DAYS 42 – 44. FRIDAY 7th to SUNDAY 9th FEBRUARY 2019. SIPI, UGANDA

These have been quiet, uneventful days with my ‘family’ in Uganda. Alex exploited at work by his mean-spirited boss, who embodies all that is bad about African management; Precious delighted to have her mzungu to look after; the children Keilah and Jonathan, cheerfully filthy in the mud and dust of Sipi. Jonathan, at only 15 months, pisses as he goes and then sits about in the dust and still-damp mud. He’s probably the dirtiest child I’ve ever seen! If he wears them at all, he goes through six or seven pairs of red mud-stained trousers a day. Keilah, at almost three, is a bit more self controlled, but ends the day with a red hue. Washed for bed, they look wholesome and happy, contented, healthy children living a very natural life, building immunity every second. “You should eat a peck of dirt before you die,” was the wisdom of my grandmother’s generation. It kept us immune to illnesses and allergies so prevalent amongst over-protected modern children. Little Jonathan must have had his peck already. And he’s only 15 months! As I look down from my plastic Chinese table on the raised restaurant-to-be, he is sitting happily in the mud flower border, spooning dirt and weeds into his mouth, where everything goes.

There are children everywhere, shouting happy ‘hellos’ from the track that passes the new restaurant on stilts, that displays the mzungu so well to the passing villagers as I write. I wave back every few moments as I try to recover from Precious’s vast breakfast.

No child in these rural villages has any toys except those created by lively young imaginations. An old motorbike tyre used as a hoop is one of the most common. Trucks made from scrap and pushed on a stick. On a local walk we found eight children having raucous fun bouncing up and down on a long springy eucalyptus tree that had been felled across a small valley, some of them falling off into the undergrowth by a muddy stream. Great glee when the mzungu joined in for a few moments. Mud makes a glorious plaything of course. They live amongst cows and goats, muck and filth. Many will never attend school.

A pretty young girl, maybe 11 or 12, is sometimes around the house these days. She’s Lizpa, one of a relatively small Ugandan family of merely seven children to illiterate, unemployed parents. They live in a rude compound nearby. The father does nothing much; the mother has babies. And probably works herself to the bone. None of the children go to school; there’s no one to encourage them to do so. Lizpa helps Precious around the compound, doing small menial jobs in exchange for some food and second hand clothing. She doesn’t go to school, will probably never read or write. Her role in life will be having lots more babies – who will never go to school or learn to read and write. Like family cattle, she represents wealth: one day, probably very soon, she will be worth a dowry…

The first born of her family, a girl, is already married at 13 or 14, Precious tells me. And so history repeats itself. The churches do nothing to stem the overwhelming flood tide, the mosques no more; the appallingly corrupt government under its ruthless crook, Museveni, one of the richest presidents in Africa, responsible for so much unrest and crimes, has an interest in keeping the populous uneducated. They’re easier to control, don’t make waves, can be bought off with pennies. It’s one of the most corrupt, cynical regimes in Africa. A ballooning population. Half of Ugandans are under the age if 15. Literacy is low. Poverty is widespread. And not one of the so-called morally responsible authorities – the churches, the mosques, the government – does a damned thing about it, all self-interested in their profits and power.

Sons are still a gift from god, girls a trial and mothers who produce girl babies punished and discarded. No man would admit to the science that the man might have a part in transmitting the ‘wrong’ genes. It’s a woman’s responsibility to produce sons, not daughters. Men whose wives produce daughters find other women. Precious tells me the shocking story of a mother who died two weeks after giving birth – to a girl – whose husband ‘married’ another woman the day after the death. Women are baby-producing machines for many Ugandan men. Sadly, most of the ones sitting about the local bars drinking violent local spirits all day, don’t drink themselves to death until AFTER they father numerous children, leaving their upbringing to downtrodden, hard working, largely uneducated mothers. It’s a pleasure to be for a few days part of a responsible, thinking family here in Sipi, a family that enlightens me so much about the life around me.

Alex paid for much of his education himself, taking whatever small jobs he could find. One of nine children, there wasn’t enough money to pay for all. Alex is also committed to his voluntary work as a Youth Champion, volunteering for various causes, working out of Kapchorwa. These idealistic men attempt to spread messages of limiting family size, stopping FGM, educating girls, preventing violence against women and girls and the equal worth of girl children. They are relentlessly optimistic in the face of the appalling inequities all about them. “I was talking with one of my colleagues today. He was telling me how he regrets the third child. He has two boys and a girl”. Alex stirs our fire with a stick. “He wonders how he can educate the third one? He looks at his small salary and wonders how he can make it meet three children… So I see change! Change in people’s thoughts.”

Precious and Alex intend to stop at two. “Even the second, well, he was really an accident!” They both laugh as little Jonathan clambers about the flaming fire.

Walking with Precious amongst the local shambas, deep in the matoke trees, we met a sister-in-law to Alex. She’s a house in a lovely situation, on the edge of a steep bluff, a small lawn looking west into the sunset across half Uganda. She has a girl and a boy. “It’s enough!” she exclaims. “Two, I can feed and educate them”. Maybe enlightenment is dawning? But is it too late, in this alarmingly over populated land, in which the message only reaches those with the education and freedom to reject overarching ‘traditional’ attitudes? A land in which the majority of women share status with the pack animals? More cattle, more children – the ambitions of the overwhelming majority of African men.

With lovely Precious I sit and talk. She doesn’t get the exposure to the outside world that Alex enjoys so much. Her education level is lower than his, but she’s a natural good sense and sense of justice. Her knowledge of the world may be smaller, but her thoughts and opinions of what she sees around her are astute. She’s from the other side of the country, somewhat marooned here amongst another culture. Where Alex is separated by his well developed intellect, she’s also an outsider in this traditional community. Oddly, they face a lot of jealousy for their drive and ambition. Locals would quite like to see them ‘brought down a peg’, despite their humility, and respect for their neighbours. My impression is that much of this envy comes from the deep, deep corruption inherent in this country. Values based so firmly on the jealousy of relative wealth from hard work and endemic poverty from idleness – and witnessing so many clamber the ladder by petty corrupt means.

Corruption is commonplace at every level. Petty opportunist dishonesty and exploitation of any small employment advantage. Maybe this is why I found Alex and Precious so attractive, for I instinctively KNOW that they are 100% honest with money, in a country where few are. Precious tells me that any money I send to Alex for their guest house project is scrupulously used and accounted for. It’s never diverted to frivolous use. “Not even a soda! He uses it all very exactly!”

I’m not in any personal danger whatsoever in Uganda. This is a country with no threat of theft of any sort except in the handling of money, especially other people’s. It’s a land that issues summary local justice. Cry ‘thief!’ here and the mob will exact swift revenge on any miscreant. It’s in financial dealings that the corruption lies.

Says Alex, “The NGOs know how corruption is so common, so they won’t deal with the local managers of their projects at all. They say they’ll only pay money direct to the service providers. Straight to our hotel in Kapchorwa, for instance. But we Ugandans, we find ways around that! The local managers do a deal with the hotel owners. They report to their NGO sponsors – the Western charities – that they have a training session or a workshop for 44 participants. But there are really only 34. The NGO pays the money for 44 trainees and the hotel event organisers share the rest with the charity manager…” He says it with no pride. Alex despises this corruption. “How can Uganda develop if it’s people are like this..?”

“It is a behind country, a very behind country!” agrees Precious.

“Me, I won’t have anything to do with money in my hotel,” Alex says. “It’s just the sort of area where the owner would blame me for wrong dealing, so he could cut my salary even more!” He’s wise, is Alex. His pathetic salary is already small enough at about £60 a month, on call all hours, criticised by a bad employer, no employment rights in this country. Hotel manager for two pounds a day.

This corruption comes down from the very top, of course, from the crooked president and those about him. A fine example to a poverty-wracked country. Probably the richest president in Africa, utterly corrupt through and through. He buys off or ‘removes’ any opposition. Is surrounded by a phalanx of sycophants. Unlike the late Mugabe, Museveni doesn’t aim to insult and belittle Western leaders and contains his corruption and political meddling generally within East Africa enabling him to hold on to power for, so far, a 34 miserable years.

The wind has been cool, gusting up from the vast lowlands below. There have been wispy clouds dancing and coiling above us. Precious and I watched their antics, fascinated.

“So you say these clouds are at what distance?” she asks. I explained to her how my aeroplane flew above the clouds the other day, showed her the picture of sunset over North Africa that I took on my flight south in December. I suggest that these are low shreds of cloud, not rainclouds, just a bit of water vapour spinning through the blue, caused by the recent rains and the wet ground.

“So is there a distance from the clouds above to heaven? What’s that distance?”

Precious has a very literal concept of heaven from the fake pastors of the millions of church businesses that abound. It’s where Jesus sits on the right hand of God, somewhere up above the blue stuff overhead.

Trying to explain the geography of what’s still known popularly as ‘the heavens’, isn’t easy… She expresses amazement that the sun is so far away, has never considered what stars might be, no idea of planets and space. Trying to explain that her ‘heaven’ is a metaphorical concept, rather than somewhere she will sit down at a big canteen table with the late crook, Daniel Arap Moi (corrupt ex president of Kenya, who just died amidst great noise), overseen by Jesus sitting on the right hand of God at the high table, is difficult. Alex laughs at her questions later, by the fire in the evening, home from his exploitation at the ‘smart’ hotel. He’s better educated, questioning, knows about the moon missions, has a concept of space and infinity and the distance to the stars, the fact that we are living on the only planet so far known to support life.

“So where is heaven?” Precious persists. Instead I try to explain how far away is that shining dot – I guess it’s Venus tonight, glaring from the western ‘heavens’. I try to explain the fact that the nearest star is four and a half light years away. But I rather spoil it by not remembering how long is a light year! Alex laughs. It’s companionable to be here with these two young people, alternately smart and aware and innocent and gullible. Nice mixtures. Fun conversations. My injured foot up on a plastic chair, the fire is dying away now, here where the bar will one day be at Rock Gardens, named after my house in Devon. It’s fun to enjoy the respect, admiration and love of these two, enough that they named their grubby cheerful boy after me. Life’s good when you go out and meet it. Maybe this trip WILL be as good as the others after all… Just different, I suppose. Restricted by the stupidity of playing rounders on a beach – when I’m really old enough to know better.

Or should be.

DAY 45. MONDAY 10th FEBRUARY 2019. SIPI, UGANDA

A day or two ago, I burned my feet, sitting unthinking in the sun, unusually wearing flip-flops. The skin is very tender, stretched by the continued swelling of my right foot. Alex’s mother, Florence, who lives in the neighbouring compound, broke her ankle a year ago. She wanted to help my foot with local medicine. I’m always open to that, as she pulled leaves from a nearby hedge bindweed. She crushed the leaves in her hands and set to to rub the abrasive fibres over my foot as I sat in the shade of one of the conifers. How I screeched and leapt from my Chinese chair! It was very difficult to explain to her and Precious that I wasn’t objecting to her medicine but that the skin was burned – “Burned as if I’d put it in fire! Look, the tops of my ears are red too, and sore. And the top of my head!” The old lady wanted to help my foot. I wanted to protect the intensely sore skin from her rather rough ministrations. We compromised. I kept my hand on the sore areas and let her spread her green goo over the rest. It’s complicated to explain melanin and racial genetics to people who seldom see white skin!

Each afternoon, I have taken a good long rough walk in the village area. It’s attractive here. Very green and fertile, matoke trees making way-finding impossible for one not born to the village. We walk through people’s shambas on the winding red mud paths, climb the huge scattered rocks for views from the escarpment, meet neighbours and watch life, frequently in very basic earth and stick houses with zinc roofs, mud yards and few comforts. If any. It’s a life for most bordering on poverty, entirely dependent on the food they can grow for sustenance and small sales. When seasons fail, people suffer. It’s a simple equation: total dependence on the continuation of the usual cycles of nature, now severely threatened by climate change.

For four years now I have stood on the high edge of the escarpment gazing over the huge view westwards over a giant tract of Uganda. Right below wanders a red dust road through green matoke bananas, shambas and fields, separated by tall waving eucalyptus. Uncountable corrugated iron roofs punctuate the view, the newer ones winking as the sun lowers in the western sky. It’s a handsome scene and many’s the time I have said to Alex, or whoever my companion was – as I usually have a guide through the endless matoke trees and numerous shambas on the Sipi ridge – that one day I must go and take that weaving road. On Monday, Alex and I did just that.

Together on the Mosquito, we rode some way down the twisting tar road towards the great plains below. This is a road with appalling accident statistics. Driving here in Uganda is so bad and vehicles frequently dangerous and hugely overloaded. Matatus plunge over the edge on the steep bends, overbalanced trucks lose control of defective brakes, buses periodically leap from the turns and boda-bodas, insisting that there is economy in switching off their engines to coast the miles downhill, thus losing engine braking and lubrication, fly into the treetops below. The few road barriers have been long flattened – one truck took out a line of about thirty of the safety posts (years ago) before soaring into the void. It’s a one-hill population control facility, most drivers using brakes rather than gears to control – or not – their descents.

Some way down, using my gears and limiting my speed as boda-bodas freewheel past at silent speed, we turn off onto a dirt road amongst the ever-present habitations. For the whole 35 kilometre ride we will not leave the ribbon development of the last decades. “When I was small,” says Alex from the back, “there was forest here. Now look!” Alex is 34… I look. Hardly a shred of natural landscape is visible until the heights and precipices of the soaring cliffs above us. Even the high, apparently inaccessible ancient rock falls and soil slippages are now cultivated in small terraces of matoke bananas. Only the vertical red rock cliffs are in their natural state now. No one’s found any economic plunder from them yet.

The red dust road is damaged from the rains, but it’s quite well used here and the ruts have been ironed out by countless boda-boda motorbikes. Few walk any more. Alex is greeted with laughter by acquaintances, amused to see the mzungu as his boda-boda rider. He’s popular and well known, born to a long-resident local family, first born of nine children, some of whom have married into these communities lower down the mountain; also from his volunteering work in the reproductive health unit of the region, spreading wisdom with his fellow ‘Youth Champions’ to attempt to alleviate some of the self-inflicted suffering in these uneducated communities. It seems an impossibly daunting exercise to me, but he is always optimistic. He’s delighted to find some of his fellow volunteers down here on this winding dust road. They are doing important work, but scratching at the edges of an overwhelming problem. He taps my shoulder to stop. A new house is being built by the road, a crude structure of handmade red bricks and hand-poured reinforced concrete beams. An expensive house for the region, but coarse and ugly to my eyes. One of his friends, Tom, a tall gangly fellow, unusually tall for Uganda, where the majority are short, is a carpenter. I know Tom, he’s visited us and we’ve walked and talked together, a quiet, rather dignified young man. He is delighted by our stop and we sit with his workmates and the new owner of the somewhat rudely built house. It’s like a million others – hideous, functional and far from the vernacular. This is, I suppose, the new vernacular. ‘Vernacular Ugly’. Not an improvement, with its blocky shape and iron roof. I know it’ll have nasty steel welded doors. It’ll probably never reach the stage of rendering the rough bricks, that are held together by thick, squishy black cement. The roof timbers that Tom is nailing with six inch nails, are rough cut, warping and bowing. They are fresh from the tree, cut by chain saws in a manner I watch with trepidation. Men wield three foot motor saws in flip-flops, no eye protection and thin mtumba wear office trousers and dirty tee shirts. “Many of them die early,” Alex told me as we walked through a plantation on a steep hillside the other evening, where villagers had gathered to carry the off-cuts for firewood. “The vibration of the saws day after day does something bad to their livers.” I guess that’s the ones who don’t die from gory mistakes or falling trees…

The workmates are taking their break when we arrive, delighted to invite us to sit with them for a time. After the customary, “How OLD are you?”, comes the inevitable second question: “How many children do you have?”

I used to answer with a simple, “Two.” It saved any further discussion and contented everyone, even though they thought it FAR too few. Now, I have understood that I can help Alex’s dedicated volunteer work to shock the audience with, “None!” and encourage a conversation – the conversation Alex and his colleagues are trying to spread to rural communities. About the impossibility of educating and raising ten, twelve, fifteen, howevermany, healthy children on the proceeds of a miserable stretch of Ugandan shamba that grows bananas and coffee. News of the extreme damage to the planet is unknown. Global warming is unknown. Climate change is just a wetter year than usual. God will make it all fine again soon. We’ll pray. The fact that we have gone far beyond the reach of prayers is unknown. Alex joins me, his Reproductive Health hat on now. The man with whom I am mainly conversing is coy about the size of his family. I talk of the stupidity and vanity of ‘wanting people to remember me’ by producing untold numbers of off-spring. “They’ll remember these men alright, but for the wrong reasons! For lack of self control and vanity. How many here remember even the name of their great grandfather? No one! So what’s the point? In 1950 there were about 5 million Ugandans; now there are 46 million; by 2050 it’s estimated there’ll be 90 million! Uganda stays the same size, with the dwindling resources!”

“Yes, but the Bible says…” Here we go! I point out that the Bible was written one thousand seven hundred years ago, when the world was very different and population, estimated at a mere 300 million, three thousand TIMES less people! Well within the capabilities of the planet to sustain. And no one had discovered fossil fuels, motor cars, aeroplanes, materialism, the ‘free market’. But my words fall on generally deaf ears. The Bible is THE authority. When it’s not the Koran if course.

Alex laughs as we ride away. “Huh, that man has ten children! Haha, how you told him! But it’s good you come. We will make changes. But here in these villages education is so low. That small boy, the one sitting by me, I asked him, ‘why aren’t you in school?’ He said because his uniform was dirty. The other man said the boy’s father had died and the mother is going from man to man around the district. The family is disturbed. It’s the parents. They don’t guide their children.” Here, a woman without a man has nothing – no land, no rights, no support. Alex is wise and thoughtful. Compassionate too, but clear eyed about the problems of the communities around him. A young man who paid much of his own education. A man who has determined to have only two children so he can raise them well in the challenges of life in this poverty-stricken, overpopulated land. A man with dreams. Ambitions not just for himself but for his community and country. A man who sees, but doesn’t follow the easy route of corruption and exploitation. A fair man. A young man I am proud to know, whom this week has stood higher in my estimation the better I know him. He’s inspiring.

We ride on, a beautiful landscape, the high red and brown cliffs far above to the left, fine views downwards to the right. There are children everywhere. Calling. Excited to see a mzungu here, where obviously few penetrate. Waving. Chasing the motorbike with its assorted passengers. They should be in school. A minority are in school uniform here. We never leave habitation. Not for 100 yards. Every scrap is cultivated to attempt to provide a living for this vast population.

Miles on, we ride through a small village centre, scruffy and sculpted in dry mud, like the ‘road’. Men hanging about, women doing the domestic and farming work. People stare. Many wave and greet. It’s rough going. Then a lovely view ahead, the cliffs forming a high sunbathed wall, a waterfall pouring in suspended motion from the dark green edge against the deep blue sky. “Stop here!” says Alex, pointing to the side of the red path. It’s his sister’s house, next in line to Alex.

Doreen is smart and educated. Much like Alex. She finished senior school and was destined for university but, “That boy, he stole her! I was annngry!” says their mother, coming next morning to thank me profusely for our visit to her daughter. Alex’s mother is a cheerful woman with a commanding nature. A bit older than me, I imagine, I wonder if, given the power, she’d have limited her family, instead of the nine children? It seems to me that she has a common sense beyond her probable education as a woman of her generation. If she’d had only two children, she’d have worked hard to educate them. She obviously brought them up on sound values. “I made them WORK, from a young age! I said, ‘do this, do that…’ so they would know how to work.”

“But now,” she says with concern, “no jobs in Uganda. Very big problem, no jobs…” Yes, the inevitable consequence of everyone having seven, ten, twenty children.

So Doreen, like Alex, could have soared higher in different circumstances, become leaders of note, not just role models in their limited communities. But she married a farmer and lives in a remote village. Her husband, Leonard, is charming and hard working. I like him instinctively – my only guide. His elderly mother – 83, she says, but looking younger – equally hard working, hacks at her steeply sloping fields with a mattock, clearing coffee to plant vegetables to restore the field’s nutrition. Leonard has cows and pigs, and several large areas of coffee, matoke banana and vegetables. I am surprised to find that coffee has a magnificent spread of delightfully sweet-smelling white blossoms.

We tour Leonard and his mother’s shambas, impressed by the order and productivity. But Leonard’s father married five wives and the land is divided and spread about the hillsides. Dangerous hillsides in heavy rains, the soaring cliffs above fragile and quickly draining. “I have land up there!” Leonard points high above, to where a terrace, tiny from down here, has been hacked from a rock slide far up the cliff face. “Those are my matoke trees. Next time you come, we can go there.” And maybe climb the steep steel ladders that access the villages on the plateau several hundred feet above the vertical cliffs.

 

Next time we visit, I should like to stay a night with that attractive couple, surrounded by openly friendly people, happy to welcome a mzungu into their village. It was a delightful couple of hours. Who wants a safari park, when he can have an African village? My presence causes such pleasure and happiness. Doreen phoned her mother in greatest glee that Alex had brought his mzungu to visit her. It’s a wonder for me to be able to provide that thrill. Just by proving my equality.

The road home was little more than footpaths. Now we had several kilos of green tomatoes to carry as well as ourselves. Hard work, two up on those tracks and trails. With only one brake on the steep hills, for my rear brake has failed again. But we persevered through magnificent scenery under the sunny African skies, happy with our journey, home to supper by a fire floodlit by the full moon.

I was planning to return to Kitale on Tuesday, but Precious has claimed HER day with her mzungu! Alex had his, now she is jealous, so I must go with her and the small children to the local town, Kapchorwa, a wild west place up the hills from Sipi. It’ll be no penance, with happy Precious!

“But we MUST have children! It’s our culture!” Almost every Ugandan exclaims. The ‘tradition’ that holds back so much of Africa. And so many of its thoughtful, educated young people, the Alexs and Doreens, as well as her father in law – with his five wives and countless children.

DAYS 46/47. TUESDAY/ WEDNESDAY 11th/ 12th FEBRUARY 2019. SIPI, UGANDA

Each day, Precious and Alex persuade me to stay one day longer. Well, I have had to accept that this trip is different from all the others of the past seven years, slower, more circumscribed and concentrated on getting to know my various East African friends and families better. Narrower horizons, but none the worse for that.

Precious got her day out. As with so many Africans, time management is not her strong point. “We leave at one!” she told me, about 11.30. At 12.00 I suggested she started to get ready. She had to wash and prepare two toddlers as well as herself. So at 12.15 she started washing the breakfast things. It was 1.45 before we even left the house, on a long way round to the road where we hoped to get transport. We were walking, of course, at 3 year old speed – until I put Keilah on my shoulders to speed up the process. Not that it did, much. Precious isn’t the fastest walker either. By 2.30 we were at the roadside. No cars were available at that time, no matatus, only boda-bodas for the 16 kilometres up the mountain to Kapchorwa. I had refused to travel by boda-boda. In the end I had to accept that it was the only option we had.

After a serious lecture on the lack of concern for their own or their passengers’ safety, I climbed onto the very small motorbike. I doubt the rider had ever taken a slower journey, the 16 kilometres up to Kapchorwa! He crept along steadily, heeding my warnings for once and terrified maybe of the ire of the mzungu behind him. Little Keilah, almost three, rode between me and the rider. She’s comfortable with the mzungu grandfather now, and within minutes fell into deep sleep, cradled in my arms such that I had difficulty keeping us both balanced on the too small machine. She slept all the way to our destination, a guest house opened by a white man from the Netherlands. Head flopped on my forearm, she slept on over the badly deteriorated town dirt roads, waking only when I lifted her from the boda-boda. She’s a serious little girl, slow to smile, unlike her energetic, never resting little brother, my namesake, who plays with great independence around the compound all day long, filthy but concentrating and engaged all day. He seldom sleeps, but when he goes to bed at night he sleeps the night through quietly. I’ve become fond of them both. Engaging children.

Coffee and snacks was a family treat in the select surroundings of the mzungu’s green acre of a smart guest house. White people tend to like to stay at white owned guest houses – unlike me, who looks assiduously for African owned ones. I can stay in white guest house in Europe, why should I want to do so here? I observed that none of the white guests greeted us as they passed a few yards away. I find it natural to greet all Africans, as they do me. The four or five white guests appeared to have their own private but invisible ‘zones’, uncrossable barriers they’d instinctively set up. One of the things I love about Alex’s soon-to-be guest house is the way I am constantly greeted by passing locals.

To return from Kapchorwa, now with Alex and Innocent as well, and weighty bags of foodstuffs from the market, we negotiate with a matatu and pile into the cramped minibus. If I believed in the efficacy of prayer, this is a time I might indulge – screaming along at speeds I wouldn’t attempt even in a well maintained vehicle, let alone a derelict jalopy with no rear suspension and in all likelihood, bald tyres. I’m not sorry we are alighting at Sipi, before this mad driver careers down the twisting, dangerous hill towards Mbale below. We’re packed in, my knees to my chest, nowhere to put my legs and very little cushion left to the rear seat that I share with Precious, Keilah, Jonathan and all our shopping, a branch of green matoke bananas crushing through the back of the seat.

I am shocked to find that Alex’s cheating, miserable boss, the owner of the hotel who exploits his staff on the understanding that with so much unemployment, they are expendable and easily replaced – perhaps the worst, most mean-spirited management style imaginable, has still not paid his employees for January. It’s February 12th and most people here in Uganda live from hand to mouth. He is responsible for numerous poorly paid workers. School started over a week ago but few of the employees have the money to pay fees, so children are excluded while they wait on the pleasure of the disrespectful owner. I found this out, not because Alex or Precious informed me or asked for help, but in conversation about Keilah being ready to start at school. “We have no money for the fees, the books, the uniform, the pencils…” admitted Precious unwillingly. “Until Alex is paid, we have been living on the money you gave me when you left to go to Karamajong…” I gave Precious £10 when I left, knowing I’d be returning and would leave more when I go back to Kitale. “Why don’t you ask?” But Precious is too shy. “Oooh, Jonat’an, we cannot ask for everything from you!”

How hard life is for honest Ugandans with education. When I paid Keilah’s first term school fees (£40) and transport money to and from Kapchorwa (another £40), Precious burst into tears. These young people have so little support. It’s so sad to witness the realities of life in an African country.

Before I left, Alex was determined to set up the new signboard for Rock Gardens on the lane that passes his property. As the sun set, he hacked a couple of holes and called Innocent to bring out the newly painted sign that advertises his dreams. The village came to watch, idly gathering to see this new development. It’s sad, though, that so much jealousy exists in these rural communities. They assume that Alex is getting preferential treatment from ‘sponsors’ and are envious.

With Precious or Alex I wander through the matoke amongst local compounds, greeted by all. For many I am probably the first mzungu with whom they have shaken hands, which for them is a big excitement. Why, I wonder, when we are all the same apart from a microscopically thin layer of outside covering? My whiteness just marks me out as somewhat exotic in the rural shambas of the sub-villages of Sipi. There are white people to be seen in the Sipi trading centre at the top of the winding hill, but they tend to be aloof from the locals, specimens to be viewed at a distance. “Thank you to see me, thank you to see me!” repeated one elderly woman, pulling forward traditional folding wooden chairs for us.

One old lady of 102, lives in her basic mud walled home, a place dark with woodsmoke stains and bereft of comfort beyond a couple of old low stools. She was in the process of rolling a cigarette in what looked like a page torn from an exercise book. “She smokes this,” said Alex, fingering a tobacco plant outside her door. Well, it hasn’t done her much harm. She chattered with Alex, this oldest inhabitant of the area. “She is saying I should bring her sugar,” laughed Alex. Many of the old ladies, if they make it to old age, are still hard working women. Alex’s favourite aunt, Khalifa, made us tin mugs of black tea in her compound, a talkative woman, maybe about 80, first born of Alex’s father’s generation. She lives alone in her brown mud houses, her sons and daughters all living in neighbouring compounds. The other day she came to Alex’s place to fetch about 20 kilos of thick, clayey building earth that she would use to patch the plaster of her house. Rather bent over, with a long stick in one hand, she swung the bag onto her back and shuffled home.

I was shocked to watch the clouds gather to the north east (the way I have to go tomorrow) and later for steady rain to fall yet again. This safari has been impossibly marked by rain and mud. It’s chilly enough for a blanket round my shoulders by the campfire – tonight under the shelter of the one-day-to-be bar. Now, as I head for bed, storms are rolling around again.

DAY 48. THURSDAY 13th FEBRUARY 2020. KITALE. KENYA

On Thursday, after a week, at last made I my goodbyes to my Uganda family and set off back to ‘base’ in Kitale. The morning was cool, the skies filled with clouds, and thunder had rumbled below Sipi, down on the lower plains (where I had aborted my exploration of the northern tribes last week), through last evening. I was nervous of the road ahead, as I decided to ride my favourite East African road back through the remote border post at Suam River. One day there’ll be a tarred road here, but for now the new tarmac has reached all of three kilometres from Kapchorwa – on the 75 kilometre journey to the border. I’ll be able to enjoy the rigours and rewards of this beautiful, remote road for some time longer.

Rain clouds hung about the slopes of high Mount Elgon as I travelled eastwards, watching apprehensively, riding the earth surfaces. It doesn’t take much rain to make them very slippery on two wheels. But the rain held off, just about, only some drizzle making a few patches dicey amongst the road building works. All was going reasonably well, with a bit of caution.

I reached the forest area. In past times this has always provided the most challenging ride on this 125 kilometre journey back to Kitale. It’s a region with some steep hills and beaten through thick red dust that sits on top of very uneven rock. It’s the highest part of the trail, at 2555 metres (8300-odd feet), and has often been hard going here. I’ve struggled up and down one particularly bad hill a few times. But they were nothing like today! About a kilometre and a half of disgusting red clay, thick and greasy. There’s a steep hill down to an old, narrow colonial era bridge over a roaring mountain river, and an even steeper ascent to the top of the route. It’s like a ski run (and remember, I have no rear brake right now!). Boda-bodas slipped and slid and a car was slithering and revving, a crowd trying to heave it upwards. I skied downwards in low gear. The deep mud filled my knobbly tyre tread within yards, by boots grew in size. A third of the way down, still upright, my engine stalled from the build up of claggy mud that had locked my rear wheel! It took minutes to push and winkle the mud from my frame. It’s an old chain, from which Sam, the mechanic in desert Marabit, last year removed a couple of links to make adjustment easier. That’s fine under normal conditions, but it brings the wheel an inch nearer to the frame – perfect to make a thick, gooey, mud pie, sticky enough to lock the engine! 100 metres downward and it happened again. Again I mined the clay from my wheel. I splashed through deep brown puddles on the bridge and stopped wearily.

A policeman on a small trail bike laughed to see me. “Where to?” I told him Kitale as we laughed about the terrible conditions. Happily, he assured me that after another few hundred metres I would have no trouble all the way to the border. “The road is dry; there’s been no rain.” I struggled up the opposite hill, weaving amongst flailing boda-bodas, a marooned car and sliding people with bags and baggage. At the top lorries waited for their attempt. Maybe gravity would help them down to the river, but how they would all ascend the other slope I decided not to wait to see!

The rest of the ‘road’ was indeed dry and presented no more challenged than those to which I am used – rocky trails and a million or two bumps and potholes. The views make up for much of the hammering ride. It’s one of the most glorious bits of this part of the world. I just love it and ride along with what’s probably best described as a foolish grin of pleasure at the experience. People call and greet, children are excited. It’s just wonderful.

In the crude village of Tulel, I stop for chai and a rest, the sinecure of all eyes as soon as I take off my helmet and take a small wooden stool in the shade of a rusty roofed mud shack, grandly called the ‘Star Hotel’. The tea is hot, milky and sweet – and reviving. Hundreds gather to watch and talk with the white man. Not many of us stop in Tulel. I sip at my scalding enamel mug of tea as everyone one discusses the ‘mzee’ (elder) who has stopped in their midst and appears to them too old for all this. Two men who later lead our discussion are fifty and frankly look older than me. Gangly boys and girls flow from the local school, bright yellow shirts and blue shorts and skirts. An ancient holey tarp lies on the dusty ground on which pale cream coffee beans are drying. Coffee is almost white until it’s roasted. A small naked boy baby sits amidst the beans, perhaps adding his flavouring to the eventual brew. A line of idle men sit on a plank bench opposite me, debating my details. Green mountain slopes back them, glinting like a disco ball with zinc roofed habitations. The women, of course, are working, most of them with a baby on their back or crawling about nearby. There are children everywhere – this country with a median age of 15.8 years, beaten only by Mali at 15.4. (World median age is 30.4. UK, 40.5. Thank you Mr Wikipedia!).

After a time, one man ventures forth to talk with the mzee mzungu. I know the questions before they are uttered: “Where from? Where to? How old are you? How many children? What religion?” Usually followed by, “What team?”

This time I borrow my two children (thank you Sam and Alice!) and fake my protestant beliefs. It’s just TOO much to go into here otherwise. But we start a lively discussion – I’ll be here for an hour – about self-inflicted poverty, the education of children, the state of the planet (from my point of view, of course. Theirs is governed by God and the Bible), the rights of women (widespread disbelief at the very concept) and the relevance of the Bible and Koran to today’s situation (“But it’s the word of God!”). “Do my children look after me now I am old?” No! They are independent! That’s why I educated them! “Why don’t you help us? You are rich, you mzungus…” I tell them how much my mug of tea would cost in England. They are silenced in horror for a moment. I tell them the price of my boots. Shock!

These are conversations I have time and again, especially in Uganda with its deep rooted cultural belief that they must have more children. It turns out that the two fifty year old leaders of our crowded discussion – there are about thirty people crowded in front of me now (I feel not a jot of apprehension or threat, only human warmth, even if what I’m telling them isn’t really hitting home much) – the two men have eight and ten children. A woman trader, sitting nearby, slightly outside the discussion group – she’s a woman, after all – smiles and chuckles at my opinions of uncontrolled Ugandan men and the need for women to take over the reins. She’s right there with me, but she hasn’t the right to express her opinion if the mad mzungu (who’s only got two children anyway) isn’t there to encourage her laughter.

“Oh, but for us, woman is below children!” says one of the old-looking 50 year old men.

“Slightly above donkeys, then?” I quip. Everyone laughs happily. Even the women. It’s hopeless!

After an amusing hour, I gather my riding clothes, pay my 8 pence for the mug of tea, giving the cheerful trader the remainder of my change, to the laughter of the men, and her delight. I’ve tipped her 6p! “I’m leaving the country, so you should have my coins!”

No doubt they’ll discuss the stupidity of white men for a while after I leave. But I do little to change perceptions that they gather from the media, peddling the wealth and luxury of the West. And let’s face it, I AM the one who rides through their lives with all this material wealth – such that I can tip 6 pence to a tea trader in her ‘hotel’ – owned by a man, I have no doubt at all. Women own nothing here in Uganda, except the work.

My Mosquito and I bounce through endless small rural villages and past countless semi-vertical shambas. The sun’s out now – more the African landscapes I have come to know and love. Without sun the smile fades from Africa’s face.

Now I am looking down far, far to the northwest, across those vast blue plains, dotted with dormant volcanic pimples – the area of Karamajong that I set out to see last week, and failed.

Even now I can feel my foot swelling inside my big, supportive bike boot. It’s getting a lot of physiotherapy… The hospital told me to stand on a step and raise and lower my weight on the toes. It’s pretty much what I have to do, standing on the foot-pegs on my little bike, dancing this way and that over the roughest of roads, down virtual staircases of rock and dust, correcting and balancing, weaving and dodging. There’s a reason for my foolish grin! I’m having fun.

So, home to my East Africa base and warm welcomes again. Little Maria’s ‘Uncle Jon’an’ and Adelight’s Scrabble opponent has come home for a day or two to think about the next short safaris. It’s proving a different sort of journey this year, but I am consolidating friendships and families, and that’s a very African way of looking at life. A way that I am adopting more and more as the years pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah… ‘Good road’… Huh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beaten, I turned round.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hotel regulations include the following directions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the dry season.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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