighbours. Yet they are cheek by jowl, the last few white homes on the edges of the smarter white townships encircled with barbed wire and steel grilles, then a couple of hundred yards of grassless scrub to the start of the informal settlements of the black neighbours. To say apartheid is gone is a simplification. It exists in all but law: in unequal distribution of wealth and resources, in housing, services and transport. The mean houses sometimes provided by the State, in row upon row of small two-roomed concrete and zinc homes, each with a solar water heater and tank, the inevitable satellite dish, a few yards of barbed fencing enclosing a dusty compound bereft of life, are a gesture to equality. But to my cynical eyes, passing through the excessive dinkiness and ‘gentility’ of a town like Clarens (god, it’s ghastly! Twee cottages filled with Afrikaans and white South African tatt, ‘art’ galleries of the worst sentimental and meaningless kitsch, and ‘tea shoppes’ of the nastiest racial exclusivity) and out the other side to the more populous shack community hidden behind the trees and lilies of Clarens, brings out the worst in me! This time, I gave Clarens a miss, as wide a berth as is possible with so few roads. Despite the fact that I’d still had no breakfast, I knew I’d just get irritable if I drove into Clarens’ exclusive ‘village’ atmosphere and saw black people doing the washing up and cleaning for white B&B, tea shoppe owners and elderly ‘South African’ holidaymakers.

Of course, Harrismith had no breakfast worth eating. Like last week, the choice was Kentucky Fride Shite and Wendy’s junk. I drove away, thinking I’d find sustenance en route. But my route was remote and it was lunchtime before I could break my fast. Travelling makes me very adaptable.

By late afternoon, rainclouds filled the huge skies, and soon after hitting the main N1 expressway, that hurries from Johannesburg to Cape Town, still more than 1000 kilometres on the signposts, I ran into heavy showers. It always brings a little frisson to see names of places as fabulous as Cape Town on road signs, even now, when I’ve ridden all the seriously many miles to Cape Town three times I think. But now I had only to reach Bloemfontein, fifty miles of highway and the problem of finding Steven and Isabel in their suburb. The instructions I’d written for myself got me within a few hundred yards but Steven had to run out to find me in the end.

It’s been a warm reunion. I am so fortunate to be accepted all around my travelling world by so many very diverse friends and acquaintances. So lucky. Steven and Isabel have been together four or five years now. She’s a good businesswoman with her own leather supplies business – a long-established business she bought some years ago as an opportunity. Steven, run ragged by his employment for a huge mobile phone company, for whom he fitted the equipment on relay towers, at last resigned and works now with Isabel. He’s always loved leatherwork; I remember him repairing things for me in the past – pannier bags, belts, camera bags – and now, for half the money he made as a telecommunications engineer, but double the personal satisfaction, he loves his work, creating and repairing leather goods.

We ate a huge meaty meal cooked on the braai (these are Afrikaners!) as the rain poured down onto the chill waters of the swimming pool. Stevens’s son, Steven, came to join our reunion. I have known him since he was less than two years old. Now he’s a strapping 20 year old, enjoying life working as a tyre fitter. I gave him my last motorbike at the end of my 2016 travels, when the maintenance required became impossible for my short-stay visits. And perhaps my enjoyment of South Africa was on the wane with its constant conflict with my social and moral ideals…

The little red BMW 650, on which I rode so many miles about southern Africa, sprang a leak in the oil system back in 2016. The bike uses the frame as an oil tank and a crack developed in the top of the frame. Steven bought a new frame and his daughter, Juvan’s, boyfriend rebuild the bike. They took it for its government test – to discover that the frame Steven had bought (for £250) had been registered as stolen! Fortunately, Steven knows the tester and wasn’t prosecuted for receiving stolen goods, but the frame had to subsequently ‘disappear’. They’ve put back the original frame and come up with a clever refit, using an oil tank from a quad bike with a similar engine. But these things take time, and Juvan’s boyfriend has other priorities. That’s why I can’t ride the bike to Lesotho, Steven says regretfully.

So The Box will have to do!

 

 

 

DAYS 58-63. SUNDAY 23rd – THURSDAY 27th FEBRUARY 2020. KITALE. KENYA

Lots of things different on this journey, even my diary writing. Not my daily discipline, but written in batches as activity dictates.

And activity didn’t change a lot this week! A pleasant, homely time with my Kenyan family, who accept me as part of their extended family. I’ve so often written that the most admirable single element of life all over Africa is its continued adherence to the extended family system. Blood relations mean less than proximity and an ability to adapt to one another. Here am I, from another culture completely, accepted as a brother and uncle figure to these fine people, some of whom are themselves not related by blood. In the West, we put so much emphasis on that close blood relation, defining our families, dividing our wealth and possessions, our loyalty and support in much narrower confines. Some of the ‘sisters’ in this household are indeed Adelight’s direct sisters, but frequently there are other young women and girls around. They have no actual blood line in common, sometimes even arising from other tribal roots, but they act as much sisters as any nuclear family. Rico’s flexible family is a unit to be admired, as is he, for his commitment to these girls and young women, brought up at his own considerable personal sacrifice of money and comfort, but to his greatest satisfaction in his large and lovingly warm family who look on him as their father.

It’s been amusing this week to give Adelight some bread lessons. She told me that she’d been trying to make her own bread but had produced only bricks. I diagnosed flour with insufficient gluten and went with her to peruse the available selection. Somewhat nervously, I made bread one afternoon – the very afternoon I had elected to provide the wherewithal for a family barbecue party before I left. Thankfully, my baking impressed. A second batch the next day confirmed my ability! The Joy Bean bread technique has now a foothold on the continent of Africa! She’d be happy to know that.

On Sunday, from Kessup I headed back by the Cheringani Highway again to Kitale – the newly tarred and magnificent road that now sweeps through fine scenery, where once I bounced and struggled on the dusty track that wound its way over these magnificent hills – and, truth be told, I loved much more. I knew it is always quite chilly in those hills, formerly kept at bay by the exertions of the bumpy road, but now the empty, smooth tar road takes little physical effort and the chill is apparent. I looked up the road on the map and find that it climbs as high as 2900-plus metres (nine and a half thousand feet). At that altitude, even on the Equator, you need some exercise to keep warm. It’s a glorious ride, huge views down to the north on the latter part and extensive vistas over plunging valleys and forested mountainsides elsewhere. Small villages scatter along the roadside, rough places of earth and rusty iron sheeting. The farmlands are green and fresh, the clouds scudding high in the blue dome above. It’s good to be alive on such a ride. And good to be on a motorbike, out in the freshness, experiencing the changes of temperature, the scents of the forests, the occasional scattering of light raindrops from the high, unseasonal slate clouds that drift past above; to wave at the surprised populous and the calling children; weaving my way between errant donkeys and goats and matted sheep with Rasta dreadlocks from mud and shit. Birds, some of them spectacularly sequinned flashes of iridescent feathers, others large lazily floating raptors, their eyes peeled onto the ground below for vermin and carrion, soar and wheel about on the wind. Joyful yellow sunflower-like bushes line the roads, happy against the red earth embankments. The road winds and rolls over the glorious hills. People wave. I am happy and content, riding along at often no more than 25mph, stringing out the pleasures. These Kenyan highlands are some of the finest scenery in Africa.

So back to Kitale and family warmth and a few final days of organising the last part of the 2020 safari and preparing the bike and belongings to be stored in Kitale until my promised return next Christmas. Uncle Jonan (Maria’s delightful diminutive for me) is now a fixture! And next year maybe I’ll be less restricted by ridiculous leg injuries and be more fully active. Precious and Alex want to take me to stay with her parents, in the far western part of Uganda (the part I have admired most) on an island on the very scenic, large Lake Bunyoni, one of the beauties of Uganda.

By the time I return, delightful little Maria, a bundle of ever cheerful energy and charm, with her idiosyncratic three year old chatter, will have grown to be a four year old. She’s been a highlight of my stay. I’ll miss the family unit. It’s been easy. Adelight said one day that I felt like a brother, and we certainly enjoy one another’s company. I’ve the patience to actually enjoy going shopping with her! In the evenings we are Scrabble opponents, a game at which she quite often beats me, a testament to her intellect, since she is playing in her second language against a native speaker with a large vocabulary. Marion and Scovia brighten our days and the other various girls who come and go, do so with a cheerful positivity and joie de vivre that is engaging. I hope I can be part of this happy family again in nine or ten months’ time.

Well, that’s all in the future. ‘Who knows tomorrow?’ they ask in Ghana. Who indeed? Still, good to have future ambitions!

…AND SO TO SOUTH AFRICA…

DAY 64. FRIDAY FEBRUARY 28th 2020. JOHANNESBURG. SOUTH AFRICA

Culture shock can be just as disorienting within this continent as coming from Europe to Africa. In a matter of four hours I am in a totally different African atmosphere. I’m in a cheap hotel rather close to the end of the Oliver Tambo International Airport runway in Johannesburg. Of course, this is not a new experience. I’ve been here in Johannesburg at least a dozen times. But it’s the first time I flew in from another part of Africa. It’ll be interesting to see how it measures up. It’s also going to be different in that I have no motorbike in this country at present.

I’d been considering the possibility of a ‘two centre’ trip this year for some time. Then the restrictions of my Achille’s tendon injury, the reduction in realistically feasible bike miles, the fact that back in April I came down here as a ‘consultant’ on a new museum project, and then the happy coincidence of Kenya Airways emailing me as a ‘valued client’ about their special 40th birthday offers, all coerced me into purchasing this ticket and travelling on down to the bottom of my favourite continent. If I’d booked my flight when I first considered the idea, it would have cost me £523. By the happy chance of that email a few days later, my ticket cost £414. Considering I got my return flights from Bristol to Nairobi for the grand sum if £1.46 (see day one), it seemed a lucky opportunity. Here I am in South Africa.

Up early and a prompt breakfast (homemade bread) and a short ride to Kitale airstrip, with the whole family to see me off. An hour’s flight to Nairobi airfield and the inevitable taxi negotiation to the main international airport. Few airports in Africa are accessible by any means of public transport. The rapid transit railway DOES actually reach the Johannesburg international airport these days, but the fare is £9 from the nearest station. It’s £8 from much further away by taxi. It smacks of efficient lobbying by the taxi companies! Fred, a friendly driver, conveyed me from the Nairobi airfield busy with small aircraft to the anonymity of the vast airport. Gladly, I have my frequent flyer lounge access that makes flying such a much more pleasant experience.

We landed into pouring rain – there was over 12mm, half an inch, of rain forecast for Johannesburg today – and a second taxi (in one day! This is NOT JB travel!) to a cheap hotel in a wasteland of car dealerships and garages. But at £15 in South Africa’s most populous city, it’ll do for the night.

As darkness fell, I walked out to seek supper. I am in Kempton Park, by the looks of it, a fairly run down suburb of this huge city, of which most travellers are fearful or at least apprehensive. I had to walk a mile or so, on broken pavements on this rainy night. Coming from another part of this wonderful, absorbing continent, I suddenly realised, as I walked the scruffy streets amidst noise, people and incessant activity, that I wasn’t in the least nervous. How well I remember my first visits to this country, when everywhere I went people – almost exclusively white people – enumerated all the things I shouldn’t do and all the things of which I should be frightened. The word used was always the perfidious ‘they’, the threatening ‘others’ – aka black people. I’ve just spent two months amongst black-skinned people. My friends. In fact, I spend a quarter of every year now as the conspicuous ‘other’, the odd man out. I have completely stopped seeing people as black-skinned. It’s odd, I just see ‘people’.

Walking through the wet streets, I thought to myself that most of my white acquaintance here would be having kittens to see where I was! It was noisy and boisterous. And very human. It was extravagant and natural. A few youths called out, not taunting, just perhaps surprised, rather loud greetings. Much more brazen than in East Africa, but not unfriendly or disrespectful. They hung about outside ‘bottle shops’, noisy, bumptious youths. I even entered a ‘bottle shop’ to buy myself a couple of long-missed Castle Milk Stouts.

Assuredly, I wouldn’t walk down those dimly lit streets late at night with my camera over my shoulder, or my pocket bulging with money. But then I wouldn’t do that in Leeds, Plymouth – Totnes, for god’s sake, any more. I felt no threat whatsoever. It’s all in the mind. And when you look frightened, you are the most vulnerable.

I remember my first visit. 2002. My Elephant was stuck in a crate, bobbing around in a cargo ship outside Durban harbour, beleaguered in a dock strike. My poor motorbike, in a crate, inaccessible. The dock strike lasted three weeks. Though I had friends to generously host me, neither they nor I had expected that hiatus. So I took off on buses to see a bit of South Africa while I waited. I rode south and on the first night of my short solo tour, I ended up in the coastal town of East London. It’s a large regional town and something of a black seaside resort. I found a hotel, of sorts. My room had a balcony (!). I leaned on the railing looking down towards the sea and over the streets. I didn’t dare to adventure into town.

I stood for half an hour looking out. It was just a pleasant seaside sort of city, the usual restaurants and cafes visible, the Indian Ocean tossing along the shore. Suddenly, and I can remember this now as I write, I thought to myself, ‘What are you afraid of? Think of the very dodgy places you’ve travelled all over the world! The backsides of Asian and Latin American cities, in the cheapest hotels known to man!’ The roughest villages in the Hindu Kush, the Andes, North Africa, Middle East you name it, I’d seen the seamy sides of those places. I’d travelled on the most impecunious budgets in the toughest, roughest places. And here I was, in semi-westernised South Africa, in a pleasant seaside city – a sort of Yarmouth or Cleethorpes of the southern hemisphere, and I was AFRAID?

I was afraid because every white person I had met in the previous two weeks had insisted I should be afraid! Stuffing my valuables under the bed, I walked out with a few pounds in my pocket and a smile on my face. I walked confidently down the centre of the pavement, greeting people (rather surprised people, it must be said) and smiling broadly. From that day – to this, walking through a run down black suburb of the ‘evil’, ‘dangerous’ city of Johannesburg – I have had NOT ONE moment of apprehension in all the time I have spent in South Africa! And I have spent months here all told, riding my motorbikes through townships, cities, villages and remote countryside. And I’ve come to enjoy the place and I respond to noisy youths with a big smile and a raised thumb. They love it! An old white-bearded bloke giving as good as he gets from them. It’s all they want. They are so unused to it.

It’s not so frequently that people smile at me here in South Africa. There’s always this distance, this suspicion, this inferred inequality. I don’t feel that in Kenya or Uganda. There, we’re equal. My fast food supper was served by a pretty young woman. She reacted to MY smile so happily. I felt I had scored a victory. I had made a young black South African woman respond with the attractive warmth of her smile. It’s not something that you witness often in this strange, unhappy land. I have to work harder for smiles here.

Most people around me now are lighter complexioned than in East Africa, and they do things with a certain bravado and lack of respect or modesty. It’s noisy, brash, flashy, more competitive, a trifle more aggressive. Faces are ‘deader’, less expressive, less eager to engage. Eyes look away, they don’t return my smile. It’s more like being at home than in Africa, where everyone loves to talk. There’s a wall, a barrier, a doubt, reluctance. A slowness to smile, to laugh, to make human contact.

I’d forgotten the South African propensity for kitsch and sentimentality – and for trying to hide paucity of taste and luxury by adding numerous silly pillows to the beds. Pillows that then have to be stored somewhere when I actually get into said bed – the usual place being flung in a corner, where I fall over them if I get out of bed in the night. This rather basic, ostentatiously unpretentious hotel has pillows everywhere to try to disguise the utilitarian furnishings and the camouflage-green emulsioned walls. Two of the pillows have the silliest text imaginable: ‘wifi + food + my bed = perfection’. Those two stupid pillows had an extra energetic trajectory into the corner of this militarily green room.

This is a land of appalling fast foods, with attendant obesity problems, often exaggerated in black races, as with African Americans. The South African diet has to be one of the least healthy in the world. Those with money eat red meat and starch, those without eat dire junk food – fat, salt, sugar. South Africa appears to take all its foodie influences from USA… The queues for McDonalds go round the block… There’s KFC, Chicken Shack, McDonalds, Wendy’s, Debonair Pizza, Burger King, all the rest. Hardly a scrap of food I want to put in my mouth!

DAY 65. SATURDAY FEBRUARY 29th 2020. HARRISBURG. SOUTH AFRICA

So, the choice was Kentucky Fried Shite or an Afrikaans rugby bar at the back of a petrol station. In the interests of travel experiences, the latter won hands down.

I think…

This is a country that brings out all the prejudices in me, all the ones I pretend I don’t have, with my extreme exposure to the world in all its glories. This is a country, the only one in Africa, this astonishing continent, that makes me conscious of my skin colour. It’s a country that confuses me as much as did Japan – the country I still sum up, when asked, by: ‘I had preconceptions when I arrived. When I left, even those were wrong!’

Anyway, I chose the smoky (yeah, this is South Africa) Afrikaans bar across the road from the deadbeat Grand National Hotel, in which I have stayed on my motorbike journeys on several occasions, Harrismith being a convenient staging post to and from Lesotho and my friends in Durban and Bloemfontein. It’s a tired sort of town, dating back to colonial times and Harry Smith, who founded the place. There’s a bizarre war memorial with an obviously English soldier bowing over his rifle in respect to the fallen of World War One; another commemorates those who fell ‘in the service of South Africa’, in the Boer War. I could find no memorial to the many thousands of black African soldiers and support staff slaughtered in the causes of those foreign wars. There are odd colonial overtones, utterly at odds with the brashness of this tired African town. I wandered into the town centre, such as it is, and found the end of a street market, noisy, incredibly littered, with an undisciplined, down at heel atmosphere that, on one hand I rather enjoyed but could also be read as pretty deeply depressing or threatening. This is a town down on its luck. In fact, it probably never had a lot of luck. It’s here perhaps as a junction on highways. Maybe it always was. The major toll highway from Durban to Bloemfontein and south to Cape Town passes by. Much of South Africa passes by. It’s a backwater going increasingly stagnant. The old colonial Grand National Hotel echoes the turgidity of the town. Electric security gates on the doors. Worn cord carpeting, scuffed furnishings, metal framed windows, empty corridors and a sense that life has passed by. Without taking much notice.

There are bottle shops everywhere and a lot of drinking going on, exacerbated by the end of the month pay day. Men are gathered noisily around the bottle shop doorways, getting drunk. Empty and broken bottles litter the streets: the usual African problem of low employment and lack of self discipline. Rico blames African mothers. He explains how they treat male children in a completely different manner to their daughters, cosseting the male babies, spoiling them, respecting them and teaching them to believe themselves to be more worthy than their sisters, the also-rans of Africa. It’s deep set prejudice, centuries of male privilege. And it manifests itself here on a Saturday afternoon like this. Men drink; women work. A few drunks lie already in doorways and the wide main street, Warden Street, resounds to the noise of young male revellers in cars with short exhausts and huge boombox speakers. There’s considerable drink driving around poor, forgotten South African towns like Harrismith. My solution to many – most – of Africa’s ills remains the same: put the women in charge and ban the production or sale of all alcohol over 4%ABV.

While the men drink away their meagre salaries and ruin their health, the women sell or shop, filling a million plastic carrier bags (South Africa hasn’t banned bags like Kenya) with groceries, often the products in the most lurid packaging, as if there’s a siege coming.

I had forgotten it was the end of the month. A mistake worth avoiding in South Africa. People are paid at the end of the month and ATMs have lines round the block. By good fortune, I had just enough cash from last April’s visit to tide me to Harrismith. Most Africans live hand to mouth and here, where the infrastructure is developed and people paid automatically into bank accounts, the end of the month is an important time. It fills the shops to capacity. Families shop as if the stores will be closed for the next month – as for many, without further economic support for four weeks, they will. All I wanted was a plug adaptor… It took 15 minutes at the tills to pay my £1.50. The hotel is aged enough to utilise the old three round pin 15 amp sockets that were once the norm in South Africa – and still are in backwaters like Harrismith.

Harrisburg and its peeling hotel suits my budget at £15, and it’s convenient to meet Michael, my old Durban friend, who is on his way to the national park nearby tomorrow. It’s also a stop on the long distance bus route from Johannesburg.

This Afrikaans bar shakes to the volume of rugby on multiple TV screens. This is a sport played by 90% white men, watched by almost all white South Africans. Soccer, meanwhile, is a game played by increasingly numerous very good black players; a game adored by every black African I ever met. The game that roars about this bar: “AAAAAHHHH! Kick the fucking BALL, you stupid oke!” yells a mountainous Afrikaner with pendulous flesh that is difficult to appoint to any known physiological map. He rises from his bar stool in necessarily slow motion; folds of flesh slumping knee-wards by gravity. He wears sloppy grey track suit shorts dangling about his knees. His Xtra Large tee shirt hangs like old theatre curtains from the cantilever of his vast wobbly stomach. While I have been here, he has downed three one litre bottles of Black Label lager. He must be three times my girth, with a long white beard. He scratches his crotch and waddles to the gents. Pasty faced, vastly obese, coarse, tattooed, probably horribly prejudiced about most of his neighbours…

And yet… He welcomes me warmly, as do those around the bar. Of course, my prejudices (that I don’t think I have) ponder whether they’d make the same welcome if the outer half millimetre layer of my body was black.

This is the ugliest nation on earth. You see, I said I have to accept that I too have prejudices! Fat, immensely fat, gigantically, waddlingly fat, pasty faced, unhealthy, bad skin, covered in tattoos. Or sharp featured, pasty faced, unhealthy and bad tempered like the witch who accused me of sitting in her seat on the bus. Happily, I had an upstairs seat at the front of the bus and a view of the wet road. At Vereening, up came a sour-faced Afrikaans woman of very acid demeanour, insisting that I was sitting in her seat. “It’s disgusting, I paid for this seat! It’s MY seat. I have seat 5A!”

“Yes, and this is seat 5B!” I pointed out reasonably. But she was so bad tempered she wasn’t listening. All the young (black) men around me pointed out that the alphabet generally held to a norm of A-B-C-D, but her anger was burning. The young man in the window seat – seat 5A – should have been sitting in seat 16D, down the back somewhere. I explained to him, but he seemed to have some sort of learning difficulty or perhaps he’d burned his brains on something earlier today. I pointed out to the screeching woman that I was in the seat assigned to me. Other neighbours spoke to the man in seat 5A in his own language but he either didn’t comprehend or wasn’t bothered. The Afrikaans woman fumed and spat behind me. “It’s disgusting!” she harrumphed. “It’s MY seat! Quite disgusting! You’re in my seat.” But I wasn’t. She’d picked her argument with the wrong passenger. She should have been railing at the (black) passenger next to me. Maybe I read more into her disgust at me, a fellow white passenger, not him? I stayed put and replaced my headphones. One thing Africa has taught me is that argument and bad temper solve no problems at all. Politeness is natural for most in this continent.

Looking for non meat food in South Africa is a generally pointless task. Especially in an Afrikaans sports bar. I ordered lamb curry. “What’s skilpadjies?” I asked the overweight Afrikaners at the bar as I searched the menu in vain for the vegetarian option.

“It’s liver,” replied my neighbour in a friendly manner. “Coated in… In…” He dried up as he tried to think what the coating might be in English. “Hey,” he called to one of the bar women, “you speak English. What’s XXXX? (I cannot begin to write whatever the word was).” The bar began to discuss how to describe the filth in which the liver might be coated. “Well, it’s like haggis…” said one. “No, it’s a sort of bacon!” said another. They compromised that it was liver wrapped in something unspeakable from a lamb’s intestine. “Oh! I think I have eaten it!” I exclaimed, remembering the time I attended an Afrikaans motorbike rally (!!) with Steven. I made the mistake once, and ate what I can only politely call ‘fat on a stick’. It’s one of the most repulsive things I ever ate (and that’s a pretty long list). “Yes, it’s VERY good! Good food,” said my immensely overweight, tracksuit shorts friend at the end of the bar, scratching his crotch again. “You should try it!” Hmmmm.

At the back of this bar is a small room. It’s lined with ‘slots’ – slot machines, one-armed bandits. It’s glittering with flashy lights and incessant visual interference. Six addicted gamblers – black – sit, glassy eyed with fatigue and tedium, unable to stop… They are the only black customers in the bar.

At the corner table sit a band of middle aged people. Smoking heavily. Bad skin. Beer guts. Tattoos. Three women, four men. Huge beer bottles in front of them. Bike helmets on the table between us. Their bikes are outside, fat, slobbish motorbikes that make a lot of noise and probably go fast, but don’t really go far and certainly never leave smooth tarmac. I’d put £100 on the fact they’ve never been to nearby Lesotho, best biking country in the world. Afrikaans people don’t go there, despite the fact it’s usually less than 70 miles away. Actually, I’d safely wager ten time that! One of the women is getting up to go. She’s pulling on a jacket and leather waistcoat. Free State bikers all belong to clubs. They have big embroidered badges emblazoned across their jacket backs. This dumpy lady has badges all over her waistcoat. Most are in Afrikaans. The only one I can read in English boasts the recommendation, ‘100% bitch’. I wouldn’t tempt fate that far, if I were her.

Afrikaners tend to hug a lot. Men and women. Imagine, if you can, two large rubber exercise balls trying to hug one another. You’ll see what I am seeing as I write!

So, you see, all my prejudice comes out here! Is it my age and conditioning? I grew into my political awareness at a time that we believed that apartheid was one of the biggest evils in the world of the sixties (as it was). Am I projecting that onto these people? These people who are at the same time immensely friendly and often generous too? I suppose we all see the world through our own filters. Mine are predisposed to sympathise now with indigenous black African people, from whom I have received more love and generosity than anyone else. Perhaps my prism is skewed here? Yet these people too, after 300 years or more, are indigenous African people. Just another colour and tribe. Another race. Yet they’ve fought alongside black Africans for their freedom. They qualify as African as much as anyone.

So why are they in their own bar? Separate, in this ‘rainbow nation’ that’s supposedly been united for 25 years?

The lamb curry wasn’t bad, however. But I had to resort to the jar of pickle to find some vegetable. I am in Afrikaans South Africa, where chicken is considered a vegetable!

What of the rest of my day, before I sat here with my three Castle Milk Stouts? (Small bottles!).
It was a half hour walk from last night’s cheap hotel to the efficient, relatively expensive rapid transit railway that brings the population – those that can afford the luxury – into the centre of Johannesburg. The rest (mainly black) go by minibus. The line is speedy, the distance surprisingly long, past mining exploits (gold is the reason for Johannesburg’s existence) and sprawling suburbs with a dotty pox of satellite dish disease, separated by wide greenswards and green-fringed motorways. The train deposits me into the heart of this seething city and to the main bus transit hub. “Do take care! Everyone wants to rob you here,” warned one kindly paranoid white woman as I stepped from the train. I felt no threat whatsoever, beyond normal city centre watchfulness in a rather run down area round the bus stations.

The road south from Johannesburg is through South Africa’s most boring landscapes. This is a huge area of gently undulating grasslands and farmland, split by occasional motorways. It rolls on and on, and then on. I recollect interminable tedious bike journeys here in the Gauteng region. From Harrismith the scenery becomes more stimulating. I’m approaching the magnificent Drakensburg Mountains that hold wonderful Lesotho so far up into the sky, where the range is called the Maluti Mountains. It’s Lesotho that has brought me back to the foot of this extraordinary continent.

“Oh, you’ve put the prices up!” I told Rose, the receptionist, as she processed my £15.38 on my credit card. “I hope you’ve repainted the rooms since I was here four years ago!”

“Noooo, I don’t think so…” she pondered with chuckle.

Correctly.

DAY 66. SUNDAY MARCH 1st 2020. GOLDEN GATE NATIONAL PARK. SOUTH AFRICA

Perhaps my greatest stimulation in travelling is not knowing what tomorrow will bring. Tonight I am staying in the middle of the Golden Gate Park in the Drakensburg Mountains, close to the new museum building being constructed in the valley below, a museum about the dinosaurs who roamed this area a couple of hundred million years ago. A museum on which I acted as a consultant (at last! It took me until I am 70! Haha) on a trip to South Africa last April.

My friend Mike is a facilitator of projects, mainly in museum conception now. He works out of Durban but we’ve known one another for many years, originally through his wife, Yvonne, long long ago my neighbour in the flat above mine in Ilkley, Yorkshire. They’ve lived in South Africa for over 30 years, and been my hosts and base for five motorbike trips. The fact that Mike and I work in the same field is coincidental, but fortuitous for me as it now provides a few days (unpaid) consultancy with my peers, in another culture. We’re here with Kath, researcher and writer for the project, for some creative meetings tomorrow and Tuesday.

We’d arranged to meet in Harrismith at 1.30. They have to drive within ten kilometres of the town to travel from Durban to the museum site and the well equipped national park campsite and the chalet in which I find myself tonight. I’ve a room with a view of the very scenic mountain ranges, curving walls of red and yellow rock rising in bluffs to oddly mushroom-like tops across the narrow defile. I’ve ridden here before, but never understood the geology and significance of the fossil beds that abound. It’s a geologically remarkable area, thick ancient mud layers topped ancient sand dunes, then topped and burned and pressed by volcanic waste. The rocks contain a plethora of fossils of great interest and amazing preservation. Fifty years ago a palaeontologist discovered a rich seam of dinosaur fossils marking the birthplace of thousands of dinosaur eggs. The great prize of the region is a fossilised egg, complete with hatching tiny dinosaur. The artefact is only palm sized, but of extraordinary detail – enough that the park service is spending millions to build a museum and interpretation centre in the valley below the discovery site. Of course, there could be hundreds more fossilised hatchlings in that ancient mudstone layer.

Harrismith is not a place to be stranded on a Sunday. “Where can I get breakfast?” I asked the Grand National receptionist about 9.00 this morning. She pondered my strange request for a moment. “There’s KFC and Wendy’s.” I consider neither of those purveyors of food. I spent a couple of hours criss-crossing the decrepit town, but sure enough there was no place open with so much as a cup of coffee. I was forced to purchase items in a supermarket to make my own scratch breakfast, eaten without cutlery or crockery. It was also impossible to find a single place to sit, until the same Afrikaans bar of last night opened its doors late morning and provided a bench for the final hour if my wait. Not so much as a public bench in town…

“This used to be a thriving town,” said Mike as we drove away, swinging down litter-strewn streets of decrepitude. “It was a centre for the Free State agricultural life. Now the citizens have taken over their own repair of roads and infrastructure from the municipality as it’s so inefficient.” I’d noticed that the town had very little civic pride and diagnosed that there was probably very little civic money either. It’s a sad place, thickly littered and scruffy. Residential streets lined with torn bin liners, from which vermin and birds have scavenged food scraps, and ditches and roadsides strewn with fast food packaging and plastic bottles. Afrikaans residents live behind electric fencing, spiked railings, razor wire, security bars and signs emblazoned with warnings of armed response from security companies. It’s grim. These are a people buttoned up, separate, enclosed, barricaded from the world around them, embattled in their own country. Why, even the churches, on just about every corner, are segregated – black churches and white churches. Could there be a greater contrast? Friendly, loose limbed, freewheeling East Africa to the Orange Free State in 36 hours?

I’d repaired to the Afrikaans bar by about noon. I don’t often take beer at lunchtime any more, but really, what else was there to do? I’d hiked three or four miles about this faded town looking for little more than a public bench, to no avail. At least there was a table on the pavement outside the bar. Mike and Kath rolled up about one, and we set off to drive another hour or so into the mountains. High above me now, the mountains hold up Lesotho. Later, touring some of the local sites that Mike wanted to show me – the rocks where the eggs were found, and that still contain many more clutches, a ridge of dinosaur bones visible in the mud layer, the fossilised sand ripples of an ancient dune – we ran into four cheerful dumpy Basotho young women. Seeing their smiles, their delight and excitement of a day out together by car, I realised how much I have missed Lesotho these past four years. These girls came not from Lesotho itself, but from one of the three South African Basotho tribes, each with their own royal family, some of whom we are here to meet tomorrow. These tribal offshoots live in the high regions of the Free State here on the edges of Lesotho and the mountain range.

My idiosyncratic ‘career’ has brought me many treats, not least the ability to work on four continents. I am content to be in the Drakensburg Mountains tonight, learning some ancient Basotho lore and a bit about the origins of diverse dinosaurs. I didn’t expect THAT a couple of days ago.

It’s cold and silent. Around me stand the silhouettes of the jagged dragons’ mountains, guarding the bones of legions of dinosaurs huge and tiny. I’m happy for a radiator in my room. It’s also drying my washing – for I have travelled perhaps the lightest yet to be here. One small backpack about two thirds full. It weighs less than seven kilos and will suffice for the next three and a half weeks. I can put my luggage on my back and just go whenever and wherever I want. I relish that freedom!

DAY 67. MONDAY MARCH 2nd 2020. GOLDEN GATE NATIONAL PARK. SOUTH AFRICA

I do have – and appreciate – a lot of good fortune in life. For nothing more than any advice and ideas I might have for this team, I have two days accommodation and food and drink in this fine national park. I’ve paid for that with a few (informed, I suppose) opinions on museum design and concepts, and perhaps three new design ideas. I can swan in, sound wise and clever, and swan away again without the least responsibility. I don’t have to carry out those apparently clever ideas, only to suggest them and retreat. That’s consultancy for you! Haha. I wish I’d discovered this earlier in life.

The museum will be a magnificent affair. It’s the usual over-pretentious architectural vanity statement with exhibits added as an afterthought by the clients and planners. I’ve seen this so often in my career as a museum scenery designer. Architecture and ducting, bricks and paving, windows and floor coverings can be quantified by number crunching surveyors. Fascinating exhibits rely on creative minds and intellectual concepts. Most clients, especially government or corporate, understand buildings and are keen to make a proud impression by over-designing structures. Yet it’s the content that the visitor will come to see, the majority never noticing the ridiculous feature brickwork and vastly extravagant sloping curved glass window walls. Sometime late in the process the clients usually remember that they must commission the exhibition, at which point poor suckers like me are asked to fit exhibits into totally unsuitable gallery spaces for a minuscule portion of the overall budget. It’s happened on every new museum with which I have been involved – apart, oddly enough, from the last one: the Collings Foundation collection of military vehicles in rural Boston. They very sensibly built a vast dark hangar and allowed us to spend the money on displaying their fine collection. It was an uncommon approach.

This morning we toured the semi-complete museum building, all curved brickwork, glass curtain walls and soaring columns. The team (with just a very few days’ input from me) have done well to plan an engaging exhibition within this pretty unsuitable building, which will be filled with African sunlight that gives so many display headaches. Doubtless the architect will preen about his sloping curtain walls of curved glazing, more suitable for a smart hotel dining room or conference hall… But the public will come to see the dinosaurs. There will be life sized models – formed in reclaimed steel in a very African fashion by a team of Zimbabwean metal sculptors. I encouraged this concept last April and look forward to seeing the work in progress this week back in Durban. There will be replica rock outcrops with dinosaur bones, an infinite storeroom of bones like the stores of Witwatersrand University (an idea I threw up, using a wall of mirrors). There’ll be timelines and artefacts, a replica landscape of 200 million years ago, with dinosaurs, flying pterodactyls and a final exhibit telling the folkloric tales of the local indigenous Basotho people and their myth of a great monster that swallowed villages alive, after which the museum is named – Khudomodomo. This important gallery is being guided by the royal households of the local tribes. We were joined today by a charming, delightful couple, Mpho and Tsolo, wife and husband, members of some part of one of the royal families. Their enthusiasm was infectious, providing us with an enjoyable day, brainstorming, touring local sites, lunching in the smart park hotel and joining us for a presentation by Mike to his clients. The project is well advanced, and the building – as usual in my experience – increasingly behind schedule, almost a year – so far. Also as usual, the deadline for the installation of exhibits doesn’t extend, but squeezes inexorably tighter. I really HAVE seen it all before, having now been involved in some 30 or so major projects of this sort. The exhibit designers always draw the shortest straw and make the most compromises. Ho hum…

 

Well, as I said, I can wander in and out with no responsibility. I have no fee but receive my ‘payment’ in kind – the chance to visit South Africa as a guest and meet my peers, and enjoy the perks of seeing great places of the world. That suits me as much as being paid a fee!

Changeable weather rolls about these high places. We’re at 2000 metres. Oddly, I’ve spent most of the past nine weeks or more at that sort of altitude: the Kenyan highlands, around Mount Elgon, Nairobi and Johannesburg and now the Drakensburg. From here I’ll also go up to Lesotho in due course, also at altitude. Tonight there’s heavy rain after a day of scudding clouds, bright sun, sharp breezes, rainbows and chilly winds. It’s a fine landscape. And close by is Lesotho, most magical heart of the globe.

An odd coincidence this morning. In January 2012 I bought a motorbike down here. I found it on the internet and negotiated by email with the seller, a kindly fellow in East London, down the Indian Ocean coast. I flew down and stayed a few days with Garvin and his wife, Mia. Then I rode away. I kept in very sporadic touch, enough that Garvin has my email address. I haven’t heard anything from him for probably four years. This morning I got an email from him, just down the road, in relative terms. He’s Cape Coloured – there are so many racial diversities and hierarchies in South Africa – a biker and a keen rock climber and is about to undertake a fund raising challenge to help purchase equipment for poverty stricken local hospitals where his Belgian wife works as a paediatric trauma surgeon. I was relating the odd fact that he had included me in his email, after several years’ silence, to Kath over coffee this morning. “Oh, I know Garvin! We’ve climbed together. He’s stayed in my house!”

I am in South Africa, maybe 7000 miles from home. I am acquainted with perhaps fifty people in this part of the world. The old cliche is so true, the world IS small, and maybe we ARE all related within seven removes.

 

DAYS 49/50/51. FRIDAY – SUNDAY 14/15/16th FEBRUARY 2020. KITALE – KAPSABET. KENYA

After two unremarkable but warmly welcomed days at ‘home’ in Kitale, I have set off for a few days – the final short journeys before I leave East Africa this year.

It’s Sunday evening now, in a noisy (football league) Moslem hotel in Kapsabet, a bustling town of little attraction except the handsome surroundings of the Nandi Hills, carpeted with tea estates and graced by tall dark woodland. It’s fifty or sixty miles south of Kitale, on the way towards Lake Victoria. I’d intended to get to the town of Nandi Hills itself, only a few miles further along the hilly roads, but heavy rain once again intervened. I stopped and found a place to stay, where I have to drink tea instead of beer!

It’s not easy, finding my way in rural areas utterly lacking in signposting. There are few direction posts anywhere in the country, and none whatsoever on these dirt back roads. The consequence? I rode fifty rough kilometres and ended up about 25 kilometres from where I started, on the wrong road. Somewhere I made two thirds of a circle instead of a direct line to the small town I was seeking. It’s often pointless to even ask directions, as I often find that the people I ask – usually boda-boda riders, on the assumption that they at least know the roads – perhaps don’t actually understand my question and answer the one they think they might have heard! I probably added at least forty very hard kilometres to my ride today – having asked my way and received extravagant confirmatory nods.

On a few occasions, I’ve ridden back and forth on these hills and have a couple of pleasant short cuts. Well ‘short’ isn’t very accurate, I suppose. They are long rugged tracks over the rolling hills. One of them I discovered about three years ago and actually marked on my map as a lovely road. It WAS a lovely road, even a year ago. Now it’s severely damaged by the constant rains of this climate-changed dry season, surely one of the worst roads in East Africa. Of the 100 miles I rode today, about seventy must have been the hardest trails I’ve ridden in a long time. The rains have certainly altered the process of moving about this year. Today I have been shaken, rattled and battered. Only a year ago this was a pleasant smoothish gravel road. Not now.

It’s fine scenery though, stretches of forest and farmland and a hundred dilapidated ribbon villages of general ugliness. There’s not a lot of time to study them. I have to keep my eyes glued to the pitted track ahead. Every yard is a potential hazard on these roads. A moment’s inattention and I’m in trouble with the deep, serious parallel ruts, often a foot deep. I wonder if the physio nurse at Totnes hospital had anything like this in mind as a recovery technique for my Achille’s tendon! I doubt it somehow. But much of the way is only made bearable by standing on my foot pegs and transferring my weight to the front wheel and the centre of gravity down to the footrests. That way I can dance and weave, anticipate and correct. It’s hard exercise. The little bike takes a lot of punishment too.

It took over four hours to reach Kapsabet. For the last hour, I watched heavy storm clouds gather and hoped I would make it to the tarred road before the rain made my trail a slippery ski run. I knew the final miles would be surfaced and didn’t let up until I was there. Light rain began minutes later and I cut short my journey, finding a round thatched hut in this slightly down at heel guest house for £11.50. It has a fine, big bed with spotless sheets and a vast red Chinese blanket that never saw a sheep or any other living organism in its production. There’s a small bathroom with a warm shower to wash off the appalling red dust. (Except the water heater fused!). It’s chilly now. Kapsabet is quite high and the rain has cooled the air up here. I’m almost exactly on the Equator, but elevation signifies more than latitude. And this year the weather is so much cooler than usual. There’s much talk, too, of the record plague of locusts invading and stripping the vegetation of the northern desert and bush lands of Somalia, Kenya and Uganda. Biblical proportions, I guess you might say. Had I succeeded in my ambition of making the safari round the north of Uganda in the Karamajong region ten days ago, I might have been fighting off locusts as I rode. Pictures show them in veritable clouds up there.

 

I’ve just eaten parts of a chicken that ran a marathon recently. Quite likely won. The rice and vegetables were beaten to submission and held down until they drowned in oil. And, add to this, I have to drink bloody tea! And there’s a certain pall of deep misery that hangs over Moslem hotels. It’s a joyless religion and its women particularly gloomy. The travelling life. It’s not all exotic and adventurous by any means!

DAY 52. MONDAY 17th FEBRUARY 2020. BROOKE. KENYA

I’m sitting in the terrace of the noisiest hotel in Kenya, shuddering to the sounds of large lorries with air brakes hissing and racing to a halt at the bottom of a long hill and crashing and rattling over the speed humps on the main East African highway outside. The road runs from Nairobi to the second Kenyan city, Kisumu, down on the lake. Rain is pouring and tumbling on the tin roof over my head. It’s cascading down. I’m wearing my jersey and fleece. This is the hot season. The dry season. In East Africa. Meanwhile, Australia is on fire, England is getting a month’s rain in a day and has 400 flood alerts, there’s a plague of locusts just to the north of here and the Antarctic recorded its highest ever temperature. And people claim climate change is fake news.

The Brooke Hotel is a vast ugly heap of pink and grey concrete with hideous pea green highlights, five storeys high around a central well. It’s a place of studied ugliness and bad design. It’s one of those places that when the cook drops a saucepan lid, the reverberations echo for minutes amongst the hard surfaces. So what does the bar staff do? Wind up the sub-bass speakers to rock the hotel in accompaniment to the screeching brakes, the rattling empty wagons and the rain hammering like machine gun fire on the tin roofs. I only stay here because all the hotels around the town of Kericho seem to have an over-egged view of their worth for some unaccountable reason. It seems to be one of the most expensive towns in which I ever searched for accommodation. Just out of interest, I asked the tariff at the next guest house up the road, a fancyish place set amongst the beautiful tea estates. The price for a resident is a bit more than double the room here, at £24, and for a foreigner it tallies at no less than 80 US dollars. I forbore to ask why it costs more to look after a foreigner than a Kenyan resident. I just puffed in disgust and left! I hate this extortion of outsiders. It smacks of exploitation. I rode away and returned to the Brooke Hotel, noise and all. I insisted on a room at the very back of the block, and being Monday night it’s probably quite empty anyway. I’ve an adequate room and a sense of justice preserved all for less than twelve quid!

I took against Kericho the very first time I visited – in 2001. It appears to have a snobbish appeal that is uncommon in Kenya. It’s the centre of the tea industry, surrounded by magnificent rolling hills carpeted in close-cropped tea bushes. But the town itself is as ugly as any other, crazy traffic, coarse petrol stations and supermarkets, glass and steel edifices of supreme architectural horror, and just behind the facade, the usual shacks and businesses of the struggling populous. Brooke, four miles to the north, is a squalid place, a rough trading centre. The poor relation to Kericho’s imagined splendour. So the hotel costs a fraction.

The ride down from the Nandi Hills is fine. A winding road that drops to the lower lands that now run away towards Lake Victoria, itself at over 1000 metres high. Tea and sugar are the main crops, on an industrial scale hereabouts. Brooke, this straggly marketing centre, is synonymous with Brooke Bond, the centre of endless tea estates. Estates, I found a couple of years ago, that don’t like visitors. I suspect that might be to hide some pretty awful employment practices… Tomorrow morning, hopefully back in sunshine, I’ll sit on the first floor terrace of this hideous hotel, as now, and look across the smiling miles of brilliantly green tea bushes to the black tree-clad hills under blue skies. It’s a magnificent landscape. When it’s not bucketing with rain.

I came this way round once again, to say hello to Nashon, the kindly, shy mechanic who has helped me out on various occasions with my little Mosquito, since the time we fortuitously met when the starter gears shed several teeth into the engine of my machine, necessitating the entire stripping and washing of every cog, chain, pipe, pump, shaft and nut of the bike. All this carried out onto a flattened cardboard box and greasy nylon sack on the oily mud at the edge of the road, under my very anxious eyes. A process that took a couple of days and a lot of my peace of mind. But it turned out that Nashon wasn’t a Chinese-bike butcher, but a reasonably knowledgeable mechanic who went way beyond the call of duty to a passing customer. And one thing I have learned – and appreciate – in Africa, is that going back to say hello shows respect and bolsters the standing of my acquaintances and friends. Nashon’s a kind man. Worthy of passing by to pay my respects.

DAY 53. TUESDAY 18th FEBRUARY 2020. ELDAMA RAVINE. KENYA

It’s the third time I’ve stayed in Eldama Ravine, and the third hotel. I wish I’d found this one first. The first night I stayed here is memorable for the noisiest disco I ever suffered, with bass beats that shook the entire, vast, four storey hotel. Last year I stopped a night in a scruffy place off the road, which was acceptable, but now I’ve found a decent room at the back of an interestingly designed building with raised bridges leading between the upper rooms, and even a balcony looking over some scrubby fields to distant hills. A good place. Quiet, comfortable and cheap. And a not bad outdoor restaurant too. The only trouble with the place is heavy cold rain tonight once again. But the hotel can’t help that, and again I reached dry accommodation before the rains.

This was a light day. I spent some time in gentle conversation with Nashon and his wife in their one room home. They’ve a girl and two boys and how they manage in one 12X12 room I’m never sure. But many many Africans do just that. A bed behind a curtain, raised up on boxes to utilise the space beneath, a pile of old suitcases for wardrobes, an easy chair and settee, a coffee table, stereo system, TV and gas ring. All in one room beneath a tin roof, cheek by jowl with seven other rooms in two rows, a narrow walkway and communal washing space between. This is life for millions of African people. There’s a row of latrines and a scabby yard with worn grass and mud. Inside, the walls are covered by religious posters and calendars. It’s not so different, I suppose, to working class Britain a bit over 100 years ago . It’s surprising how we forget our own history and react with horror to others’…

Nashon’s workshop is nearby, a greasy, oily lock up by a broken street in the market area of the unattractive town. Kindly, his wife insisted on making milky chai and I only just managed to avoid fried eggs, having just finished breakfast in my hotel up the road. Nashon and the family borrowed a car and went home to visit his mother yesterday, a village about 40 kilometres away. He was taking today off, but generously replaced my brake shoes in an attempt to give me a rear brake again. A pair of Indian brake shoes cost £2.30, probably one tenth of what I might expect at home. He’s a conscientious mechanic, always going beyond the minimum and doing a professional job. The bike is better for 45 minutes’ of his ministrations.

We then rode to find an arboretum for which I have searched on various occasions, a pleasant public park owned by the major tea estate, itself part of the giant Unilever multinational. He also showed me a charming garden, open to the public on a private farm – tea and dairy – a few miles from Brooke. Set in a valley backed by woodland and carpeted by tea bushes, was a small lake and trickling brooks. Abundant bird life swooped and flitted about. Peaceful and brightly sunny under the blue dome of the sky.

Then it was off on a winding road through hilly country, riding northwards to Mau Summit, where the old colonial railway from Mombasa on the coast to Kampala, half way across Uganda, toiled towards the heights of the Equator. At 8300 feet, the air has a chill that forced me to stop and put on my fleece jerkin under my riding jacket. Tonight at Eldama Ravine I even resorted to a bowl of soup to warm up. I had to join the unpleasant main highway for some miles, the one that carries all the traffic from Nairobi and Mombasa up to the Kenyan highlands and on to Uganda. I dislike this road very much. It’s a constant line of steep hills with toiling lorries belching their incontinent way at crawling speed, causing faster vehicles to risk all in a race to overtake. Happily, I have only about fifteen miles of this to suffer. Another year I found a direct short cut on an appalling, rock and dirt road, but discretion suggests I avoid the unnecessary ones this year; they are so damaged by the recent weather, and my foot damaged by rounders. Turning off onto the quiet road to Eldama Ravine, I crossed the Equator once more.

And so to this busy small town an hour before the rain began. A gentle day of generally pleasant scenic hills. I know this region quite well by now and always enjoy the ride. Spacious country.

DAY 54. WEDNESDAY 19th FEBRUARY 2020. KESSUP. KENYA

It’s three months since my orthopaedic boot was removed. As I wrote before, I rather doubt that the hospital had in mind quite the exercise regime I have undertaken. Three to six months was their diagnosis for recovery time. I can’t claim recovery, but it IS getting stronger with my harsh treatment. The ankle swells less each day now. I was happy this morning to see that my ankles matched exactly when I got up from a long, good sleep in the quiet hotel. Progress, I felt.

One of my favourite roads in this part of the world is the one that winds from Eldama Ravine, a regional town of little attraction, via Tenges to Kabarnet. I’ve ridden this way at least once each of the years I have spent riding in East Africa, sometimes more often. I like it because it has such variety and such scenic splendours. In only about 75 miles it coils through climatic zones, climbing alongside yawning drops into the Rift Valley on one side and the Kerio Valley on the other. In the day I climb and drop thousands of feet, twisting down to spiky acacia, aloes and cactus-like plants scratching a life from pale sand and rocks, upwards through thirsty eucalyptus trees, leaves shimmying in the breezes from below and on up to coniferous woodland with magnificent views down into deep valleys. Then, from Kabarnet, the process unwinds the other way, serpentining down into the vast split in the Earth’s surface, deep into the dry Kerio Valley, the green forested opposite wall of which looks entirely unscalable – and I know of only three ‘roads’ that do scale the heights. Two of them are seriously rough rocky staircase tracks and the third the only viable road on four normal wheels, that wriggles and clambers back up to Iten, some five thousand feet above, atop the jagged precipices of the cliffs of the escarpment. Two thirds of the way up is familiar Kessup.

Another reason I relish the Tenges road so well is that it is amongst the friendliest of the area. I suspect that the education level is high in this county. This could be explained by the county being that of the birthplace and home of the late crook, Daniel Arap Moi, president of Kenya for many years. The home regions of presidents in Africa get preferential treatment. It’s the payoff for buying all those votes. I remember back in 2001 I noted that this region had the best, smoothest roads in East Africa. “It’s the home of the president! Of course it has the best roads; you could play billiards on them!” declared Rico.

One of my happiest activities on these footloose safaris is to stop and meet the people. Towards the top of the winding potholed road, a view of the huge Rift Valley was suddenly released from constant roadside growth. On rounding a bend I looked down onto an open saddle with big views far into the sun-bleached distance. I pulled up and stepped over the steel accident barrier to enjoy the vista and take a picture. Within moments I was joined by a whole family, and friends, from the only visible homestead on the saddle, their small home 100 yards away on the precipitous edge of the road. They came to welcome me and out of open curiosity. And curiosity is an attribute I greatly admire. Curiosity and compassion, I always say, make people good humans. I stayed half an hour with those ten cheerful, respectful people, four men, some teenagers, a number of children and Priscilla, a smart, handsome middle aged woman. Boda-bodas pulled up to join the interest. Everyone exuded warmth and welcome. I felt very privileged to be sitting on that remote roadside barrier with such charming, warm-hearted people. The one thing we shared was common interest and warmth. I felt accepted for myself, with no real sense that I represented anything other than a different human being, with unusual attributes that they didn’t often get an opportunity to investigate. It was a delightful meeting.

Riding on, the road wiggles along the very ridge between the two giant valleys, irregular fields hacked and fought from the steeply sloping mountainsides through generations of hard physical work. Small houses cling to the slopes and fences of vertically split logs add staccato graphic hatching to the green roadside, the views downward pixillated through the bright gaps. Mature trees spread their glorious shade above and glimpses of incredibly scaled panoramas flicker behind the abundant growth. High on the mountain, the woodland gives way to rich natural forest, heavy leafed trees draped with lianas, the sunlight dappling and flashing in the canopy high overhead. It’s simply magnificent. From one small rocky promontory, I seem to be able to gaze over half Africa, displayed into endless heat haze at least 100 miles to the east.

Spotting a ‘hotel’ – a mean shack with a large Chinese flask prominent on its wooden counter, I chose to stop for chai. Served by polite Alfred, thrilled to have a mzungu stop by to chat and drink his sweet tea and eat a couple of dry chapatis, I was immediately joined by two small girls, pulling a Chinese chair ever closer to the white ancient, and politely greeted by most of the village elders and cheerily acknowledged by every passing pedestrian and vehicle. I stayed an hour, relaxing in the welcome of a whole community. “Aren’t you afraid?” so many ask me at home. Afraid of feeling so content I move to this remotely splendid mountain village, maybe!

From that tea house I texted William that I would arrive later at Kessup. I’d thought I might stay somewhere on the road, but Kessup was only another 60 kilometres or so, and I know I am received so kindly here. It felt like a good way to end a contented, people-filled day. So I rode on, down into the steamy Kerio Valley so far below and toiling up towards the familiar guest house and my usual room. At this rate they’ll change the room’s name from Mexico (I have no idea…) to another ‘Jonathan’s Room’.

It’s one of the best 75 miles you can ride in this part of the world. Eldama Ravine to Kessup. Just lovely. Of course, I am assured of a happy welcome from William and the guest house staff. I’m almost a fixture this year. It’s considerably warmer tonight than on my last perishing visit. We’ve sat outside in the open garden, with a young Norwegian traveller, as the night drew its veil over the spreading valley far below, now a mystery of darkness, a few winking lights and the promise of an elephant or two beneath the equatorial stars. It’s a fine place to be.

Leaving the hotel this morning, the gateman came to unlock the steel gates. I’d woken to dull skies, chill and damp earth. Unpromising, although the gloom burned off in the equatorial sunshine. I was, after all, only about five miles from that tantalising imaginary line.

“I don’t like your weather much this year!” I quipped, as I zipped up my jacket, pulled on gloves and swung my leg over the bike.

“Yes, it’s all changing! But it’s down to God!”

“Don’t blame God for this!” I exclaimed. “This is Man! Entirely Man! The selfishness and greed of mankind!”

“But what can we do? God makes the weather…”

And there you have a problem to ponder. However much climate activists may try to change perceptions in the West, much of the world is educated in old religious dogma and myth, and is persuaded only God can change the fates of the planet. “Oh, we’ll pray! What can WE do? It’s the will of God!”

I rode the next few miles somewhat despondently.

DAY 55. THURSDAY 20th FEBRUARY 2020. KESSUP. KENYA

A typical day in Kessup is for William and I to walk down in the villages. It’s funny how this has become so much part of my East African experience. After breakfast we wander off down the stony pathways between small houses and shambas and just see who we meet. Today, young Nore, a charming and mature 21 year old Norwegian student accompanied us. He appeared to get great satisfaction from the activity too, reacting happily to the many excited children who greeted us, clung to our hands and pulled the hair on our arms. He was patient and intrigued and actually commented at one point that this was the best day he’d had. He’s on a six month world tour, starting recently in Oman, on to Kenya and will wander down through some of Africa, down to Australia and back through California. A warm young man, happy to join in our unexciting peregrinations on the green hillsides.

We walked contentedly northwards along the plateau. It’s half term, so many were the children calling and following us as we meandered amongst fields and homesteads, women hard at work planting, weeding and harvesting and many of the men, as so often, sitting about talking and drinking bulsa.  We too joined some men beneath shady trees to take fibrous bulsa. Nore impressively tried his best, even if he didn’t express much enthusiasm. Just being seen to drink the rather sour liquid, made from dusty fermented maize, gains a good deal of respect. He’s the makings of a good, sensitive traveller. I’m amused to find that his father crossed the Sahara in 1987, as did I.

Everywhere, people greet and chatter. We shake hands a hundred times, laugh with cheerful children, excited to touch not just one, but two, mzungus. It’s happy fun and warm-spirited. William is a good guide. He knows his community well, and his community knows him. He’s respected and well thought of, a man with integrity, honesty and good sense.

It’s rough ground and taxes my ankle. But a long rugged walk seems to be good recovery exercise. The swelling is less each day. Tomorrow is, though, to be the big test. We intend to hike all the way down to the Kerio Valley bottom, hundreds of metres down the steep, rocky slopes into the furnace below. I wonder how that will go..? I’m in kill or cure mode, fed to the teeth of this frustrating disability.

DAY 56. FRIDAY 21st FEBRUARY 2020. KESSUP. KENYA

I’m rather self satisfied tonight. I did it. Obstinate maybe, but I walked, indeed scrambled, down no less that 810 metres of the escarpment into the Great Rift Valley! That’s 2630 feet. A three hour hike on rough rocks and slippery gravel, tiring more for the intense concentration to carefully inspect each footfall, than the distance. Three to six months’ recovery, the hospital warned me. Well, after three months and two days, maybe I am not CURED, but I certainly feel that I am well on the way to recovery, despite the fact that the three month cure is probably for people half my age.

We set off at nine, William, Nore and I. Taking advantage of the cool of the morning. Every metre the heat increased. We walked across the plateau to the edge, where the slopes drop away dramatically, with enormous vistas of the Kerio Valley far below.

At this point, last evening, I realised that sleep was more pressing than my journal. The light went out at 8.30! Twelve hours’ sleep was required. This morning, I wake with two matching ankles. No swelling. It seems that hiking to the bottom of the Great African Rift Valley is good physiotherapy!

So, back to the clamber to the depths… Kessup sits on a plateau, maybe three miles long by three quarters from the high cliffs up to the highlands, to the drop to the steaming depths below. In total, the depth of the Rift here is about 1500 metres – 4900-odd feet. Kessup sits at about 2000 metres, the valley floor, where we emerged from the wooded hill, at 1190.

It’s hard walking, but of course local people do it frequently – often up and down in a day. Many families, William’s included, graze their cattle down there, under the care of herders. Atanas is William’s herder, a cheerful, spare man prone to cheerful drunkenness at any opportunity – like the visit of a mzungu and the infusion of a pound that will buy him enough of the killer local spirit to add to the bulsa that William will drink here, to make him inebriated for the remainder of the day. It’s a life of privations but not an arduous one, looking after grazing cows and goats. They do all the work, Atanas just has to sit under a tree and gaze into space. Once again, I wonder so much what occurs in his head in the hours he can doze patiently on a rock in the Rift Valley? He can probably read and write, just about. He’s some basic English. He has – of course – his phone. No doubt he fills the wonderful silence with terrible (to me) music played from a speaker the size of a drawing pin. He probably communes with the few other people who choose to live in this outpost of humanity. He has milk and ugali for basic sustenance, and a rugged stick and mud hut in which to sleep – and tonight to sleep off the alcohol. There’s nothing much to talk about but goats and cows – and probably league football. He’s a house and family up here on the Kessup plateau; I’ve photographed his daughter Sharon in my peregrinations with William. I guess he has domestic problems to ponder: where the next money’s coming from; how to arrange his food for the evening; a few practicalities about the animals. Maybe that’s all any of us think about most of the time. I suppose life’s not made up of philosophical musings – but it is greatly stimulated by reading a book; appreciating thoughtful opinions; considering the diversities beyond our own very limited community. Things to which Atanas has little exposure as he sits on his rock on the scrubby hillside in the furnace of the Rift Valley.

We only have to do it once, thankfully. William and I have talked of this for four years, walking down to see Atanas and William’s cows. This trip has been inspired by my Harberton neighbours, Jill and Ken, keen beekeepers. I was in touch by email last week (about the water from three consecutive storms probably flowing down my chimney!) and happened to send them a photo I had taken of a small commercial bee farm project that Alex and I discovered near Sipi. By return came an enthusiastic response and questions that I’d never considered, here in Africa, where I often see local beehives hanging in trees as I pass. “Can we find some hives and a beekeeper?” I asked William a couple of days ago. “My neighbours would be very interested.”

“Oh, of cooourse! We can find many! But not here. We have to go dow-en to the valley. There are many keeping bees there.” Immediately, out came his phone. “I will ora-ganise it! But your foot..? Will you manage?”

Manage it I did! I admit I’m happy it was no further. By the time we reached the valley floor, almost three hours after starting out, I was exhausted, as much by the intense concentration for every footstep as for the exertion of the scramble itself. I have lost some confidence as a result of my stupid injury. I don’t have my usual easy balance and quickness of recovery from a misstep, and am terrified – as yet – of damaging that ankle again. And the muscles in my right leg are still quite reduced. William, with his love of discipline and time, allowed us two ten minute breaks (phone clock in hand!), but for two and three quarter hours we stumbled and slid down those narrow cattle paths. He’s informative too, is William, and has a new listener in Nore. He pointed out medicinal trees and a tree from which, in former times, before all the animals were hunted to extinction or escaped to reserves, hunters used to poison their arrows. “Oh, if it gets into your blood, you are a-gone! Huh! No chance, if it gets in the blood!” William, as a youth, remembers hunting for antelope down here. “Are there animals now?” asks Nore.

“NOO! Only in the reserves!” William’s 54. They’ve been wiped out, unless protected by national laws and rangers, in his lifetime. Over most of Africa. Now and again, outside a park or reserve, I may see an odd antelope, zebra or ostrich. They are in remote places far from habitation, on dirt roads in the backwoods. Only in the wildest areas, deep in the deserts maybe, will you see animals really in the wild. Most game is behind fences now, corralled largely for tourist dollars, managed and accessible. “Aren’t you afraid of wild animals?” people ask me. About the biggest I see is a squirrel, unless I am on a public road that happens to pass through a park or reserve.

The sun was high when we reached our destination, a glade of trees by a water tank where we could rest and William could arrange with his brother in law to bring us bulsa for him and Atanas – with a gesture for me – and milky tea for Nore and I to rehydrate. William’s brother in law, Philip, keeps bees, but here it’s a young man’s game, and Philip at 63 is, in Kenya, too old for it. Leonard was to be our guide to the beekeeping arts in the Kerio Valley.

A smart young man, with a decent education and a determined business acumen, Leonard took up the beekeeping mantle from his grandfather. “Since 2008, I went with my grandfather, even as he grew holder.” Leonard has an odd habit of adding an ‘h’ to his vowels. “Heven when he left this a-world, he was a man of bees!” He scrambled down the hillside to a tree in which one of his hives was suspended, busy with bees. “It’s han inheritance of sorts in a family. Somehow a talent. This beekeeping, we prepare ourselves. Hit is somehow in the blood of someone! You love honey, somehow it’s a-good to keep bees!” Leonard keeps seven hives down here and thirty up on the highland plateau far above.

Leonard clambered agilely into another tree, where a big hollowed log hive, about a metre long and half a metre in circumference, hung from a fairly spindly branch. The upper half of the tube was raised. They had opened it, taken the honey and the hive had needed some restoration. By leaving the hive open, the bees had been driven to find an alternative home. Leonard and his boys had repaired the old wooden log and now it was ready to host another colony. He now closed the two halves together and stuffed leafy twigs into the surrounding gap. “We close, and may-a-be by next week we have new bees!” This was a big hive. “From this we may only harvest once in the year. In Haugust or December maybe. We can get maybe 20 kilos of honey from this hive,” he called down, balancing on a bouncy bough. “From the smaller hives like the one there, we may harvest twice.”

“Eh! It’s a young man’s game, working up there!” I exclaimed, watching the bough bend.

“Yes, we will have to be three men to hempty this hive. When it is full of honey, it is a-heavy!”

“What about protection?”

“Hah!” he laughed. “We can use hoveralls and protection on the down ones,” pointing to a big hive hung only at shoulder height nearby, “but if we use hoveralls and gloves in the big trees high we damage the cloth-es. So we use mud.”

“Mud?”

“Yes, we put mud on our skin. Loam mud.”

“What about your head and face?”

“Yes, there too! Hall over our skin. To hide the smell of our bodies. And we hopen the hives at night when the bees are quiet. We use smoke to drive them out and we pull the honey with our a-hands. We tie a plastic container in the tree and we scoop the honey and lower it down. We honly put hives in trees where we can climb!”

I imagined three men hanging about in that tree, at night, surrounded by disturbed bees, pulling horribly sticky honey from the upper half of a heavy log with their hands, stickiness everywhere imaginable, mud on limbs and faces, bees buzzing, the tree shaking… “I hope you get good money for the honey?”

“Yes, it’s good business. We get about 4000 to 5000 Kenya shillings for 4 kilos!” That’s about £8-10 a kilo, pretty good money in Kenya – but of course, they only get it once or twice a year. “We let it settle and the top honey, we get more than 1000 bob a kilo, the bottom a bit less. Our hives? This one is from 2008. The time? Oh, about four more years maybe. This hive was for my grandfather.” He showed me his stock of heavy log hives, marked inside with the patterns of combs. “Some go this way!” he pointed out the diagonal pattern across the hollow of the thick wood, “and hothers, they make it along the hive. These hives are from cypress wood. We used to make cedar, my grandfather, he made cedar, but now there’s no cedar left. Oh, I like bees! My grandfather, I inherit from him.”

We clambered back to the grove where William was drinking bulsa and Atanas by now had moved on to the wirigi, killer spirit.

A shy boy, Rogers, had brought a green plastic jug of tea for Nore and I from the distant road, 250 feet below and a quarter of a mile away. Philip had brought us honey to taste – about half a teacupful each – with a spoon. I’ve never eaten half a teacup of honey in my life. “Oh! It is good for the energy!” exclaimed William. I spooned in the honey, complete with dead bees, doubtless some mud and fibrous bits and pieces. It was as if I could feel the energy flowing back into my blood! It was delicious and a miracle of nutrition to tired muscles, still tingling from a 2630 foot scramble downhill. The sun was intense. Goats scavenged around us. Atanas drank himsel-uf a degree closer to an early death and William and Leonard chatted quietly. We two Europeans were happy to sit and stare at the wide valley below, content – as no Kenyan will ever be, William admits – to just think. “Oh, we like conversation! When we are walking or sitting like this we MUST talk!”

In the mid afternoon we stumbled the rest of the way to the white dust track in the valley, where some benighted families live in this inferno and stoney inhospitability. Even Nore, a tough 21 year old, admitted he was happy we had decided on the strength of my damaged leg, not to climb back the 2630 feet to
kessup.

We negotiated for a boda-boda ride to the road junction at the bottom of the long, winding climb back to the plateau. Four up – and Nore is perhaps even a centimetre or two taller than me, and a good deal tougher – we ground along on a 100cc motorbike. The rider, Sam, would rather make an extra 50 bob (40 pence) and have the tyre rubbing on the underside of the metal mudguard than sympathise with his machine. I remember that road from four years ago, when it seemed like elastic and never ending. I’d ridden down from the top of the escarpment on a sandy, degraded track beyond the north end of the Kessup plateau and had not reckoned on the fact that the return to the road was 50 miles of sand and rock. It was that evening, exhausted and filthy, that I found the Lelin Campsite and guest house, and next morning the manager introduced me to William, now perched on the carrier of the boda-boda behind a rider and two very big wazungus.

At the road we pushed our way into a vastly overcrowded matatu, 21 adults, a baby and assorted bags boxes and rolls of roofing sheets, to uncomfortably grind our way back up the 800 metres height to our evening beer. “Walking down was more comfortable than the journey home!” I joked with William, falling undignified from the packed vehicle.

And, amazingly, almost no oedema in my ankle, despite the exertions. I must suggest to Torbay Hospital that a cure for a ruptured Achille’s might involve scrambling down into Africa’s Great Rift Valley! At least it’s entertaining. Better than stretching that damned rubber exercise band all the time.

DAY 57. SATURDAY 22nd FEBRUARY 2020. KESSUP. KENYA

Another easy day of meeting the people as we wandered the village lanes. It’s been fun to have another mzungu along, with his obvious enthusiasm for the simple activity – unusual in one so young. Nore has enjoyed his interaction with many village people and learned a good deal about rural African life quickly, something that’s often not easy for a mzungu to investigate, yet is how so many African people exist. He’s a good traveller and already says he thinks he may travel quite a lot, more than his contemporaries, most of whom appear to have taken a year’s placement in another university, while he chose a footloose period. He’s a surprisingly mature attitude to all he sees about him, and a pleasant confidence that makes him popular with the villagers.

Once again, we drifted about the red tracks and lanes, greeting all we passed, sitting here and there, spreading a bit of understanding, we hoped; purchasing some green vegetables for supper – the guest house, like most African kitchens, relies on scraggy meat and starch; drinking some bulsa in one compound, to the excitement fo the inhabitants and seeking avocados unsuccessfully. We met Martin, an age-mate to William, a wiry man with a lined face and shaggy hair now touched with white, who made the foolish decision to look for some money by smuggling on the Uganda border in 1986. Not a good time to enter that country without papers. It was the time that the present crook, Museveni, was leading the resistance to the previous (even worse) crook Idi Amin. The young fellow was arrested on suspicion of spying, threatened, tortured, saw some appalling atrocities and mass graves filled with skulls – Africa can treat life very cheaply – and was tried. He avoided execution but the soldiers destroyed his right forefinger and thumb so that he wouldn’t be able to fire a gun. Now, 34 years on, he tells the story with a laugh at his own adventurous stupidity. Underneath, no doubt, the trauma must be real. What is it about Africa that causes such terrible cruelty? Ordinary people, largely compassionate, professing allegiance to Christianity or Islam almost universally, who then carry out unbelievable atrocities on their fellows, sometimes even in their own kith and kin. It’s difficult to forget the story of the Hutu child in Rwanda who killed his Tutsi mother because she was of the ‘wrong’ tribe in that awful conflict – the evidence of which I have witnessed in all those broken skull and shattered bone mausoleums outside almost every village in the small country. Mind you, I ask what it is about Africa and forget to question the atrocities amongst ‘normal’ people in Nazi Germany, the Balkans, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Syria, Iraq, the Gulf States… Yes, Africa has no monopoly on massacres of their fellows.

Invited into numerous houses, we managed, by William’s diligence with his clock, so frequently in hand, to return in time for the first football match of his day on the satellite TV that his daughter sends him on the proceeds of her nursing studies in Australia. It was a bribe to stop him wasting his time, money and health on booze! He laughs as he tells Nore that story. “Oh, Jonathan and my daughter, they both told me to leave the alcohol! And the cigarettes! Now I only take a little bulsa sometimes.” He is passionate about football, especially ‘his team’, Manchester City. He showed us his TV, and innocent that I am, I had no idea that you can watch football, from somewhere, at any and every hour of the day or night! His house is basic, a place of wooden walls and a burning zinc roof. He has some battered and threadbare foam armchairs and a settee, an untidy sideboard and a small table with a gas ring and his entire crockery, cutlet and utensils. A tattered net curtain divides off the plywood-enclosed bedroom area. It’s the necessities, with no frills or comforts except the TV. It’s how most rural Kenyans live. I was impressed to find his house without any security whatsoever. “Oh, no, everyone knows William, and William knows everyone! No one will steal here.”

Tomorrow I’ll head Kitale way once more. I’ve just a few more days in East Africa before I fly to South Africa on Friday. It’s been a different sort of tip, this time. I’ve not ridden far and seen no new horizons, but there’s a satisfaction in strengthening friendships and becoming a familiar figure – evidenced by how often in the past couple of days I have been hailed from fields and compounds by my name. I’ve broken through some of the exotic mzungu state and am accepted as an equal in these villages.