DAY 98 SUNDAY 25th FEBRUARY 2018. SIPI, UGANDA

My usually infallible bump of direction gets so confused down here, just about on the Equator. Is the sun north of me here, or south at midday? I know it still rises in the east and sets in the west, but shortly after the equinox, just where is it? It must be going north by now? Changing hemispheres, everything is turned on its head for one so accustomed to the clear angles of fifty degrees north or so.

Thus it was that I took a wrong turn out of Jinja and added fifty somewhat frustrating miles to my ride today. I thought I was riding east: I was riding north. It took me 120 kilometres to reach Iganga, 38 kilometres east of Jinja, a narrow triangular route.

Stopping at a petrol station, when I finally realised I was on completely the wrong road, I asked a fellow in a car (always ask another driver about roads in Africa). “How can I get back to Iganga? How are the roads?”

“They are good. Murram…. If you want tar, you must return to Jinja; but if you don’t mind a little adventure, you can go back a kilometre, turn to the left and go by Bulopa.”

Well, what was I to do? The glove was down. The earth road to Iganga was actually in good condition, recently graded and almost as quick as the tar road, if you take into account the multitude of speed humps on the tar. I bowled along for another 60 kilometres, only a little over an hour, getting tied up in a damned cycle race, dangerously mixed with screaming supporters on boda-bodas, all enveloped in a vast cloud of fine dust; dust that certainly won’t have done any good for the straining cyclists, and dust that fills the eyes and lungs for future problems for the millions of Ugandan boda-boda riders (not to mention the dwellers beside dust roads), almost none of whom take precautions against dust or any other hazard. Respiratory and eye diseases are a time bomb for Uganda’s future – in a country with little medical provision and largely private health care, but maybe the average Ugandan doesn’t live long enough to reach that stage on life… Gosh, life in Africa makes you think.

*

The Mosquito seems to be adapting well to its electronic transplants (better than I am with my bionic teeth) and runs along well now without the palpitations of last week. It’s given pretty well trouble free service on this safari, now going towards five thousand miles. I’ve come to quite respect this machine, so small it seemed at first, but which has revealed itself to be an ideal touring companion: lightweight, manoeuvrable, not uncomfortable since Rico found the wide seat, and extremely economical at 80 or 90mpg.

My transplants don’t work quite so well! “Oh, I don’t want to see..!” exclaims delightful Precious, turning away but secretly fascinated, as I removed the plate to eat my supper – for it clatters and grinds if I don’t. With most of my smile now in my hand, she screeched, “NO! Don’t laugh! I won’t look!” She’s never seen such a thing before: in Uganda if you get old enough to lose your teeth – which few do – no one attempts restorative dentistry to maintain their vanity. It’s just a fact of life, and a mark of respect that you attained the grand age of the 2% of over 65s. One old lady here in Sipi, last week reached 102, an age that is talked about far and wide, born in 1916. Imagine the changes she has seen in African ways of life, although Alex says her memory is a bit faulty and slightly confused; but she enjoys the respect of Sipi, nonetheless.

Back on my road at last, I had spent an extra hour and a half on my journey. The weather is changing now as the rainy season approaches; the meteorologists forecasting an early wet season this year, so it is beginning to tell already. By afternoon, the last few days, I have watched dark clouds form; as yet in isolated thunderstorms that pour the contents of their heavily saturated clouds in dramatic outbursts, that are short and localised. One such formed ahead of me as I rode, so I took shelter under the zinc canopy of a small guest house at the roadside, riding right onto the terrace and waiting out three quarters of an hour under the noisy roof with three young women, hardly out of school, one nursing a baby, and a fellow folding sheets. Boys along the road stripped to their underpants and ran in and out of the quickly forming deep puddles at the pitted roadside, leaping and screeching with glee at their improvised swimming pool. Small pleasures provide so much diversion for African children: no need for the ubiquitous ‘devices’ and materialism of our ‘sophisticated’ children: a muddy puddle; an empty oil container on small wheels, steered by a stick; an old motorcycle tyre rolled along as a hoop; a cardboard box or empty cans, mud to sculpt, a stick to wave and slash: these are all you need, and anyway, you have duties to watch over the family cattle by the roadside, to carry loads – and hopefully, attend school, even if only for a few years. The vast majority here are basically literate and most speak English to some extent at least, even in rural communities

The roads never leave habitation in this intensely populated land. I seldom see anything resembling countryside, unless maintained as a natural area by government decree. Every acre, even be it at 45 degrees to level, must be put to account in a land with 50% of its inhabitants under fifteen years, and growing at such an alarming rate. Being Sunday, many were dressed for church, the matrons sporting what must be the fashion: the shiniest, most vibrant fabrics swathed from neck to sandals, with two curious volcanoes of fabric sitting on their shoulders like a visual shrug. It’s a fashion so obvious that it will date very hastily, but it makes work for the numerous seamstresses and tailors, and makes the scant money go round.

*

I paused while it was still so hot for chai (African tea), that turned out when it came to be local black coffee, weak and insipid, mixed directly in the flask. It was lunchtime, and the simple, somewhat grubby ‘hotel’ was serving up gigantic quantities of carbohydrate, supplemented with a few bits of goaty gristle: starchy rice, mashed matoke (savoury local bananas), red kidney beans and potatoes. Cooking is done in huge cauldrons, balanced over sticks and charcoal on a few rocks in a corner. Most work takes place on the floor, the cooking women bending supply from the waist. Service is at the omnipresent Chinese plastic chairs and tables on plastic plates and cups. These are washed in cold water and soap powder, recycling hastily from a small supply. Wiped with a greasy scrap of old towelling, they are refilled in moments, the giant piles of food slopped unceremoniously with wooden spatulas straight from the cauldrons. It’s all a bit unseemly to me, but fingers are soon dipping and dripping into the food. Quantities are prodigious, but nutrition probably poor. No one can comprehend that I don’t want to partake: all I want is some tea – or coffee, as chance elects.

At such times I often think of my old friend, Kim from Norway, one of MY travel mentors, now about 83 I guess, whom I met so long ago in Bolivia when I was green. We’ve always remained good friends. She taught me to drink from cups with my left hand when in doubt of hygiene, for most of the world drinks with the right hand, from that side of the cup!

*

With pauses to shelter, extensive detours thanks to my confused bump of direction, and a horrible 25 kilometres of heavily pot-holed and part-rebuilt road, it was almost five before I reached Sipi and a blustering, extravagant welcome from Precious, Alex still at work at his hotel in town ten miles away. It was eight before he came home, and sat on my bed (there really IS very little furniture here!) to talk and share my chicken, matoke, tomato salad and rice supper.

“We are building! The first room – it’s called Jonathan’s House – is almost finished already. I am determined. All I needed was the help to start! Precious will show you tomorrow; we will soon start to decorate it. Oh, yes! It will be ‘self-contained’ (en-suite)! The provision is already there. I just have to get the blocks for the bed, and finding the grass has been difficult. But we are working hard. I am determined! We thank you so much for your help, Jonathan. It was all we needed. We will use the help wisely.” And I know they will; a push was all they needed. I realised that as soon as Alex told me that the remaining Ugandan money I left him last year as I rode away back to Kenya (£34) had been invested in seed potatoes: thinking for the future, a choice that paid off so well for him in a year with bad harvests; a year in which those ‘Irish’ supported his family and neighbours and prevented hunger. It’s so unusual to meet Africans who plan ahead; the problem of this continent.

I have given Alex and Precious £200 in much needed start-up capital in the past four weeks. From this I am convinced he will build up a business, using his and Precious’s imagination and drive. He already has begun on the second round house. They will be on his own property along the track from this cliff-edge site, so short-sightedly and jealously argued over by his co-owners. If they but saw how they could help him to turn this site into a small goldmine, he could be flying by now but, not planning for the future, his co-owners, living in Canada and distrustful and greedy, want their return instantly, unable to understand the ‘speculate to accumulate’ law of capitalism. So he will develop a pleasant ‘resort’ but without this spectacular view. He is proud to tell me that he already has the first two bookings! Not until October, he laughs, but the support of the people to whom he showed his nascent resort has been encouraging. Next time I come to Sipi – for I am sure I will sometime visit Alex and Precious again – I will stay in Jonathan’s House.

*

For now, I am in the broken-down thatched room, with a gentle spray of rainwater coming through the roof, for a violent thunderstorm with exciting mauve sheet lightning, sprays a light show across the rain-washed view of the enormous plain below my doorstep. The wind is loud, the night wild – but it will be brief and dramatic, as is all weather on this extreme continent. I will sleep very soundly here in Sipi, once again with my welcoming young friends.

DAY 99. MONDAY 26th FEBRUARY 2018. SIPI, UGANDA

Soundly indeed I slept – for ten hours. I rather look forward to coming to Sipi, because it is so conducive to sleep. It’s a bit like sleeping in a tent – only a good deal more comfortable: fresh mountain air, silence and warmth.

This was a quiet, calm day. Against Precious’s ideas of hospitality, I insisted on walking by myself down into the valley below to visit Michael, who was working here as askari on my last visit, and his wife Rose, the delightful, ebullient character who cannot talk, but communicates so extravagantly with her expressive face. They live on their shamba two or three hundred feet below our high bluff. The walk involves clambering down a rough ladder, some forty feet high, to negotiate a part of the rock faces that circle the valley below. As I approached the top of the ladder, I heard voices below and, looking down saw a young couple beginning to climb. Lilly, a pretty girl, was climbing completely unselfconsciously bare breasted, followed by Shafiq, her husband or boyfriend. Seeing my camera, they asked for a photo, never a problem for me, but I was a little disappointed when Shafiq suggested that comely Lilly should replace her tee shirt! Down the mountainside I was warmly welcomed by the lovely Rose, so expressive despite her inarticulate noises; a delightful woman.

*

Poor Alex is being frozen out of his part-inheritance here at Coffeeland Resort by his jealous relatives. A young man has come to stay, representing the members of the family who claim ownership, despite the late owner, a great uncle of Alex, willing him partial rights to the place. With my somewhat rosy views of African life I often don’t see the family jealousies that are unpleasantly common. The man who is staying here now, is here to survey the resort and cost the improvements required from the family. This afternoon as he was discussing water connection with an official, Alex’s name was not mentioned in association with ownership, and he has had no negotiation about potential management.

But Alex, with my seed money, is striking out on his own. In the afternoon, Precious and I walked to their own plot, on which they have built their own mud and stick house – and are now constructing the two first bandas of their own resort. They have big plans: a new kitchen is being constructed; the earth has been dug from an embankment to build the bar; there are plans for a raised drinking terrace, car parking, and gardens. I am impressed: this is ambition. Good for them, and good luck. I feel they will prosper. I also predict that the restoration of the cliff top resort will be ill-planned, badly executed and badly managed, and will result in little good for the greedy family, for they don’t understand what visitors want: a warm welcome, imagination and congenial surroundings. I doubt they will achieve any of that without Alex and Precious.

*

As the sun sank in the sky, a smart 13 year old neighbour, Sam, took me on a walk; at three times the speed of Precious, it must be said. We walked along the precipitous edge of the cliffs around the top of the great amphitheatre and watched a fine sunset from the edge of the rim above one of the now dry falls for which Sipi is famous. Sam was bright and sharp; a good guide. Sitting on the rocky heights beside the yawning drop another boy sat, whittling at a length of eucalyptus with nothing more than the customary machete that every man and boy carries in rural Africa. “What are you making?” I asked. “A gun!” he laughed shyly, showing me his work. The valley constantly hums to the sound of chain saws from below, where men cut fast-growing eucalyptus. Straight and supple, they form the basic building material for all the local houses, fences and structures and bring in about £5 a tree for their owners.

Walking back, now in virtual darkness, for the light fades quickly here on the Equator, we were trailed by a parade of small people, chorusing their, “Hello! How are youuuuu?” One small boy slipped his hand into mine, rubbing his other hand up and down my hairy arm in fascination. I was glad of his small steadying presence as I am always almost blind in the dark, unlike Africans, used to it, who can run and jump if required.

DAY 100. TUESDAY 27th FEBRUARY 2018. SIPI, UGANDA

The weather is changing fast. It’s time to leave; motorbike travels in the rain lose their attraction. And with the rain, the temperature drops too. In the afternoon I witnessed a dramatic rain storm: it cascaded down as if thrown from buckets, and then hailstones the size of peas machine-gunned on the tin roof. In moments all was mud and runnels of rushing water. Just before it happened I was outside in Kapchorwa, the town ten miles up the hill; for we are in the foothills of Mount Elgon, one of Africa’s highest. As I watched, a most extraordinary phenomenon occurred: clouds, boiling and spinning, coiling and billowing, and travelling fast at ground level, enveloped buildings around me, blanketing out the view even a hundred yards distant, a very strange thing to watch in an urban environment.

Alex and I had gone to Kapchorwa to attend a meeting of his volunteer group; the one that dealt with encouraging less births until the vile trump (I never grace him with a capital T) cut the funding because he ‘had more pressing needs for the money at home’ – like giving tax breaks to the disgustingly wealthy, I suppose, now that the richest 8 people in the world, of whom six are American, obscenely, have wealth equal to the poorer 3.6 billion HALF of the world population (2016). Now, fortunately, the Dutch have stepped in and the same volunteer leaders are focusing on trying to discourage gender based violence – although how they hope to have much effect in this male dominated society that knows no social control, I wonder. But these men are doing their best to bring a little enlightenment to their poorly educated, rural communities, some of them through music and drama, some through regular social sessions with the older men of the villages, some by gathering groups of youth, and one by trying to influence the 1000 boda-boda riders of Kapchorwa town and district. 1000..! They are well meaning men in a project coordinated by three women, it seemed. Consulate, the facilitator of the project, I met last year, and so I was invited into the meeting once again. Alex said later that my presence had certainly livened up the session. For we began with lots of questions to the mzungu: most of them about family size and inheritance in England. Needless to say, I astonished them with some of my views about the viability of this poor planet being so vastly over-populated, to the extent that their grandchildren will look upon this profligate age with anger, when they are even more in poverty than at present, for resources in these countries remain the same or reduce. I argued with them about the ridiculous vanity they showed in fathering so many children. “I predict that your great grandchildren will be fighting wars over water. Water is finite on this planet. So is land.”

“Oh, but we will pray to god for more,” said one man, in all seriousness. What answer is there to such blindness? One of the others, slightly more sensible, and more persuaded by science than by the many centuries old morality myths of the Quran and Bible, commented, “We are already fighting wars over water…” and mentioned some locality where violence was rife over water rights.

Then someone laughed and introduced me to one of the two Moslems, from a backward rural area down the hills. “Tell Jonathan how many children you have!”

“Twenty six. With four wives!” he told me, with evident pride.

“WHY?”

“Because the Quran tells me, and because I want my children and their children to remember me.”

“How can you meaningfully educate 26 children, and keep them healthy? It’s not possible. I guarantee you WILL be remembered, but for your greed and irresponsibility and for condemning your great grandchildren to even worse poverty than exists in Africa now. Uganda is said to be the fastest expanding population on earth, but the land stays the same size, with the same resources. Surely you can see the link between we in the West having an average of two children and being rich countries with high education and average life expectancy of 78 or 80, and your poverty, hard graft and dying at 57? Two percent of your nation reach my age – and I am still riding a piki-piki round Africa!”

But the argument is all about land and inheritance. They just could not comprehend that my wealth will be shared amongst friends, willed away quite thoughtfully to those it will benefit. In Africa, ownership of land is all important, and male inheritance the only acceptable form of lineage. My arguments fell on largely deaf and non-comprehending ears, except for a couple of educated younger men (Alex and Robert), who want only one or two children, that they can care for adequately and without stress. I might as well have saved my breath. “But it livened up our meeting!” said Alex on the way home.

*

When the torrents stopped, Alex and I went to the Kapchorwa market to buy food for our supper. The market in Kapchorwa is a mean affair of scrappy wooden shacks along a couple of earth lanes. Now it was unsightly with thick mud and all the wares looked accordingly dingy: plastic shoes covered over by sheets of dirty plastic; derelict second hand clothes gathered hastily from the wires looped along walls, now being rehung on bent wire coat hangers; earthy sacks of ‘Irish’ and cabbages; small piles of tomatoes, bunches of small purple onions, luscious avocados and bundles of green vegetables – all laid out under the dripping roofs of the squalid stalls, women traders lying amongst their wares on the tables, babies and small children everywhere. Amongst all this we slithered and slid in greasy mud, filling another African black plastic bag with our supper, later cooked by Alex at home at his new house, for he is backing away from the Coffeeland resort and concentrating on his own project now that the family member is here to plan new concrete pavilions utterly unsuitable to the site and cottages that will be mismanaged – if they ever transpire. It’s only jealousy that has prompted this sudden interest by the family members blocking Alex’s part ownership: one of them heard that a rich mzungu had come to Coffeeland and Alex was getting rich! That’s me – paying £4 to sleep in a tumbledown, slightly leaky hut. The more I find of family relationships in several parts of Africa, the more envy I witness: it seems people do not celebrate the success or good luck of their children or siblings but fight them for a cut of the perceived profit. Alex’s own father is angry about his son trying to launch out and develop his own business, whereas you’d think he would be giving every encouragement. The family now thinks that Alex has a ‘rich white man’ (me with a gift of £200) and wants part of that deal too. And yet, all the talk in this afternoon’s meeting was of family love, closeness to siblings and the support of neighbours. It seems to me that here is a great romanticised theory, but reality often differs.

*

Sometimes (and rain and chill don’t help!) I think I have seen enough of Africa. The insoluble problems weigh me down, when I hear of the the social ills these volunteers try to eradicate or at least reduce: idleness, drug abuse, alcoholism, rampant rape – and I mean rampant: even fathers with their own daughters – teenage pregnancy, non-consensual sex, murder within the family (usually about inheritance), jealousies and greed. Why can no one see that all these are directly connected with over-population and an average of almost eight children per poor, struggling, early-dying woman? My view of the surface is often so rosily specced, my knowledge slight of social and traditional mores. When I glimpse below the surface at the roiling emotions, it depresses me. This, with my extremely pessimistic predictions for mankind’s ability to sustain life on this planet beyond the next few centuries, makes my thoughts gloomy as I ride, for having seen and begun to understand this mess that is Africa, I can’t just put my head back in the sand. The friendly, outgoing, cheerful surface that I often see as a visitor is just that: the cheerful surface with which everyone greets a stranger. No, now the rain’s coming and I am seeing the seamy side, it’s time to go back and enjoy the fact that my birthright is so much more comfortable.

*

Riding with Alex on the carrier, we passed a large group of boda-boda boys – every group is large at every junction or destination; well, it would be, with a thousand members of the local boda-boda organisation alone – as we passed, Alex started to laugh and translated their calls. “Hey, if mzungus start to ride boda-boda, where will we get customers?!”

*

It’s a two-blanket night in my hut. The temperature plunges with the rain. Usually I sleep with no more than a sheet. I hope the roof doesn’t leak on my bed. Precious and Alex are so sad that I could not stay in the first of their bandas by now. They await the next visit for that. They are charming young people.

DAY 101. WEDNESDAY 28th FEBRUARY 2018. KITALE, KENYA

Back ‘home’: “You are more one of the family now, than a friend! You are welcome any time!” says Adelight. Happily, all the girls are home for half term holiday, so we are a cheerful, full household.

Thanks to the rain, I decided to take the longer route back to Kitale on the tarred roads. The broken road through Suam would be just about impassible now; all that thick dust turned to clogging mud; the hard earth turned to greasy slipperiness; the rocks washed downwards. There will be abandoned vehicles stuck in the mess, churning up the filth as they are extricated. Better to go lamely round on the tarred roads, twice as far. The day remained sunny until 23 kilometres short of Kitale, when a violent thunderstorm, that I had watched gathering as densely slaty skies and dramatic clouds shapes, deluged its weight in forty minutes while I sheltered with some boda-boda boys, in their flip-flops and tee shirts, beneath a tin awning in front of some shops in a small, mud-swilled village. Water cascaded from the noisy, rusty zinc, splashing into the rivers of mud below. The temperature plunges and the boda-boda boys shivered as I pulled on waterproofs. Soon, in the succeeding drizzle, they were back out looking for customers; the customers themselves in shirtsleeves huddling behind the riders in spray and wet. It’s hard when the rains come.

The Malaba border is one that carries most of the commercial traffic between the coast and the interior countries, horrendous lines of trucks and tankers jockeying to pass the rutted, broken, narrow bridge that allows single file traffic. Fortunately, with my motorbike, I could weave my way through and accomplish my business – arcane though it appeared to be – at different windows. No one seemed quite sure what to do with my papers, and I still have the Ugandan customs document that should have been collected in Uganda. “Well, sorry, but I’m not going back! It’s their mistake, and so far as I am concerned, you’ve stamped my piki-piki back into Kenya and that’s all that I am bothered about!” All I wanted was to get out of the chaos. I rode away.

I’m glad to get away from Ugandan driving, the worst in Africa that I know. It’s interesting to see how much better is the infrastructure on the Kenyan side of the border. It’s cleaner, less densely populated and things just seem to work better. This country hasn’t the incredible population surge of Uganda (still a high birthrate, but not in the extremes of their neighbour), with the consequent pressure on resources and services. The ban on plastic bags has had perceptible influence – although a Ugandan told me that Kenya makes all their plastic bags; the ones that billow and litter the landscape, pollute the fields and strangle the animals of Uganda.

*

“Just as well you didn’t go to Ethiopia!” Rico greets me. “It’s in chaos; a state of emergency. The government has resigned. You’d have had trouble moving about, or been thrown out!” I can’t find details, but he gets the East African news here in Kitale; news that hardly registers on our Western- centric media. Still, it’d have been interesting to see for myself, but it would have made a lot of problems I suppose. With no government, the rest of the system will collapse quickly into a shambles…

DAY 102. THURSDAY 1st MARCH 2018. KITALE, KENYA

The rains have arrived. But, says Rico, “It might rain like this today, and not rain again for a fortnight.” But this feels like the start of the rainy season. A violent rainstorm, with attendant thunder, left a long, drizzly rain all evening. The ground needs it of course; it’s only me that doesn’t welcome the new season. Africa quickly turns to red mud and becomes unsightly – and little fun to negotiate on two wheels. Well, my journeys now are limited and will have to take place during windows of dry weather.

So a day of little activity beyond trying to find out why my Mosquito hasn’t been starting from cold for the past two or three weeks. I have had to bump start since I was in Rwanda. We think we have traced the problem to two tiny tears in the carburettor diaphragm. It’s not allowing sufficient fuel to start the motor. Looks as if I will have to continue to try to park on hills at night for a while! There are usually plenty of volunteers to give me a push. Cor, Rico’s Dutch neighbour, who’s something of an expert on motorbike engines, knows where we might get a new diaphragm in Nairobi.

The other afternoon, after sheltering from the rain for forty minutes, the bike wouldn’t start. “We push!” volunteered some boys. I thanked them, jumped aboard and began to push the bike with my feet down a slight, very muddy slope. I looked round and no one was pushing at all! Happily, the motor started before I got to the bottom. It starts easily with a push.

So I am happy to be here in Kitale, where I am made so easily welcome, during this wet period. The mornings are usually dry, so I may have to restrict my movement to earlier rides. It gets cold when it rains; not the cold of Britain, about which I receive various emails just now as temperatures plunge and even Devon is submerged beneath snow – the ‘Beast from the East’ as the media terms the cold spell, while the Arctic basks in temperatures way above freezing… My ‘cold’ is 15 degrees, when I have to put a thin jersey over my tee shirt and shorts.

DAY 103. FRIDAY 2nd MARCH 2018. KITALE, KENYA

It’s rained just about the whole day: wet, English rain. No doubt the farmers will be happy. I’m not. Oh well, I’ve only a few days to go. It makes for uneventful days though. Cor, next door, has managed to locate a new diaphragm in Nairobi for the Mosquito, which we hope will be sent up in a day or two, and I removed and replaced the carburettor successfully to bodge a repair, and managed to start the bike with a good push from two of the girls, so I can continue with my journey, dependent on the rain.

Meanwhile, it’s such fun to be part of this happy extended family. For one from a small nuclear family, being a member of such a cheerful, congenial, large household is a lot of fun. “Well, you’re not hard to get along with!” say Rico and Adelight; and I guess, in this situation, I’m probably not – but that’s more to their credit than mine! From little Maria, the happiest baby I’ve known, through Shamilla, who no one could help loving, through all the other girls, to Scovia, who just makes me smile to look at her – well, it’s an easy life for me, and a very joyful, merry one.

I’m putting this up while I have some internet, as I will be out of range, so to speak, for a few days…

DAY 92 MONDAY 19th FEBRUARY 2018. MASAKA, UGANDA

It’s taken me until February 19th to spot that I have headed every entry since January 1st as ‘2017’! That’s the trouble with copy and paste…

This morning I began the long ride back to Kenya. I was quite sad to leave the White Horse Inn and its cheerful staff and lovely gardens. But the weather is changing up there and it won’t be long before the rains begin in earnest. As it is, there was a big thunderstorm soon after I went to bed last evening. I’m a good deal lower in altitude now, and it’s pleasantly mild this evening in Masaka, a bustling, not particularly attractive town on the main road back to Kampala, still a day’s ride away. I rode further than I wished today, about 275 kilometres. I did that because the Mosquito isn’t quite happy and I knew help wouldn’t be available until I hit a larger town. It’s pretty scarce here, but I found a fellow called Jahz – middle aged, so I trust him more than the boda-boda butchers – and between us we agreed that all the signs point to adulterated petrol; either water or dirt in the tank. Tomorrow he has someone who will drain and wash out the tank for me before I head east again. We’ll replace the plug again too.

*

The ride was considerably more relaxing than I feared, so far. This episode of my journal won’t hit my blog site until after the journey’s over, so I can admit that I have been apprehensive of this section of my East African journey for a long time; since I decided to return to Uganda, in fact. Ugandan driving is the worst I have experienced in the seventeen, I think it is, sub-Saharan countries in which I have ridden, and the roads around and approaches to Kampala frightened me last time I rode here. Sadly, there is no route to avoid it. Still, thus far, and I am still many miles from Kampala, the road was calm and lightly used. My way brought me down from Kabale’s heights, sweeping down and into a pleasant ride through high rolling hills, with abundant tree cover and still green from the fairly wet year. Later, the road flattened out into longer waves and drier landscapes. I passed through many a small straggling roadside town, and my principle emotion of the day was to thank my good fortune that I was not born sentenced to live my life in such places. One very strong influence of travelling in Africa is that of gratitude to be able to experience it all – but ultimately to be able to leave it all behind me! It does make me appreciate my privileges and birthright.

*

Bowling along fifty or sixty kilometres from Kabale, I was flagged down by the police. I was riding at 71kph in a 50kph area! Frankly, I frequently do. The officers were two men and a woman. “You will have to go to the bank and pay!” declared the policewoman, not unfriendly. I was interested that I would have to pay the fine at a bank – an obvious anti-corruption measure. “Well,” I admitted, “it’s a fair cop! I was enjoying the scenery so much; Uganda’s so beautiful! And the road is so good and fun to ride. Such magnificent scenery…” Once again, smiles, cheerful talking and the silver tongue had their way. I am an old hand now. Never argue with an African official, just look suitably contrite and heap praises on the locality and their thoroughness in doing their job so well to keep us all safe. Interest them in my journey; let them laugh at the ‘old muzee’ (the respectful term for older men) riding a motorbike at such an ‘advanced’ age. Well, you get the picture. Charm, it’s called, and I can lay it on when required… especially when the alternative costs £40 in a speeding fine.

“…but we can let you off…” said the policewoman. And actually, I realised as I rode away with a smile, how could they ever know if I paid or not? They could hardly mark it against my (British) licence, or my (Kenyan) registration, and no African computer is efficient to pick me up at the border. It was probably more trouble than it was worth to even fill in the forms.

“How many children have you?” asked the junior policeman.

“Oh, two…” I always invent a couple in these casual situations.

“Only TWO! Why, I have THIRTEEN!”

Sometimes, it’s not even worth starting the argument about the future of the planet, the resources of Uganda, the impossibility of educating thirteen children to any meaningful level… I decided just to express shock – rather, you understand, than express the admiration of his virility he desired. “…With six women!” I heard him shout as I rode away.

“You should control yourself!” I suggested. It was a polite way of saying ‘you should be castrated’!

My parting shot, as I accelerated away, was to call to the policewoman, “you women, you should take control in Africa! You don’t need these bloody men!” Deaf ears, I fear. And once again, my pessimism for the future of mankind on this beleaguered planet shaped my thoughts for the next few miles.

*

At 8.30, I am sitting here after supper, with a Club beer, rubbing my eyes in weariness. 8.30! I bargained my way into a pretty smart hotel again, on a hill above the sprawling town. It’s airy at least, and after a bit of negotiating, a quid below my £15 budget, from £18. For four months I have paid a maximum of a pound for a pint of beer. It’s going to be such a shock to get back to Harberton at £3.50 plus! Just as well I seldom ever have to negotiate for accommodation in England. It’d cost me £14 to camp in my own tent some places.

DAY 93 TUESDAY 20th FEBRUARY 2018. KAMPALA, UGANDA

A few days ago I was absolutely determined I would not stay in Kampala. Walking just now to find food – tonight’s guest house has no food or drink – I looked at the traffic antics and thought, ‘how does anyone cope with this mess and madness?’ – and then realised that I had driven through it just hours ago. Sometimes I sit in Perry’s big car in the crazy Accra traffic and think the same; but somehow, when you actually have to do it, it’s quite different. In fact, I hate to admit it: it’s quite exhilarating! And Kampala has a certain mad African charm: it’s every man for himself, but not in any aggressive fashion. There’s a sort of community feel to the craziness; no one appears particularly jealous if you manage to weave in front: there’s none of that sense that, if I can’t get ahead, then I won’t let you, that I often get as a biker in Britain. I’d thought I would stay outside the city and ride through to stay the other side, but I relented as I rode into the traffic of the city. My pretty failsafe bump of direction steered me towards the Entebbe road, down which I stayed last year – despite the fact that I approached the city from another direction. I even recognised roughly where I was and then recognised the bike breakers from whom I bought a second hand shock absorber last year. Then I knew exactly where I was and found the ‘Clock Tower’ roundabout, with its red and white colonial tower marooned amongst the craziest traffic in East Africa. I rode south towards Entebbe, just 35 kilometres away towards Lake Victoria, for a few kilometres to get away from the noise of the city, and found a decent guest house up a rutted track off the road; just far enough away to be peaceful. Actually, it’s one of the nicest rooms I’ve rented, in a quiet compound of modern bungalow-style rooms: a large bed, spotless bathroom with warm water, and well appointed – for a little over £12. No breakfast, but that’s easily accomplished on the edge of the big city.

*

It was after noon before I got away from Masaka. By then Jahz’s boys had stripped my carburettor, emptied and cleaned out my tank and found me two new Japanese spark plugs somewhere in town. Meanwhile, I adjusted the chain and washed the extremely dirty air filter. This was all done on oil and petrol soaked mud at the edge of a piece of town wasteland, during which a downpour added filth to the underfoot conditions. The boys were so friendly, especially Hasim, known as ‘doc’, who spoke the best English of them all; a quietly spoken, respectful lad of considerable charm. The ‘boss’ appeared to be Ibrahim, and there were, as always, a crowd of hangers-on and viewers. The work took much of three hours and Jahz’s bill for labour was two pounds! Ocean, Plymouth, BMW price would have been over one hundred times that, plus VAT!

Mind you, the bike still coughed and cut out for a second now and again as I motored towards the capital, so the problem is not actually solved, despite the bits of dirt, the dust and the lump of fluff that rinsed out of the tank. I found, however, that if I keep my speed between 60 to 65kph, the engine runs fine. So I guess it’s just a slower ride home for now.

*

Funny how relaxed I feel here, after the angst of last week in Rwanda. There’s a vitality about this madness; everyone greets me with a smile; they laugh at the chaos; they seem to be content with one another, friendly, cheerful, positive. This is a fun country. I’m sitting now in a very basic outdoor bar beside a junction between the main Entebbe road with its dense traffic, and the turn off onto the earth lanes to the urban hills where the guest house is, just two hundred yards up a pitted dirt track. Lads play pool under a tin shelter behind me; multitudes of boda-boda boys sit at the junction, all calling to me as I pass, with cheerful greetings, in the hope of a hire. “Oh, I’ve been on a piki-piki all day! I certainly don’t want to sit on yours!” Every meal in East Africa is taken to the sound of endless TV: either wall to wall tabloid (generally African) 24 hour news (who needs it?) or, more commonly, absolutely perpetual, ceaseless football games – breakfast to dinner, and doubtless beyond. It’s certainly the one thing that virtually every African (man) knows about Britain: our biggest world export, beyond doubt.

*

So far, the road has been reasonable. The worst, most aggressive of drivers are those of the huge racing international bus companies, for they give no consideration to meagre boda-bodas, and, of course, I am classified as a boda-boda, even though I go so much faster. Perhaps, I have decided, it’s just best to forget my pride and BE a boda-boda! It’s probably safer than trying to insist on my rights as a fellow road user – at least until I get out of Uganda. Riding here, especially on this East African Highway that flies across Uganda from Rwanda and even Congo all the way to Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast, and brings all the goods and fuel for the landlocked interior from the ports, you really DO need eyes in the back of your head, as well as in front and all around. It’s tiring, coping with traffic of this danger. Last year, I said, never again. And here I am, courtesy of the Ethiopian embassy, Nairobi, here again.

But there is a lively, immediate attraction about this frenetic Kampala. And the beer in this basic neighbourhood bar is the cheapest yet – 70 pence a half litre. Gosh, the Church House is going to be a shock! Five times a shock. I feel so much more involved and positive again. The journey is working again.

DAY 94 WEDNESDAY 21st FEBRUARY 2018. KAMPALA, UGANDA

Kampala, I found last year, is the best place in these countries for dealing with repairs and parts for Japanese bikes, so most of today was spent in just that. There’s a whole area of the city that is devoted to these activities, and it’s at the top of the crazy main Entebbe road, eight kilometres down which I am staying. Getting there through the mad traffic was interesting, and quite fun, since I can flaunt every traffic regulation, and am probably a better; certainly more observant rider than most others in these countries.

My rear tyre has carried me 12,000 kilometres (7500 miles) and still would have taken me another three or four, but I know that replacements are very rare to find outside Kampala, and I knew exactly where to go – so much so that the boys in the incredibly ragged workshop remembered me from last year. Later, I went to the nearby petrol station, right on the Clock Tower roundabout, one of the craziest places in the city, to check the pressure – since no worker has any gauge; they just guess. “So you’ve fitted another tyre!” exclaimed the man at the air pressure machine. “How was the one you bought last year?” Amazing! But I guess mzungus on piki-pikis are rare and memorable. A new tyre cost £51 and £1 to the lad for fitting it, a horrible task with new trail tyres. Then I went looking for advice about the engine cutting out under power. For this I went to the Japanese specialists, where an incredible array of machines in all stages of dereliction stand beside the heaving traffic on the mud of the roadsides.

Edward, a small middle aged mechanic with half a container as workshop, reckoned that the coil was probably beginning to fail; or the control unit under the seat that distributes the signals for the spark. Of course, I won’t know until I have been on the road some time tomorrow, if the two second hand replacements solve my problem! For £70 he replaced both with ones stripped from other machines. I kept the old ones as insurance… Well, the Mosquito is still running, so I must hope that his diagnosis was correct. I’d arrived at roughly the same conclusion myself, but of course no one has the equipment to run tests on any of these components, so replacement and hope are the only options.

Before I left the first seedy and squalid workshop – a shower had loosened the mud and oil of the workspace floor by then – the used tyre was hanging on the door for resale! Nothing gets thrown away if there’s the vaguest chance of making some money from it. My old tyre, complete with a small cut in the outer wall, and having motored 12,000 hard kilometres, will end up on another machine in due course. I was happy to donate it.

All this took most of my travelling day. By the time the work was finished, about three, I couldn’t face struggling through more traffic; not even to test the bike down the Entebbe road, now full of crawling traffic and weaving boda-bodas. I’m sitting not far from it now, at seven o’clock, and it is still crowded and creeping along. Instead, I found a bakery at the end of the street where the guest house is situated and ate cake for pretty much the first time since that cafe north of Mount Kenya; not quite up to Pat Mills’ standard of rich fruit cake, but not a bad alternative for East Africa at all. With freshly pressed mango and passion juices, it’s a discovery for breakfast tomorrow.

I’m disappointed this evening to find that about £150 or £160 appears to have been filched from my bags at some point in the last eight days. I keep a selection of smaller denomination notes: £10, £20, $10 and so forth, in a zipped bag that contains all my small paper items and bits and pieces, well down in my left hand pannier bag. I recollect getting out about £100 shortly before reaching the Rwanda border, and think I remember putting them back later that day. Oh well, on the whole, my last six winters of travelling have been astonishingly crime free – a pair of headphones and this cash. I’m more disappointed that someone I have trusted in a hotel in which I have stayed has given way to opportunity to rifle in my luggage. Oddly, some notes are left, which suggests just a quick delve, rather than a premeditated theft. I hope it will support a good cause at least. Pity, though… It’s not as if I stay in the sort of dives and brothels in which I used to lodge! Oh well, I am comfortable in the knowledge that they definitely need it more than me, at least. Maybe I should consider it a charitable donation.

Tomorrow I must gird up my loins and face the most frightening road in Africa, in my opinion. Happily, I have a quiet place to sleep in preparation. It’s only fifty miles, but it terrified me last year. Sadly, it’s also unavoidable.

DAY 95 THURSDAY 22nd FEBRUARY 2018. KAMPALA, UGANDA

A personal disaster struck a couple of hours ago as I ate a rather good chicken pie from the excellent bakery at the end of the street. With a mighty cracking noise, my three front teeth (some of the few I have left…), that are an extremely expensive bridge and crown mechanism (£1000 from a rip-off dental clinic in Totnes), came loose and now wobbles in an unsightly fashion, just when I was congratulating myself on getting through a complete African journey without any tooth problems – for my teeth are my weakest point, unfortunately. I was rather grateful to the dentist who insisted that he pulled two more of my few remaining teeth a week before I flew to Ghana, despite his lack of sensitivity in telling me how his Polish grandmother lived a full life into her 90s with only two teeth. Thanks to his advice I have had a rare four months without any gum infections. Now I am on a liquid diet and must find a dentist to patch me up – if that’s possible. Fresh fruit juice and beer for supper tonight.

*

Waking to a bright sunny morning after ten hours of sleep, I decided to stay another night in this pleasant guest house and visit the big city. I may never come this way again (said that last year) so I may as well experience Kampala for a day. I left the Mosquito behind and flagged down a city-bound matatu at the end of the road and bounced through the morning traffic chaos, letting someone else do the driving. It meant I could just wear my shorts and tee shirt and carry all I needed in my pockets: a good sense of freedom.

I’ve visited more than twenty African capitals and many more African cities, but Kampala is in a class all of its own for sheer, utter, mad chaos. This is a warning of what happens when you have traffic anarchy and a ballooning population; when control just breaks down and turmoil and disorder take over. It’s unlike any city I ever knew, is Kampala. There is no public infrastructure; no city run public transport, just a million (and I doubt I exaggerate) uncontrolled boda-bodas fighting for business and road space with hundreds of thousands of minibus matatus – every one of them making up their own traffic rules and wanting to get their passengers to their destinations first, so they can refill and make more money, for matatus make money by the numbers of people they carry in a day. Then of course, there are pedestrians, fighting in their millions to get from place to place in a city made for half the number, and with broken pavements that are made largely impassible by shop wares flowing out over the pavement; squatting beggars of every description – more than I have seen in any other African city; itinerant salespeople spreading their wares across the pavements, and themselves with them, babies too. There are signs that protrude, cars that park wherever they can, including the walkways and pavements, and the million boda-bodas clogging every junction and space as they await passengers. It’s unbelievable if you haven’t seen it for yourself. Every other African city – even Accra – is sedate by comparison. Everyone exists by trying to sell something to everyone else; this is informal employment taken to an extreme, be they street traders, boda-boda boys or shopkeepers.

The saving grace of all this total shambles and confusion is that those involved are Ugandans, one of the friendliest races on earth. Without that, a day like this would have been unadulterated hell and horror. As it was, it was eye opening and revealing, but calmly acceptable as everyone left me to myself, was respectful and returned any smile or eye contact happily. Sometimes it was fun to exchange a wry gestural comment on it all with a look or a shrug and a complicit smile across the crowd. At one point, I climbed to an upper storey of an arcade that seemed devoted to selling dresses, displayed on hundreds of cheap plastic mannequins of an odd fawn colour common here; heads sellotaped to bodies; sometimes heads formed more of sellotape than plastic, where they had suffered terrible plastic facial injuries – or merely collapsed down the stairs that they lined like a line of dominoes perhaps. These places must be the most awful fire hazards imaginable, boxes, clutter and goods piled on every surface, constricting every doorway and stairway with, doubtless, no fire codes or sufficient exits and violently flammable cheap synthetic clothes from Chinese production lines. I went up to look down on the chaos at the crossroad below and stood there thanking my good fortune that I might never see this mess again.

Crossing the roads as a pedestrian is hard, until I realised that I just had to force my way. Oddly, it worked so much easier. With an eye glaring at drivers, the best is just to exercise your right to cross. I got many a glare and a few challenging smiles, but I got across each road safely. And I walked many hot miles; I couldn’t countenance a boda-boda ride: I’ve watched too may riders for that. I walked out to the Uganda Museum, feeling duty bound as a tourist to make the effort. Oh dear… The Uganda Museum was started in 1902, the first colonial collection in Africa, set up in a building in Entebbe, the colonial capital. It’s in its third home now, built in the sixties – probably the last time a shilling was spent on displays, its ancient dark show cases flyblown and faded; its dioramas of moulting animals on dusty plains unlit, bakelite bulb holders dangling empty on twisted flex behind dirty glass; lino tiles curling on the floors; dust covered fossils lifeless and boring; a fine collection of cracking musical instruments set amongst old faded black and white photos of colonial era natives in loin cloths; frequent empty cases filled only with dust and cobwebs. The only saving graces: Alice and Isaac, with both of whom I enjoyed conversations: Alice, who played a one-stringed traditional instrument in a faded gallery and wanted advice about her daughter; should she study art and design or industrial design, and what was the difference? and Isaac, from Kisoro, who spent his childhood exploring the regions in which I was riding last week. He studied literature and is now employed with the Uganda National Library, in the museum compound. With Isaac I had a jocular conversation about some of the books he was selling from a stall. One was the president, Yoseri Museveni’s autobiography, ‘Sowing the mustard seed’ and another a satirical take off, ‘Unsowing the mustard seed’ by a flippant critic. We spoke of the hope that the deposition of Mugabe has given Africans for deposing their own well seated antique dictators and aspiring life presidents. It’s so good to meet cultured, intellectual Africans and be able to share our common language.

With my wobbly front set, I am sitting in the same rough and ready beer bar on a threadbare grass embankment at the side of the local dirt road that must go to some expensive suburban housing, to judge by the quality of car that uses the road – and the thriving bakery, certainly a cut above any other I’ve seen, and probably existing by catering to slightly richer, discerning customers. There’s a power cut – not uncommon – and the pool players play by torchlight and I sit beneath the stars and dust-covered trees, blinded by the light of my iPad. It’s cool now. I’ll soon have to retreat to my bedroom, where a sheet is sufficient covering thank goodness, for I would be pressed to a slither by the immensely heavy Chinese, inch thick blanket supplied: ‘100% synthetic’ as the label proudly displays. It weighs more than a carpet, with its florid whirls and whorls of autumn leaves.

I hope I can find a dentist in the morning. I’ll be hungry if I don’t! I can’t cough or yawn for fear of the loosely swinging three front teeth… If I am very lucky, maybe it’s just the glue that’s come unstuck. Probably payment for that cake yesterday!

Time to drink up and go. I guess the power-out covers my guest house, in which case, it’s straight to bed at 8.30 again.

DAY 96 FRIDAY 23rd FEBRUARY 2018. KAMPALA, UGANDA

I’ve lost it tonight: my sense of humour, my patience and my travel head. I’m not even sure I can write tonight; maybe I’ll have to complete in the morning.

What a day; what a ******* day. All I want right now, is to get out of this city and never see it again. It’s a revelation of what Armageddon might well be, when it comes: a city designed for a third the number of inhabitants with very little infrastructure – and what there is, provided fifty years ago when the country’s population – and remember, this is one of the fastest growing nations on earth with terrifying statistics – was many times smaller. This is now a city of millions; millions of individuals who know no laws or regulations; whose country has just been rated the 30th most corrupt in the world (I shall avoid the other 29! They start with Somalia and South Sudan, by the way); people who have small resources and of whom 7 out of 10 drop out of school by Senior Four class and 9 out of 10 before A levels.

Hell on earth would be to be condemned to live in Kampala: a life sentence. Nairobi rises consistently in my estimation… It just took me a little over an hour and a half – starting at 8.30 in the evening – to travel a bit more than six miles in chaotic traffic that knows no laws. Imagine having to do that six days a week, as many of those around me in the packed matatu must do. It’s a nightmare vision of modern life, Kampala: of what modern life can degenerate into. How it makes me appreciate Harberton.

The millions of small, smelly Chinese boda-boda bikes are one of the main causes of this horror. They know no restriction: using any means to get their passengers through the mess. They ride on what pavements there are; they ride up the wrong carriage ways; they weave in and out of the belching matatus, themselves in their hundreds of thousands in the gridlock; they ride dangerously and recklessly. There must be hospital wards filled with the injured, for no one has any protection, especially the passengers. No one, or very few, I hazard, are insured in any meaningful way – and health provision here is largely private. Moving about this city is the most stressful I have witnessed. There is, of course, no provision for crossing roads as a pedestrian, so people have to weave between jostling cars and weaving bodas. Crossing the main Kampala to Entebbe road has to be seen to be believed: women with babies on their backs having to run dangerously across two and a half lanes of racing – or, if they are lucky, stationary, traffic – to reach the median and clamber over the steel crash barriers to chance the other two and a half lanes. Now and again everything stops while a passing dignitary is escorted by wailing police sirens in convoy home for his supper, followed by a line of chancers, joining the convoy with their hazard lights flashing too. It is ghastly beyond description and unimaginable as you sit there and read this. If you haven’t SEEN it, you have NO idea… And at night the monstrous mayhem is enhanced, for there are virtually no street lights, and the pavements, such as they are, abound with traps and hazards, unseeable with dazzling boda-boda lights and deep shadows behind cars parked on the pavements. There are hidden steps and steep slopes; uncovered manholes; long forgotten road works, started but never filled in; beggars – quite a lot of them professional rings employed by unscrupulous landlords in exchange for basic accommodation; traders with their wares still sprawled on the broken pavements; drunks and the destitute asleep ; a baby sitting alone in the middle of a dark pavement, unheeded; air-time salespeople for the many mobile services, with bright umbrellas blocking progress; changes of level; rubbish and garbage; broken bricks and mud; the million boda-bodas with their shouting, hooting riders vying for passengers; derelict lamp standards that once, in better, kinder days, illumined streets with a quarter of the people and a tenth of the vehicular traffic. In my considerable travels, I have yet to see the equal of Kampala. I want to leave. I don’t want to come back. Seeing is believing, and believing is to avoid. I now have an extreme against which to measure all other cities. Enough is enough.

*

I try to believe that every travelling experience should be met with interest and become part of the travel story. It’s difficult to maintain that when the whole day, from 10.30 until 7.30 was spent in a dentist’s waiting room, hungry and a bit anxious. There’s an American mzungu living at the guest house here: he’s been in Uganda three and a half years, married now with a small child. “Have you been here long enough to require a dentist?” I asked him yesterday. He sent me to a Dr Mawano in the city centre. It’s quite an upmarket dental practice, and made me realise how fortunate it was that my dental mishap happened here in the capital: out in the provinces I’d have had no chance to find a half-decent dentist to help.

It was three hours (regaled as always by TV – nature documentaries at least – as I tried to read my book. Why is it that people are so terrified of silence now?) before I was seen by Ronata, a pretty, cheerful young dentist. She clucked and commiserated and said after a few moments, “Well, these teeth aren’t yours any more!” Two teeth held the front bridge, both crowned long ago – actually, fifty years ago! I recollect really wanting to go to school with the ground-down stumps, but the dentist insisted on putting temporary crowns. The teeth had discoloured thanks to Tetracycline, the first wonder antibiotic that all we children of the fifties were fed for all our illnesses. The left anchor was loose from bone loss (my problem) and the right one had shattered asunder, breaking right in half with that chicken pie. Ronata fetched her senior partner, Dr Mawano, who confirmed that there was no saving the bridge and talked of implants, bone grafts and so forth. When I explained that I was a passing tourist, he thought they could make me a plate with the three teeth by five o’clock! That, it seemed to me, was service. The total cost would be £95: £4 for the inspection, £10 for the extraction, a £20 supplement for the haste at which the plate would be made and £60 odd, for the plate.

Ronata drew the wobbly tooth, still with half-attached £1000 bridge, smoothed off the broken end of the other, and I went to walk about town for an hour and a half, coming back at five. But the work wasn’t finished until 7.30 – astonishingly, the practice still open and Dr Mawano still working – when I walked away – now in the perilous dark – with a mouth seemingly full of plastic and a lisp, and I admit, a certain degree of misery, ameliorated only by the fact that the problem was solved so easily in a day. Well, not solved but postponed to expensive dentistry at home…

I picked up a soft meal of pasta and juice in an overpriced place in the city centre, new teeth feeling huge and cumbersome, like eating with a big boiled sweet in my mouth and, against my better judgement, took a boda-boda to the matatu station for the Entebbe road. It was now 8.15 and thousands were still trying to get home from the city, thousands. At last I found a matatu and clambered into the front seat, mouth full of plastic and by now getting short tempered. It then took a little more than one and a half hours to travel about six miles. I could walk at that speed – but there are no pavements. Instead, I had to suffer and mope my way through those millions of scrambling, thrusting vehicles down the dark road lined with millions of people walking in the mess; still trading their goods; cooking snacks; arguing, bargaining, shouting and conversing. All about me was chaos and the matatu was hot and cramped. At last I was able to fall out at the end of the dirt road to the expensive suburbs and bought a cup of fresh mango juice at the good bakery.

Imagine my frustration, to the point of shouting obscenities and close to tears of anger by now, when I fell over on the pitch dark dirt road, slipping into a dust-filled drainage runnel caused by the total lack of public infrastructure on this suburban track to expensive homes. My juice spilled over my hand and I slung the paper cup into the bushes – the first time I have thrown a piece of trash in decades in a public place. What difference would my paper cup make to this utter shambles, this mess, this chaos, this uncontrolled bedlam? Shouting vulgarities into the night, I picked myself up and slithered and slipped the last unlit rutted yards to the guest house. I couldn’t even be bothered to get a beer. It was now 10.15 at night, long after my bedtime, especially tonight, at the end of a totally frustrating, rather miserable day on which my false teeth came another step closer: I think I now have fifteen and a half of my original complement of 32 teeth. But I suppose the greatest quality of we humans is adaptability. Perhaps I’ll get used to the mouthful of slightly loose plastic, although right now it feels unlikely.

DAY 97. FRIDAY 24th FEBRUARY 2018. JINJA, UGANDA

Travelling alone I sometimes create irrational demons. It’s good to face those demons.

The road from Kampala to Jinja was the most frightening stretch of my 7000 kilometre ride last year. For weeks now, since the day I decided to return to Uganda, I have inspected my map to invent a way to avoid those fifty dreaded miles, but there really isn’t any sensible detour.

And you know what? It wasn’t as bad as my imagination – although, reading this, you can have NO conception of the first twenty miles or of the pandemonium of the traffic of Kampala and its outskirts, through which I was forced to fight my way. I found a word that I like: mobocracy, which as you might imagine, means rule by the mob. That’s Kampala. Fortunately, my Mosquito has twice the engine power of virtually every other bike, of which the vast majority are boda-bodas, and I probably have a hundred times the experience and training (‘training’, what’s THAT in Uganda?) than any of them. I am more aware of what’s around me on the road than any of them. Otherwise I would still be in Kampala, battling with the traffic. Red lights are just a decoration so far as the bodas are concerned, so is traffic flow. If you can squeeze through a gap, ride over the pavement or central reservation, through a petrol station, over a roundabout – you do it. As I stood waiting for the lights to change (quaint behaviour) I did observe a small initiative called ‘Safe Boda’, and a boda rider waiting beside me, with helmet and tabard advertising his training.

The road from Kampala to Jinja is the most used in the country. It carries an average (I saw this in yesterday’s newspaper that I read from cover to cover in the dentists’ waiting room – and very boring it was too), carries an average of 270,000 passengers a day. And it’s a single carriageway almost all of the way; broken and worn. It carries most of the buses, straining articulated lorries and petrol tankers in the country, and those to Rwanda, grinding up long hills at twenty miles an hour with vast jams stretching miles behind them; matatus weaving in and out dangerously; overtaking that has to be seen to be believed and passing through crowded towns filled with blockages and jostling taxi matatus. It requires total concentration, to know what’s in front; what’s following and what might suddenly, without warning, pull out and overtake head-on. By the time I arrived in Jinja, despite the short journey – only sixty miles today – I was well ready to stop, and gently dozed off over a book for an hour on my bed. Maybe the last couple fo days have been more stressful than I thought, for I slept well and long each night in that pleasant guest house on the Entebbe road, except maybe, for the preoccupation with my bloody teeth!

*

Jinja’s a pleasant town, larger than it seems from the central part. It sits at the so called ‘source of the Nile’ and I am sitting writing, with a beer, in a threadbare garden overlooking the great river as it starts its journey down to Egypt and the Mediterranean. It’s astonishing to think that the water that slides past me here, will flow for two and half thousand miles, down to the skirts of Europe and the Middle East. I wonder how long it takes to get there, these molecules that float by, quite fast as it flows out of the great inland sea of Lake Victoria a half mile to my left, about to pass through the turbines of the dam that blew away the natural sight of Rippon Falls a few decades back? The river’s about thirty feet below me and maybe 400 yards wide here. It will pass through the big swampy inland lakes of Uganda, over the Karuma Falls that I crossed three weeks ago; on down to Lake Albert over the impressive Murchison Falls; changing names from the Victoria Nile to the Albert Nile and so to the White Nile for its journey through Sudan and Egypt.

Last year I found a decent small hotel and negotiated within my budget, so I returned this afternoon and was recognised by the staff. I suppose it’s not SO surprising really: after all, how many white haired mzungus pass through on motorbikes? I got the same room for the same price – cheaper this year as the exchange rate has changed in my favour (and with Brexit, there can’t be many countries where THAT is still the case…).

The main street of Jinja is the attraction for me, although for most mzungus it’s the ‘adventure tourism’ – all the bungee jumping, white water rafting, and organised safaris – that makes this perhaps the tourism centre of the country. Main Street is a fadingly elegant reminder of Asian colonial days, with long arcaded shop units and some fine Indian influenced African architecture, and a few large Indian temples. After Idi Amin’s terror was over, Uganda tried to attract back the Asians, the backbone of their urban economies, and in Jinja many seem to have returned and taken back their possessions. There’s a distinct Asian influence. It has many touristic shops, but Uganda’s – well, East Africa’s – craft scene is disappointing. All shops, the length and breadth of Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda stock just about the same items: almost nothing reflects any local character or local source. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that quite a lot of the ‘African’ artefacts are now mass produced in China, where labour is EVEN cheaper than here. Much of it is produced with no heart; obviously mass-produced by an uncaring process that shows very little talent or imagination. It’s largely derivative and badly finished. But I had a lovely conversation with delightful Stella for half an hour in a tourist trinket shop: an educated woman with considerable charm, I enjoyed the fact that we share a language with such facility. The African fabric iPad cover I bought for a couple of pounds will remind me of Stella. We mutually agreed that we had cheered one another’s day!

I’m persevering with the teeth! They wobble and clatter if I eat with them, and the temptation is to remove the plate for supper (in frustration, I bloody did!). I’m still philosophically divided on old age. I love travelling as an older person: so much more fun. I threaten no one, so can be as cheeky and charming as I like to anyone: after all, I am just an old muzee, uncle, daddy, baba, old man. I am generally respected for my age in Africa. It astonishes people that such an ‘old’ bloke is riding a piki-piki around their countries. By this time of life, I don’t feel the need to prove anything, to impress, to demand status, to seek popularity. If people don’t like the way I am, so long as I am not abusing or affecting them adversely, then it’s their problem, not mine! I can be uncompromising about that now. But… my teeth fall out and I DO get more weary from my efforts than I used to. Even I have to admit that: having a bit of a doze when I arrived in Jinja… Still, there’s life in the old dog yet. I have achieved the age range – plus – of two percent of the people of Uganda. TWO percent of them make it to 65.

*

A most interesting email just came in from Rico, in response to reading my complaints of the begging in Rwanda, of which I will copy the relevant part verbatim:

‘I feel that I have to come to the defence of the Rwandese children. I believe that 75 out of 100 times a kid was calling Money to you (with or without the hand held up) this was NOT asking for money, but simply greeting you. They don’t actually say ‘money’, but ‘Mo neh’.

This was explained to me across Lake Kivu in Congo. I also complained about the begging habit, but I was told by a local staff member, that it was in fact a friendly greeting. I was also told that because the two ‘words’ sound so similar, some (white) people in the more populated regions, started to respond to the greeting by giving money or other small presents… As children learn quick, and even parents take over habits that bear ‘fruit’ this is now very often (indeed) a request for ‘something’. Too bad, but we can only blame our own ‘sort’.’

Interesting. I hope he is correct in this as I was disappointed by the insistent ‘begging’. Mind you, “Give me money!”, heard so frequently, is pretty unambiguous.

Sipi tomorrow. It’s a bit like going home, having these friendly, generous ‘bases’ to which I keep returning: Sipi, Kessup and chiefly of course, Kitale.