DAY 76 WEDNESDAY 22nd FEBRUARY 2017. BROOKE, KERICHO, KENYA

I did a very, very, very dumb thing this morning. I do sometimes…

Topping up the engine oil, as I do every few days, I unscrewed the oil filler cap and put it on the engine, topped up the oil, talking to Rutoh and others who had gathered on the rough gravel outside the hotel gate, preparatory to leaving. Yep… I rode off without returning the cap. It was perhaps two or three kilometres before I saw how stupid I had been – I mean, as I took it off, I thought to myself, ‘must remember to put it back!’ I turned round immediately, foot on the filler hole and rode gently back. It would be on the bumpy gravel within a couple of metres of where I had topped up the oil – wouldn’t it?

Despite at least ten very friendly Kenyans and twenty pairs of eyes, we never found it. Logic tells me that it couldn’t have balanced more than a few metres on the engine top, but it was gone. Almost an hour of searching, even employing the security staff’s metal detector on a scrubby grass outcrop. Gone. What to do? Cheerful Sambo, such a charmer, a nearby welder making window frames, fashioned a wooden plug with some inner tube as seal, a work of real craft. I rode slowly back along the road searching for the cap; surely it couldn’t have survived this far..? Road bumps, lurching onto the tar edges, bouncing over gravel. It couldn’t have gone far. But it has eluded many eyes over several hours.

Finally, I set off, trusting to the wooden plug, waving goodbye to all my new friends: I DO appreciate how I can share so much communication in Kenya. I rode over the hill to the north and was in tea country. Espying a road into one of the big estates, I turned off to take yet another tea photo, stopping about half way down a gentle hill to a gatehouse and walking into the tea. Photo taken, I threw my leg over the bike, and pushed the electric start. ‘Click’. Again: ‘click’. The engine had seized! I panicked. This was the end of my journey! I would have to send the bike back to Kitale by truck, following in a matatu. The end of my safari.

First things first: I had to get back to Kericho. I needed a pick up truck. I pushed the bike up the hill towards the road, no mean feat as the sun was now high in the sky after a cool morning. The last rise up to the road was beyond me but a cheery fellow selling bags of tea where traffic had to slow down for a speed hump, hurried over to assist. Kenyans are like that. He then (for a small consideration of course) hopped on a boda-boda to go and fetch a pick up truck from town. Little did I know that if I had continued to push the little bike – and now I was appreciating its lightness! – up a long rise of perhaps 500 metres, I could have freewheeled back to the hotel! Oh well, in the end we loaded the bike into the pick up and drove about two kilometres (costing me about £8!). I stopped at the hotel to drop off my bags and rebook my room with smiling Rutoh – who had already sent me two text messages to say how he had enjoyed my visit and ‘safe journey’ – Kenyans are so good at these social niceties.

There was, everyone assured me, a good bike mechanic in the local town. I’m not actually lodging in Kericho, but four kilometres down the road in Brooke (Brooke Bond, I wonder??), and the local community is a scruffy place of run down lock up shops, pitted streets and small businesses, a typical African local town. We drove into the depths of this seedy area and, sure enough, there was an oily cavern of a single storey lock up with bikes in various stages of decrepitude and destruction littered about. My arrival caused a stir and we soon had the bike amongst the mess and oiliness. Simon, the driver of the pick up drove away with many smiles, leaving me with Nashon and his assistants and a considerable crowd of onlookers. Nashon is a quiet, unassuming man who gave off an air, to me at least, of mechanical confidence that cheered me no end. He was undemonstrative and quickly assessed my bike’s problem. Removing the spark plug, he injected engine oil into the cylinder and gently worked the kick start until the piston released. I heaved a HUGE sigh of relief! Setting his assistant to continue pumping at the kick start, he delved into the oily filth and gloom of his lock up and began to search amongst an astonishing display of derelict machines for an oil filler cap that would fit my engine. Many were unearthed from the heaps of rusting, dusty carcasses and, eventually and to everyone’s delight, he found one that just about fitted! The assistant was still working at the kick start.

Well, after less than half an hour, Nashon pushed the electric starter and my little blue bike fired! To say I was happy would be a gross understatement. My journey was possible again. The bike was unharmed and not going to cost me a fortune and end up being scrapped with a knackered piston! I was back in business.

Of all my saviours, Nashon was the best, a man of integrity and capability and quiet confidence. Grinning from ear to ear, I asked him what I owed him – for rescuing my entire journey and maybe the next one too! I had already advanced £4 for oil but he had £3 change from that. Counting the notes in his hand, he said quietly, “give me another 300 Shillings – slightly under £2.50! Five pounds fifty for saving my motorbike! Why, I’d paid Simon £8 for a two kilometre-long rescue and the tea-selling fellow who’d gone with the boda-boda a kilometre to fetch help had conned £4 out of me! I happily gave Nashon an extra couple of pounds, to his embarrassed delight.

It’s always the way: when trouble hits me on these journeys, I end up with a story to tell and meet so many kind, helpful, compassionate people. I’m surrounded by smiles and good cheer and all seem to be happy to have me back in the simple Brooke Hotel, eating Patrick’s food again and sitting with my beer on the upper terrace above the road. It’s distinctly cool now and it rained in the late afternoon, just after I paid Bernard £1.60 (he asked 80p) for spending at least 45 minutes washing my bike at the roadside. It was, not surprisingly, blathered in engine oil – as was my right boot. So, Rutoh, Patrick, Sambo, Simon, Joanne, Nashon and several others have all made what could have been a fraught and worrying day into a very positive experience, another story and warm impressions. The hotel manager sat with me for half and hour and an elderly man just introduced himself, the owner of the hotel. The hotel is basic but friendly and comfortable; the bed warm and cosy in the cool night; the food quite acceptable – the breakfast was excellent; the staff warm and welcoming – and my journey is back on course. Not a bad outcome for the day.

DAY 77 THURSDAY 23rd FEBRUARY 2017. BROOKE, KERICHO, KENYA

Well laid plans gang oft astray… Well, of course, and fortunately, I seldom actually HAVE a plan on these journeys. Just as well today.

It was a stressful morning, enough to make my head spin and ache mildly. My motorbike was reduced to its component parts, nuts, bolts, cogwheels, piston, clutch plates, circlips, spacers, washers and all the assorted bits and pieces. To one used to BMW’s spotless, shiny – extremely expensive – workshops, with not a speck of dust and grit or smudge of oil, ‘mechanics’ in ironed shirts, seeing my vehicle stripped so comprehensively onto the dirt, dust, bits of greasy sacking and general oily filth of an African lock-up workshop at the edge of the road, is very worrying. Being already the possessor of another motorbike in Rico’s compound, one that he bought for me last year but later condemned as ‘butchered’ and for which he has since been trying – unsuccessfully so far – to get my money back, I was alarmed that I was about to have another useless machine.

However, my usual luck has held and I perceive in Nashon not just a decent, honest man, but a reasonably sensitive, experienced mechanic.

*

Packed up and ready to set off to the north, I pushed the bike out of the hotel courtyard, shook Rutoh’s hand for the umpteenth time and pressed the starter – to no avail more than a click. A few times more, but still a mere click. I decided to push the machine back to Nashon’s workshop, a quarter of a mile away. “We must take off this,” said quiet Nashon, fingering the cylinder head. And then they began, he and his two assistants. Bolts and nuts piled up on the old sack; shiny bits of Japanese engineering were strewn about the floor and sacking in increasing piles. There was grease and oil everywhere. I watched apprehensively, wondering – as a totally inept mechanic with no aptitude for engines – whether they would ever remember how it all went back together. I wouldn’t.

They identified the problem. I may jest about the workshop and the oily mud on which they worked, but Nashon was efficient and able; it’s just that no one here has the best tools, and has to improvise – which is where I feared the ‘butchery’, but Nashon was quite careful and obviously knowledgeable. He started his small business – the two assistants are his cousins – some years ago, before the influx of cheap Chinese machines, so he honed his skills on Japanese bikes and knows them well.

The problem was the flywheel ratchet, from which three teeth have sheared, along with several corresponding teeth on the adjacent cog. The broken pieces may be anywhere in the engine, gearbox or clutch, so it meant a TOTAL strip down and thorough cleaning of all the engine parts.

Off came the cylinder head; off came the cylinder; off came the clutch housing, the starter motor, the exhaust, cables, electric connectors, things I didn’t recognise… In the end the skeleton of the engine was sitting on a stool in the muddy, petrol smelling, oily arena with bits piling up around us. This was major surgery. Sure enough, they did find two of the broken teeth; the rest perhaps shredded to dust. There appears to be no damage done at least

Then, to my relief, began the rebuild. Methodically the three of them, Nashon, Lucas and Ken began to reassemble the engine, blathering it in petrol to clean it as they went. The parts may be available from Kisumu, the second town of Kenya, about Two hours away down on the lake, and Nashon will set off at 5.00am to fetch them for me. THAT’S service. My respect for Nashon increases. I have given him 10,000 shillings (£80) in great faith of his absolute honesty. As I have so often written, my experience of the world has led me to believe very sincerely that 99.9% of people are good, decent and kind.

Nashon believes that this was a problem that was due to occur eventually in my engine, probably coincidental to – or perhaps just finalised by – the oil filler cap debacle. Old age, he reckoned, not my stupidity. Maybe he said that in sympathy for my feelings.

*

Fortunately, since I was able to rebook my room, charming Rutoh insisted that he must have my ‘contact’ so that we could communicate after I leave. This happens everywhere. Everyone in Kenya wants my ‘contact’, however briefly we interact. Mobile phones are the lifeblood of daily existence in Africa now. They burble and bleep all around me; people shout into their phones in every situation; boda-boda riders have their phones thrust into the sides of their helmets; passengers talk; drivers chat; truck and petrol tanker drivers steer their lethal weapons with one hand, the other clutching their phone; everyone listens to scratchy FM radio on minuscule trebly speakers – silence is a thing of the past. Almost no one, no one, is without a phone, clutched in that very 21st century gesture, fingers twitching, endlessly obsessed with ‘social media’ at the expense of actual social interaction – like smiling at passers by or chatting to your neighbour.

*

So, a third night in Brooke, by Kericho. I find myself philosophical about it all. I’m happy this has happened here, not in Tanzania or Rwanda, where communication – on every level – was so much more restricted. Here I am welcomed, understood on a cultural level and surrounded by delightful people who seem genuinely pleased that I keep getting delayed and they can spend more time with me. Isn’t that a great compliment and honour?

DAY 78 FRIDAY 24th FEBRUARY 2017. BROOKE, KERICHO, KENYA

For an hour or two today I assumed my motorbike journey was over and began to deliberate how to ship the bike back to Kitale and continue my journey by public transport. A message from Nashon in Kisumu told me that he could not find the flywheel ratchet cog required or the one that connects to the starter motor. At the time I was rambling in the nearby tea estate. So this, I thought, is the end of my safari. I’m happy it has happened with only a couple of weeks to go.

Late afternoon, poor Nashon drove back from Kisumu, over two hours away. I am so impressed by this quiet, honest, decent man. He had been unable to locate the parts we needed – and I am sure he tried hard on my behalf. When he got back, I was waiting at his scruffy, oily lock up, watching the street life around me. By then I was resigned to the fact that I’d need to transport the disabled machine back to Kitale. What I hadn’t understood, in my mechanical ineptitude, was that the machine would still work, but without the electric starter. Who cares for that! For many years every one of my trail bikes had a kick start, and my 67 year old right leg is more than equal to kicking 200cc’s of compression!

Nashon set to work. Lucas and Ken had already put most of the bike back together during the early morning. It just needed the left hand engine casing back, with the damaged flywheel ratchet and alternator. Leaving out the connecting cog that transfers drive from the starter to the engine, he and Lucas reassembled the engine and refilled the oil reservoir. When Nashon kicked the starter, I must admit that my smile spread from ear to ear! The bike sounds a great deal better than it has since it arrived from Nairobi back at New Year. It has, of course, had the most comprehensive service imaginable! New oil, a complete clean out, readjustment as it was reassembled and all nuts and bolts checked and tightened.

Nashon even insisted on washing the bike before I could ride it away. By then he had test ridden and inspected his and his colleagues’ work. A thorough, conscientious mechanic, with pride in his work. I was so fortunate to find him, not the customary bike butchers.

After six, I took him into his filthy, wrecked bike-piled lock up to settle up. He was embarrassed as he finally, timidly asked me for 4000 shillings (£32) for the labour, plus 2000/- for oil and petrol for his trip to Kisumu (£16). I happily added 1000/- for giving me back my journey and added another 400/- to give to the two assistants for beer. My total bill was therefore £59 for a COMPLETE dismantlement and rebuild of my bike. At Ocean BMW in Plymouth this would have probably cost me not less than £1500, basing my estimate on the hours worked and their labour charges. Oh, plus VAT! Is it surprising I am happy? Well, in my own defence, I am happier at having my little bike back, than at the low cost of the work!

What’s more, the bike is running the best it has run since I owned it.

*

With hours to squander while Nashon drove to Kisumu, I wandered off into the tea estates behind the hotel. Such beauty should be enjoyed and the tranquility was just what I needed to overcome the tension of wondering if my bike would ever run again on this trip. A mile or so from the hotel, deep in the tea bushes, I watched the new regime: tea clipping machines, like lawnmowers that ski over the tops of the tea bushes, propelled laboriously by a man on each side. The tea is sliced off and blown into a large bag behind, that coasts over the tea on a vinyl fabric skid. Gone the flowing colours of the tea pluckers, baskets over their shoulders, chattering and laughing in the tides of tea. This is automation, efficiency – and smelly exhaust and noise. But this is Unilever too, multinational profits to a vast corporation. It seems to me that much of the world is owned by Unilever, Nestle and Coca Cola… A worrying thought.

Soon I met Hillary, a very charming supervisor, overseeing his patch. Actually, I shouldn’t have been wandering the tea estates without permission from Unilever in Kericho, and certainly not with my camera without sanction from the ‘press office’! However, Hillary let it pass and we conversed for about two hours, gazing over the tea bushes, many of them, Hillary said, planted by white settlers almost a century ago. Now it’s big business but Unilever have established standards and systems and stamped out corruption at every level (except, says my cynical side, at the international profit and taxation level…), but in the field there’s little nepotism or bribery, and health and safety are taken seriously, rules and regulations observed. The ‘mower’ operators are supplied with protective clothing and adhere to safe practices. Despite my distaste at the probable corporate greed of Unilever, I had to be impressed by the operation in the field. The tea has been of low crop this year thanks to drought, but is usually cropped about every 17 days by hand plucking or 24 days by the mechanical trimmers. From the field it goes to the factory over the hill, is rested for six hours and fermented for eight, before it is chopped and sifted and dried and packed.

And we drink from tea bags! The dust that is discarded at the end of the process. “Yes, you drink dust!” Hillary laughed!

We chatted amiably for a long time. Trimmers came to refuel their machines. “It’s a safety measure, the machines should be cooled down before they are refuelled, to prevent accident,” said Hillary, when I wondered at the inefficiency of the two operators carrying the machine hundreds of metres to the fuel, instead of the fuel can to the machine. “You see, we have fire extinguishers here, and everyone must present themselves with their full safety gear every morning if they want to work.” I watched the men guiding their machines across the top of the tea bushes, all a uniform height, trimmed so regularly for so many decades. It is hard work, forcing their way through the dense sea of tea, heavy yellow aprons pulling through the almost impenetrable greenness. The teams alternate daily with sorting the leaves at tables in the field, tossing the tea into nylon sacks that will be collected by truck and taken away for processing. Across the green carpets I could see the housing blocks for the workers, vastly improved on my memories of the crude, basic housing I saw in 2002. Now every small home has solar electricity, running water, sanitation and even waste recycling. It’s quite an impressive operation – but then, it’s also a huge operation. Unilever own a vast amount of the land between here and distant Nairobi. This is no small rural farming: this is multinational corporate big business.

*

I’ve been very warmly received here in Brooke (yes, it IS from Brooke Bond, precursor of Unilever) and have had to promise many people that I will return one day, maybe when I come back to reclaim my little blue bike for another trip. Out in the tea ocean, I met various people who had seen me riding in Brooke and Kericho. A white man stands out rather! But it’s so pleasing to be the focus of so much goodwill.

As I have been writing on the hotel balcony, a violent rainstorm machine-gunned on the steel roof above me, deafeningly noisy. Once again though, I don’t care if it rains when I am drinking my beer and not riding my little blue bike! Oddly, since I have been in Africa for eleven weeks, I am rather sunburned tonight, my face flaming, yet it didn’t seem so sunny today, with plenty of cloud as the rainy season gathers strength.

Tomorrow, my journey can resume, for its final few rides. After a brief hiatus, that I imagined to be the end of my journey, I can ride on – and enjoy very much the memory of so many congenial, warmly welcoming fellow beings. These experiences fill me with a general sense of goodwill.

DAY 79 SATURDAY 25th FEBRUARY 2017. KESSUP, KENYA

A fine ride today, made finer by the fact that it WAS a ride, a ride on my motorbike that seemed back from the dead, and actually running better than it’s done since I started my travels in early January. Nashon seems to have done a very efficient job and I am happy to have my journey back. I rode by his oily workshop to tell him so before I left town.

And now I am exhausted and in bed at 8.00! There’s a noisy party taking place outside in the gardens of the guest house, to which I have returned for the third time, about six weeks after I last stayed here. But I am so weary tonight that the ear plugs should keep it all at bay.

*

Nervously, I pushed the bike out of the hotel yard in Brooke and kicked the starter arm. It took some time to fire, alarming me briefly, but then it ran, and continued to run for 220 kilometres of fine scenery. I’d ridden much of the route before a few weeks ago, including that road that I exclaimed about so much that wound me down into the Rift Valley warmth, up to the coolness of the forests at Tenges and Kabarnet, down again onto the oppressive heat of the Kerio Valley and finally up to the plateau two thirds of the way up the escarpment of the Kenyan highlands. Kenya has some fine scenery, and if you avoid the busy main highways, provides relaxing days. For a brief while I was on the main Nairobi to Kampala road, one of the country’s most accident prone, but fortunately I had only fifteen kilometres on a fairly quiet stretch before I could turn to the north onto remoter roads back to Eldama Ravine (site of that awful night with the pounding disco as I tossed in my brocade and gossamer draped bed) and on in and out of the fabulous valleys and forested mountains. Stopping for tea in high Kabarnet, I was recognised by young Erick, the waiter, whose name, astonishingly, I remembered despite such a brief tea stop several weeks ago. A muzungu who mixes with the people and doesn’t flash past behind glass, and one who chats with the staff, is remembered here.

Back up the final long sweeps from the Kerio Valley to the plateau of Kessup there’d been a drizzly shower, now just a wet road. For all these weeks I have avoided getting wet, dodging an occasional shower but never having to pull on the waterproofs to ride, except the other morning when I rode off into the tail of that heavy rain on the last morning in Rwanda. It’s often rained at night but almost never while I rode my bike. What luck!

At one point on the road today I was suddenly conscious that I was riding exactly on top of my own shadow. I looked at my clock and found it was about midday, and I must at that point have been almost exactly crossing the Equator once again at that moment.

*

So back to Lelin Campsite, where I have spent a few nights. Before I could even settle to my room William appeared, alerted by the staff to my return. To describe William’s reaction as excitement and delight would be a serious understatement! Ecstatic might come closer. I am now his best friend after his daughter in Australia. It seems that he will never get over the honour I have bestowed on him that will make him great in his community. I am a great man, a very special man… And so it went on over a beer for me and a quarter of gin for him. Trouble is, as with almost every African of my acquaintance, alcohol is uncontrollable. Decent, cheerful William proceeded, as I ate my supper, to drink a Guinness, order another and become very garrulous. I’ve known so many Africans who died from hard alcohol (mainly in Ghana). It is the continent’s Achille’s heel, the inability to limit alcoholic intake, the imbibing of seriously strong spirits – often with insufficient solid nutrition. Strong young men like Kotua in Navrongo – one of the toughest men I ever knew, who could work like a machine in the hot sun, water his dry season gardens with a bucket hour after hour, hack and hoe the dry dust and rock hard soil of Navrongo for days on end… He sold his family’s heritage for viciously lethal home distilled alcohol, and perished before forty, weakened and destroyed by his inability to live without the stimulant of that dire spirit, always drunk neat, guzzled into an overheated body without solid food. He’s not the only one I knew; and doubtless it is all around me now. It’s a hard life in Africa and people think they can improve their lot from the bottle. Banning alcohol and enfranchising women would be my two choices for this continent. THEN you’d see it surge forward from its basket-case situation, as it contains so many of the world’s natural resources and social skills. Women, with the natural responsibility of their role as mothers, think of the future. Men think of instant gratification. A generalisation, perhaps, but not far from the truth in my extensive observation of this continent. The power here is in the wrong hands…

So I hurried away to bed before eight, leaving William to his second Guinness and a weave home in the dense darkness, but no doubt he is familiar with his route. I came away to my room and by 8.30 realised, as the mis-typing spread, that I didn’t even have the energy to carry out my invariable daily discipline and write my diary, which I am now having to do over breakfast. At 8.30 I turned over and went to sleep! William, doubtless unscathed, will be back at 10 to accompany me around his community once again. Since my wisdom seems to be in the ascendant in his eyes, I might take the opportunity to tell him about Kotua and the others!

*

Talking over breakfast in Brooke with my neighbour, she transpired to be the daughter of the elderly owner of the hotel. A smart, capable woman, she told me she has come for a time from her home in Washington DC. “The hotel is under performing, so I’ve come to see if I can help improve its fortunes. How long? Oh, maybe a couple of months. But I may stay on… I don’t feel comfortable or welcome as a black in Trump’s America…” No doubt she speaks for a large percentage of the population.

DAY 80 SUDAY 26th FEBRUARY 2017. KESSUP, KENYA

“Yes, I was so excited!” William agreed when I told him he was very drunk last night. “So excited to see my friend again!”

Today he accompanied me all over the hillsides of Kessup community once again, introducing me to all his neighbours and friends. He’s a well known and obviously popular fellow and makes a good introduction for a wandering mzungu. So many people came to shake my hand. “Greeting a mzungu is something very special for them! Maybe they never touched a mzungu before! It’s very special for them.”

We met William’s mother, Teresa, and many of his brothers and half brothers, cousins, nephews and nieces – as well as a lot of local people who weren’t related I suppose. We sat for a time drinking bulsa – the local beer, a soupy fibrous mixture made from millet and maize. I don’t have much taste for it and poured a good deal of mine quietly into William’s ‘Tilly Pure Cooking Fat’ container, retaining just enough to impress and appear polite to all the passing villagers as we sat on a low wall on a steep slope. Everyone waved from far and near, came to shake the mzungu’s hand, and many actually wanted me to take their photos which, of course, I did with pleasure, adding another twenty or so people to my portfolio of smiling portraits. It’s so easy to get the majority of Africans to smile. All I have to do is smile at them!

We had a light lunch of beef stew and potato made by William’s mother and later repaired to the Rock Hill Resort for beer. After my short talk about the dangers of hard spirits and the need for moderation and thought, William drank Guinness. I felt a bit of a killjoy, but I might extend his life by some years if I can make him consider the damage that a frequent quarter of gin can do on a dehydrated body. He took the advice well, after all, I am his senior by fifteen years, so he has to give respect to my opinion. His daughter, currently studying nursing in Australia – “I am the only person in the whole community who has sent his child out to train abroad!” William boasts proudly – his daughter, understands his proclivities too. She won’t send him money, but arranges for groceries to be brought from Eldoret instead! Says William, “She doesn’t want me to go to the village..!”, meaning to the illegal spirit makers to spend his money, or her money. So a friendly word of warning went down well from his new ‘best friend after his daughter’. He and his wife, strangely invisible and a police officer in Eldoret, invested about £11,000 or £12,000 in sending Lydia to Perth. A huge sum and a great investment in a daughter’s future.

Conversing in the bar with one of William’s neighbours, watchman at the same bar, I was reminded again of the prejudice against girl children still so prevalent in most of Africa. To his astonishment I informed him that many people in Europe actually chose not to have any children, let alone the six and sixteen that Africans bear. “Two is enough! You can educate two and their future has a chance of some development, but five, eight, nineteen! how can you care for them? The grandchildren won’t thank these stupid men who are proud of the huge families they bear. The population expands, but Kenya stays the same size, with less water, less resources, less trees…”

“But if you have only two, what if they are both girls?”

“Why do you always devalue girls here? If you have two girls someone else will have two boys! That’s nature! Nature keeps a balance. Look at the statistic all over the world, even in Africa where you are so obsessed to have boys; you’ll see: a maximum of two percent difference between the number of boys and girls born! That’s nature keeping control. You can’t change that. It’s the work of your god! God’s will, if you like. Educate your girls, make them leaders, get rid of the stupid, self-interested, proud, corrupt men and your country will thrive!”

But of course, most of it falls on deaf ears. Boys are a gift from god, girls a burden. How does one change this attitude? I do my little bit – but no one believes a mzungu with no children, no belief in god and no interest in football..!

*

It’s been a hot and very scorchingly sunny day, but the sort of day I enjoy, partly for meeting so many friendly folk and being the focus of their goodwill and partly for enlarging my collection of photos once again. Say it myself as I will, I do have a wonderful collection now, and there’s a certain professionalism about them. Handing my camera to one of William’s friends in the bar garden as William wanted a photo of us drinking beer together, proved once again that not everyone has the ‘eye’ for photography. The fellow got most of us in the picture, but it needed a lot of straightening and cropping to make a picture. I am proudest about my portraits in that the subjects are reacting to ME, not the camera.

I think this could be another 8.30 night! A lot of sun, walking on the dusty steep hills, answering endless questions – yes, I feel another very early night approaching fast. Last night I slept for most of eleven hours. No beer tonight, which’ll help my sleep; I had two in the afternoon. Now I have eaten a basic supper cooked by Vicky in her charcoal black tin kitchen hut and the day is almost done. It’s not even eight yet. It’s very quiet outside tonight, just a very distant dog barking far below in the deep blue valley. A few lights wink down there in the heat of the Kerio Valley bottom and Kabarnet, where I stopped for tea yesterday, provides a sequinned patch of light about twenty miles away on top of the opposite escarpment. Between me and Kabarnet lies a whole deep valley of darkness, little habitation and quite a lot of roaming African wildlife. A silent night world. Only in Africa do you see such depth and breadth of darkness at night.

*

I phoned Adelight a while ago and told her I will be back to Kitale tomorrow. I had a warmly cheerful welcome. “Oh, we will cook a NICE lunch! Welcome home!” How fortunate I am to have – and to make – friends all over the world.

DAY 70 THURSDAY 16th FEBRUARY 2017. KAYONZA, RWANDA

In the end, I rode right bang through the centre of Kigale, following my well developed bump of direction and found myself on the road to the east without a flaw. Andrew, the hotel manager in Nyanza wasn’t comforting about the long cut that avoided the city and the day was heavily overcast, draining the contrast and colour from the pretty Rwandan landscape. I decided just to fight it out with the city traffic, which here in Rwanda is pretty disciplined and polite, lacking the murderous instincts of Ugandan drivers. Kigale is a small city anyway. They are still digging up the wide road outside the dull guest house I used at the weekend and no diversions are ever signposted in African cities so, knowing just enough of the shape of the city from my brief walkabouts, I took to some cross-country antics down bumpy, rutted unmade lanes and found my way onto the sweeping avenue to the east.

It wasn’t an interesting ride, all the earlier part I had ridden before – twice. I was sorely tempted to turn off back to Kibuye, but my Rwandan permits only last until Sunday, so it was cutting it fine. Anyhow, I have no idea how the roads and terrain, or the people and interest, will be in my brief trip across the top of Tanzania, so I pressed on, looking only with regret at the turning back over those fine mountains to Kibuye and the peaceful lakeside scenes.

The eastern part of Rwanda is much lower and gently rolling than the more dramatic steep mountains down the west side, sliced by Lake Kivu from the Congolese mountains in another arm of the African Rift Valley that is so much a feature of travel in these countries. Once clear of the traffic and business of Kigale, I was back onto a wide, good quality road between the intense cultivation that makes up so much of this small country. It’s densely populated too, and I seldom leave habitations along the main roads that I have been using all across the country. And where there’s habitation there are people walking the roadsides, bicycle taxis struggling up the long hills – or freewheeling at alarming speeds down the other sides. As before, some of the people wave and greet, others stare impassively, but not aggressively; I am just too far beyond their ken to make contact, however casual.

In Rwamagana, a well developed town 30 miles from Kigale, I needed a stop and a drink. I pulled into quite the poshest, most snooty hotel I have seen in Rwanda and asked for a flask of African tea. In my very faded motocross trousers (that do very well as a disguise of relative poverty in rural areas) and my dust stained, faded jacket, I didn’t look the part for that hotel, and I could see from the welcome – frosty might describe it – that I was considered below the expected customer standards as smartly suited men and brightly clad women came and went from a conference of the Ministry of Health. But so far as I am concerned, the Min of Health has NO business squandering the taxpayers’ money of this poor nation on such pomp and pretentiousness and needs to be brought down a peg or two! It’s all show and no knickers to me, this conceit, so popular amongst the self-claimed ‘first class’ of these poverty stricken nations. The tea was good, despite the disdain of the staff!

*

Thanks to the ease of my passage through small Kigale, I was at Kayonza in the mid-afternoon. The Tanzania border is about fifty or sixty miles from here, in the bottom corner of Rwanda. I didn’t intend to cross today; border formalities are best approached in the morning, I find. Then at least there’s less pressure for the tedious stuff of bureaucracy, visas and money changing. So it seemed sensible to look for a place to sleep and have a relaxing afternoon. My free tourist map, given to me by Marechal at the Ugandan border some days ago, on which I have relied for information, showed a guest house by the long, sinuous, shallow Lake Muhazi, called the Seeds of Peace Centre. It’s delightfully situated just beside the quiet lake with lawns running down to the still water. I’ve a good enough room looking out on the lake. It’s quiet and reasonable at £15 again. The only drawback is that it is run by Episcopalians and is thus ‘dry’. However, ten minutes’ walk down the lakeside is the Jambo Bar, an empty place of beer umbrellas and plastic chairs with a hideous and fringed stork strutting about and barking at me. It looks as if it’s made from pipe cleaners and felt, rather than feathers and bones.

*

I’ll be sorry to leave the astonishing cleanliness of this country. The people take a pride in their surroundings that is unusual anywhere in the world of my knowledge. Even the roadsides are often planted with colourful trimmed shrubs and neat grass verges. Topiary is very popular and I see many tidy displays. It is heartening to see such visual awareness and pride. Oddly enough, though, another observation I have made since being in Rwanda is that I have had to become accustomed to the strong smell of sweaty bodies! Personal dress, so often at odds with the dwellings and surroundings of most other African countries, where great pride is taken in personal appearance and incredible cleanliness despite dust and intense heat, is here the scruffiest I have seen. I accept that this is a poor society and money is a rare commodity, but where so many African nations spend a disproportionate quantity of their small personal wealth on clothes, even second hand ones, and soap, Rwandans don’t seem to care much! People do a lot of heavy manual work here; hacking at the soil with hoes, pedalling huge loads up long hills on old bicycles, carrying almost everything on their heads and backs, toiling at incredible tasks – and I have become used, even at thirty miles an hours as I pass gangs of bicycle taxi-men or resting fellows by the roadside, to wafts of sour sweat smells. All part of the rich pattern of East African life, I suppose. And I’ve also seen the amount of water that has to be carried up those hills too. Maybe washing one’s body is a low priority. I guess it would be for me if I had to lug the water as far as so many Rwandans do!

DAY 71 FRIDAY 17th FEBRUARY 2017. BIHARAMULO, TANZANIA

I rode far too long and late today, forced by circumstances, and only found a place to sleep as the light was failing. It’s something I usually rigorously try to avoid, but crossing borders sometimes just throw things out. Oh well, all’s well etc…

*

The first real rains came this morning, starting soon after dawn and falling hard and constantly for several hours. So my day started late as I lingered in the shelter of the guest house reception hut until almost noon. My breakfast was the best yet – for £2. Fresh pineapple (as usual), African tea (as usual for the coffee is normally so bad), a Spanish omelette (as usual, but this one was generous and tasty) and a delicious pancake that came with a pot of local honey. It’s just as well it was so good, since supper only came late, in a dingy beer bar here in this small town. Supper was a sort of barbecue-in-the-bag chicken with vegetables done in foil over charcoal. It would have been good had the chicken not been quite such a vintage hen that had been smashed to pieces with a hammer before cooking and had to be pulled apart with greasy fingers in an almost dark bar! Still, by then I was just grateful to be sitting down with some food and a bottle of milk stout…

*

So by noon I rode away, into a slight drizzle that slowly died away after the long downpour. By early afternoon the sun was beginning to break through and by the time all the border formalities were done, the afternoon was clear and sparkling and the scenery splendid: large vistas over big rolling mountains covered in that sort of bush country that we think of when we hear the word ‘Africa’, a sort of cross between brilliantly green rolling veldt and acacia covered ridges thick with long grass and scattered trees. The mountains fell away dramatically to a vibrantly, dazzling green flat valley with a shining green floor that looked like a fitted, growing carpet.

The border was rather impressive and well coordinated with all the business concentrated in one building depending which direction you are travelling. Normally, borders are separated; all the formalities of the country you are leaving carried out one side of the barrier/ bridge/ no man’s land/ pass, and the other papers all done separately, by different nationals in the next country. Here, I rode through a long chicane past the building on the Rwandan side to a single large matching building on the Tanzanian side, where the outgoing passport window was adjacent to the incoming and so on. It did make for efficiency. But everyone seemed a bit phased by the Englishman taking a Kenyan motorbike from Rwanda through Tanzania, and seemed confused as to what I should do and what papers were required. In the end, I have a transit visa valid for a couple of weeks, that doesn’t allow me to tour – but I’m not sure how anyone would know if I did anyway, so long as I stay in the roughly northern area. Then a pleasant official made me out some form of document that seems to be a sort of temporary import permit to take my bike across the country. Well, I don’t care. The transit visa was £24 instead of a full visa for £40, the permit was free, and there was nowhere to buy insurance anyway. “You will have to buy it in Mwanza, I think…” pondered the official, who seemed so confused. By the time I get to Mwanza, I’ll be most of the way across Tanzania back to Kenya!

At last I rode away from the border. I am totally lost without a map. I do like to have a map and know where I am and what’s around me. They are scarce in East Africa and none of the old ones I have from Rico’s collection covers this part of Tanzania south of Lake Victoria. I asked a fellow in the immigration hall as I waited for my visa to be processed and he wrote down the names of the towns I will pass. He intimated there’d be a decent sized town with plenty of guest houses about 24 kilometres along my way, where I could stay tonight. I suppose it was the ugly, dusty, straggly village filled with parked petrol tankers that I passed through after about 18 kilometres, for I saw no other. By then I was well past it, and it hadn’t looked promising anyhow. So I battled on. There was a town, or what I thought must be a town as there was a major road junction there, in 68 kilometres. Sadly, though, the road was appalling, peppered with potholes like tank traps, many of them six inches deep and sharp-edged. Half the road was also in some state of being rebuilt – on a very long timescale by the look of it. By now the afternoon was advancing – and I’d moved forward an hour back to East Africa Time.

Eventually, worn down by the intense concentration that potholes require, especially in late afternoon when the low sun casts shadows of the roadside trees across the tarmac for confusion, I reached the junction and found the town to be a very down at heel, grubby rural village of shacks and stalls and mud. I looked for accommodation and was shown two sheds, for they really were little more, in grubby brick yards. Yes, these were the places I frequented on my early parsimonious travels! The price was all of £2 for a basic room with a metal framed bed, a foam mattress that wouldn’t have borne much inspection, and a few bits of sheet. I guess there was a pit latrine and a bucket bathroom with cold water. I ALMOST took one of those grim cells; I mean, I am not unaccustomed to that way of life at all! What actually put me off was that almost everyone who talked to me appeared to be drunk. That didn’t augur well for a night’s rest and security. I decided not…

So another 30 kilometres had to be tackled, with the sun now drooping in the sky, the clouds tinging with a cloudy sunset. Fortunately, those last kilometres were on a smooth fast road and I managed to coax almost 55 miles an hour out of my little blue bike. As the light failed, I reached Biharamulo, to find it a proper town of a backwoods sort but with simple guest houses that were a cut above the basic sheds. By chance, as I rode, I recollected that the name Biharamulo was familiar and that I had been looking at the internet a few days ago to investigate the map of northern Tanzania – in the absence of a paper one – and happened upon a blog website that mentioned a place here called the Old Boma. Well, any recommendation, even from someone’s old blog, is better than searching at random at sunset. I asked my way here and have a large room of an old fashioned sort that you find in somewhat run down places round the Mediterranean, opening off a yard behind what’s obviously a collection of relatively historic buildings from early colonial days – the town fort and administrative buildings. It’s quite a fine location with thick walls and that early colonial African feel. I’ve an en suite room, which sounds grand but is a lot less pretentious than that, with polished concrete, worn painted floor and stained whitewash. But the bed’s clean and about half the bathroom fitting work, a pretty good average. It’ll do for the night. The price is certainly right: £4.40 – a record low for this trip. A middle aged South African couple are camping out in the yard with their expedition vehicle. Solvieg and Ian live in Gordon’s Bay, where I stayed in February 2015, the closest I could afford to stay to Cape Town. They’ve driven up and are now doing a similar circuit to me in the opposite direction.

*

I’d been intrigued for a while how the change back from right to left side of the road would be achieved at this land border. Between Uganda and Rwanda it was just a 100 metre long piece of road between two gates, controlled by soldiers. On the Uganda side they opened the left gate, and at the other end of the short no man’s land, the soldier opened the right hand gate. On this border it was very neatly done. The road through the border area was a dual carriageway with a central barrier. At one point the road curved out into a figure of eight with instruction signs that instructed ‘straight across ONLY’. Automatically I changed from the right carriageway to the left carriageway. Very clever. A tidy touch that rather made my day.

It’s good to be able to communicate easily again, now I am back in anglophone Africa. I did miss that in Rwanda, compounded by the apparent reserve of the people. (I don’t get many portraits when I can’t communicate). But I did appreciate the cleanliness and visible pride that Rwandans take in their surroundings. I rode through a number of villages today that had been planted with avenues of brilliantly yellow flowering trees. Verges are well kept and households enjoy their clipped and trimmed hedges and even make formal little gardens in the French chateaux style of geometric low hedges and tiny patches of lawn in front of their simple houses. These little efforts make a very good impression, especially on this continent where I often accuse the populous of being visually illiterate about and careless of their surroundings. Rwanda was a fine surprise, a magnificent landscape, intensely cultivated, well cared for, with good roads and generally excellent infrastructure, uncorrupted officials and a general sense of calm. If they would only change the national greeting from the outstretched palm and the imperative demand, “…money!” it’d be even finer. As it is, that wasn’t particularly aggressively done, just habitual, so when I kept my cool and just said, “No!” they didn’t seem very offended, since they were only trying it on anyway.

*

I didn’t mean to ride 150 miles, especially having set off only at noon. I keep reminding myself that it is only 9.30 as I am writing, not 10.30 as the clock tells me. I’m weary enough though that I will probably take note of the new East African time rather than the Central African time. Time to sleep.

DAY 72 SATURDAY 18th FEBRUARY 2017. MWANZA, TANZANIA

The little blue bike has done well today, bbattling along for over 150 more miles across the top pf Tanzania. It was a long slog, but there wasn’t much to attract or delay me, just mile upon mile of quite attractive green bush country. The early part of the ride was hilly, the hills flattening out into gentle rises and falls towards afternoon. For much of the day my road seemed to weave miraculously around and between thick grey clouds that always seemed to threaten rain, but happily never dropped any on me. Later, it became a sparkling afternoon with that ‘big sky’ I associate so much with Africa. We blew along at 45 to 50mph for much of the way – after the first forty miles…

This is the main road in this part of Tanzania and I was horrified, some five kilometres out of Biharamulo when I turned at a signed junction for Mwanza, and a few hundred yards later was on a derelict, rutted and pitted gravel road. If this was to last until Mwanza I doubted my sanity in selecting to return to Kenya by Tanzania. Twenty kilometres of this punishment gave way to the preparations for a new road, fairly smooth, level hard dirt, interrupted, as they do, by speed humps of piles of gravel that had to be negotiated every few hundred yards. It was wearing. These surfaces take plenty of concentration, but it was better, at least, than yesterday’s killer potholes. I’m always conscious, on these roads, that even a small mistake could end my journey quite badly! Still, I am used to that by now and also to riding on all sorts of surfaces. After 35 miles the new road began, smooth tarmac all the way to Mwanza! A great relief.

I batted along, stopping for a flask of African tea (but being served a flask of hot water and a tin of the most disgusting, cheap coffee powder! Sometimes you just have to accept fate here in Africa) in a bustling ribbon of town that I cannot name as I am still not back on any map in my bag. Tomorrow should see that occurrence, fortunately. I feel so lost without a map.

About thirty kilometres before Mwanza I enjoyed a break while I took a car ferry across an arm of Lake Victoria – which only came in sight a short way before the ferry. The slowest car ferry in the world took half an hour to cross the calm water, not more than a mile wide, a pleasant break for me and fun to be on Lake Victoria for a short time. The traffic on the other side, it was now five o’clock, was less enjoyable, but I ride like an African now so was soon through it and circuiting Mwanza in search of a place to sleep. I wanted to be on the lakeside but those hotels were expensive $50 places (I’m always suspicious when I am quoted in American dollars, and the one that attracted me, being a Chinese owned hotel, would not bargain, I knew. The Chinese run their businesses with rods of unsmiling iron and would allow no mere black African the right to negotiate). Eventually, I found a place for £6.50 – hot and stuffy – and went back to the smart Chinese place for supper and a beer on the side of the lake. Well, my eyes’ll be shut for nine hours, so why pay for a view? I can always go back for an African tea – or an instant coffee, you take pot luck – in the morning to enjoy the view for about thirty bob!

Actually, the view is rather good. Mwanza is attractively situated in an area full of those odd, smooth, balanced rocks that teeter atop one another in crazy giant’s play-brick heaps. Some buildings have been attached to them here and there and many stand along the shore, some with feet in the lake or with attractive clipped grass around them. Those were surrounded by wedding picture groups this Saturday afternoon. Small ferries come and go to islands out in the lake, splashing past the shoreline hotels and gardens of this, one of Tanzania’s biggest towns and its major lake port.

*

It was already eleven when I finally left the ‘boma’ in Biharamulo. I awoke to bright sunshine and then a knock on my door to say that Solveig was preparing breakfast for me, a kind gesture from fellow travellers. We exchanged views and ideas for the better part of three hours, sharing so many opinions and loves of Africa, and agreeing how much better we enjoy being older as travellers. Solvieg (her parents were Norwegian) is full of life, a cheerful person and outgoing. I rather hope they’ll keep in touch now and again, and maybe I will one day see them in the Western Cape, except it seems that their chosen travel time is much the same as mine and their travels subsidised by renting their seaside house in Gordons Bay to English people for winter. It’s fun to meet people on the road for, of course, we tend to share views of life thanks to our chosen way of spending so much of our time and money.

My muscles are getting very fidgety. I sat for about six hours on that not very comfortable little bike in a lot of very fresh Equatorial air – and the mozzies are eating me alive. Time to get out of the bar and under the net. My motorbike is next to the reception desk tonight!

DAY 73 SUNDAY 19th FEBRUARY 2017. MUSOMA, TANZANIA

Another slog across the top of Tanzania. Today it took all my stubbornness after a night of bad sleep. My room was very hot, the fan rattled and shook and a cheap hotel on a Saturday night is seldom a place of peace, with doors banging and people shut out of rooms in the middle of the night trying to wake drunken partners, such that in the end I was reduced to ear plugs. All that and I ate too much too late last night. So today was a bit of a struggle of mind over strength. But it ended well.

The road was generally empty and the landscape became flatter and drier as I rode eastwards, punctuated by many straggly villages of mud-walled houses and zinc or palm roofs behind dusty roadsides. Huge herds of cows were driven along the roadsides for this is Mara country, the home of cattle-herders. A couple of more sizeable towns were a bit more colourful and the heat under the sun was oppressive but clouds filled enough of the sky to provide a good deal of shade today. It was, though, a long 120 miles.

By only mid-afternoon I was approaching Musoma, now coming back up the east side of Lake Victoria towards the Kenyan border, another hundred or so miles to the north. I had decided to stop at Musoma and relax for the afternoon, hoping I’d find a quiet, pleasant hotel for the night. Four kilometres short of the town I saw a smallish, plush looking hotel standing back from the road amongst trees and behind it I could see a garden stretching down to the lake shore. I turned around to investigate, without even continuing to the town to check other options. I was warmly welcomed by the manager, Steven, who understood by my weary, dusty state that a glass of juice would help, whether I stayed or not, a kindly gesture that persuaded me to take a room. I’ve an enormous room, with bathroom and a bizarre, flouncy and over the top bed (sometimes African taste can be so dreadful!) for £15. By 3.30 I was ensconced in the gardens at the back, with Lake Victoria stirred to choppiness by the strong wind that had bugged me for the last fifty miles of my 120 mile ride.

Soon after lunch – a mere literary expression, since I haven’t had such a thing for the past six weeks; I always go from breakfast to supper unfed when I am on these journeys, mainly because I doubt I’d find anything to attract me in the way of a snack – soon after what would have been lunchtime if I took it, I passed the far western end of the great Serengeti Plains. Perhaps one of the best known, most visited African locations, it stretches eastwards from Lake Victoria for hundreds of miles. My experience lasted about ten miles. I’d have liked to see the ‘herds of wildebeests’ that are not visible from TQ9 (my Torquay postcode!) but all I saw was a few grazing antelopes and a handful of bison of some sort. My, it was flat! I am really quite happy that I and my motorbike can’t cross that vast plain. Anyway, it probably costs an arm and a couple of legs to pay the entrance fee, were I allowed to. Solveig and Ian were laughing yesterday at the ridiculous charges these countries have imposed on foreign tourists to get into national parks. “We come from South Africa! We have pretty much the best parks and they don’t cost anything like here! We haven’t been paying for any either!”

*

These past three days I have met few people who speak English. I assume that not many wazungus come this way. Around here they are more likely with the proximity to the Masai Mara and Serengeti but where I have been there’s not a lot of reason for casual tourists to pass, only ‘overlanders’ like me. I find it disappointing when I can’t communicate. After all, I come on these journeys to meet and talk to people, maybe that’s why I have enjoyed southern Africa so well these past years for there the majority speak English.

This hotel, the Mara Paradise (a slight over statement!) is run by some church or other – the Africa Inland Church, it appears. Beer is only available by order from outside! The bishop doesn’t approve, apparently. I checked with Steven that I wouldn’t offend the bishop if I ordered a bottle, and here I sit in the garden as my supper is prepared. I shall sleep even earlier than usual tonight, my strength is at a very low ebb!

DAY 74 MONDAY 20th FEBRUARY 2017. MBITA, KENYA

One of the real joys of life is to enjoy a good night’s sleep. You’ll never catch me admitting to any infirmity of age, but I guess I AM getting older and a long day’s ride after unsatisfying sleep, such as I had in Mwanza, perhaps has more effect than it did twenty years ago! That’s as near an admission as I will make.

*

I’m back in Kenya tonight. I’ve been ‘on the road’ for 44 days so far and have only about 14 left. Over the next couple of days I will complete my circuit of Lake Victoria. Tonight finds me on just about the most easterly extreme of the lake, on a large gulf that penetrates eastwards from the lake. I am heading northwards towards Kisumu, a large town in western Kenya. Mbita is a small town at the causeway that connects Rasinga Island to the mainland. It’s an unusually expensive area; finding an affordable place to sleep was tiresome. In one ‘resort’ they wanted an unnegotiable £29 to sleep in a tent! Other quite dingy places asked me £23 for places I’d turn my nose up at for £15 elsewhere in Kenya, but I finally haggled my best room yet for a one third discount at £16 – my budget. I’ve a room in a newish hotel that hasn’t yet had time to deteriorate (almost ALL the bathroom fittings work, even if there’s no loo seat. Better than the one last night with a crack in it that viciously nipped your bum!). It’s on the top floor with a balcony and a pretty spectacular lake vista, plus as it’s a corner room, a view across the small town, with the sea on both sides of the causeway. I’m sitting now in the yard at the back with a much-needed Tusker. In a couple of years the yard will be disguised by bushes and bourganvillea but for now it is rather exposed to the dusty track behind the hotel. Maybe in Africa it’ll only take a year; things grow so fast here, given some water.

Parts of my journey today were through handsome scenery, others rather tedious dry bush country. With the lake on my left all the way, at one point I climbed through some hills with astoundingly long views down onto the plains of what eventually becomes the Serengeti and Masia Mara. The hills were scattered with those odd upstanding and balanced rocks that must, I suppose, have been left behind in some ice age by gigantic glaciers. As I rode I realised that the rocks are granite of some sort, for I passed many people engaged, with fire and hammers, in breaking stones. Here and there men tended fires to heat the rocks and split them asunder. In other places women and men sat atop small piles of grey stones wielding hammers, endlessly breaking stones into smaller stones. Imagine having to make a living this way. I can’t… In Western countries we used to use this activity as a punishment for criminals; here it is a way of earning enough to eke out a minimal existence in rural Africa: breaking rocks to afford dry maize to make an unappetising meal of ughali and meagre vegetables; to live in a room of mud, sticks and straw; sleep on a piece of thin, stained foam – or a hard mat of reeds; and die at fifty – if you’re lucky. Travelling in Africa: once again I feel so glad that I can come and look and go away, back to my very privileged life.

*

Oh SHIT! I am within a couple of hundred metres of a bloody mosque!!!!! Aaaaaarrrgggghhhhh, Alllllllaaaaaaaaahhhawwwaaaawwwaawwaaabbbaaaagggaaa, Allllllaaaaaahhhh, eeeeeekkeeekeeaaalallllaaaaaa! Waaaaaaaaa, aaaaaaaaaah, waaaaaaa, eeeeaaaaaahhhhhh! How can this awful drone and tuneless noise be WORSHIP? Gosh, it’s so drearily dismal. The local muezzin gets ‘Nil points’ for his intonation of the bleak and dispiriting prayers. It’s such a joyless, wretched noise! Allluuuuuaaah Ackbaaaar! Uuuuuuaaaallllaaaahh…. woooowwwwwoo ackbaaaar! I’ve heard this prayer so many times, often in the middle of the bloody night, and it only gets worse…

Ear plugs then, tonight…

*

It was with a small sense of relief that I got out of Tanzania. There were traffic policemen everywhere – with, it must be admitted, reasonable driving standards, for traffic slows for all speed limits as fines are quickly and efficiently imposed. I certainly notice the very bad driving in Kenya where speed is all, despite the national obsession with spring-breaking speed humps. The traffic laws of Tanzania are being upheld by large numbers of police and it’s working. Perhaps Kenya could employ more traffic cops and less speed humps. But Kenyan police would need a purge first for they are sadly so corrupt. But my relief wasn’t at getting away from speed traps and policemen – in a way, I welcomed THEM! No, it was that I travelled across 500 miles of that country uninsured. I doubt the insurance would have been worth much more than the paper on which it was written, but I do try to avoid any excuse for policemen to hassle me on my travels, and I was stopped a few times, fortunately only for a look at my license.

*

A sudden violent storm has blown up. Frequent power cuts are at least interrupting the muezzin, such that over dinner I got a fit of giggles that I tried to suppress so as not to give offence. I’ve come back up to my room in the top of this tower of a building, the highest in town. Shoddily built, even in a new hotel none of the windows fit very well, there’s no window catches on the windward side, so I’ve tied them with socks to muffle the muezzin. I just ate supper downstairs in the sort of well around which the hotel is built – so that the noise of the interminable TV, for every activity in most of Africa is accompanied by TV (whatever happened to silence?) – echoes up and down the hotel. When Fred, the receptionist with whom I had negotiated, opened my room for me, he immediately switched on the TV, as if I would be desperate for some crap, facile, mind-numbing ‘entertainment’. For supper I ate tilapia since I am opposite the biggest lake in Africa. Tilapia with shredded green spinach and stodgy ughali. A nutritious meal, but I hate eating with my fingers. However, my pride as an experienced traveller won’t allow me to ask for a knife and fork! Since childhood, my mother used to say, I was always washing my hands, and to this day I have a deep distaste of grease on my fingers. Try eating tilapia with THAT handicap! When in Rome…

*

The lights are going on and off like a glitterball just now, strobing with the intense wind that is buffeting the hotel. Once again, I don’t mind rain while I am drinking my evening beer. Let it rain! So long as tomorrow the sun shines as usual.

I passed no less than eight dead dogs on the road today, surely a record? All dogs in Africa seem to be of one generic breed, pointed nose, sharp ears, long legs and skinny bodies – not attractive animals, and almost none of them kept as pets. Life’s too demanding for that luxury.

Wow! This is a dramatic storm! How great to be indoors with such a view when the lightning comes. The room’s dark as the power’s off but electricity lights the sky and the almost invisible lake behind a wall of rain that roars on the steel roof overhead and courses down the ill-fitting patio doors to the rain-slashed, wind-lashed balcony, where the wicker chair has impaled itself against the railings. I shall sleep with the curtains open to the balcony tonight and have that view of Lake Victoria to wake to. Haha! Life’s good sometimes!

Oh, except the moaning of the dismal muezzin will probably beat the sun to it, wailing next door… Well, ear plugs won’t spoil the view.

DAY 75 TUESDAY 21st FEBRUARY 2017. KERICHO, KENYA

What ear plugs can do for muezzins and cockerels, they sadly fail to do for the base beat of the mechanical modern ‘music’ largely created by sound engineers, not by anyone with compositional talents, that pound on until one in the morning. “Oh, Africans, they like it like that,” said Fred, with an unapologetic laugh when I suggested it might be antisocial and he should consider shooting the people by the lakeside. I have frequently found that most people in Africa have a FAR higher tolerance for noise than me. I have seen them sit a few feet from wardrobe-sized vibrating speakers while I was physically distressed yards away. Is it any physiological difference in our ears or just me being weak?

A case in point tonight in Kericho. I have had to retreat into the bar of the hotel from the balcony to keep warm. Bass-tuned speakers are pumping out ‘music’ of sorts PLUS the TV is blaring at the same time in the same room. Three TVs, to be precise, tuned to two different channels!

So another disturbed sleep last night. Being one of the world’s lightest sleepers AND a world traveller is difficult. Fortunately, tonight I am at the furthest corner of the hotel from this bar.

*

Circling around in Kericho, tea capital of Kenya, looking for an affordable hotel, it was again difficult. “You won’t find anything for your budget here! Kericho is growing so fast and there are no good places that cheap. You might get a place in the centre of town, but it won’t be a good place!” one receptionist in an overpriced tarty place dismissed my chances.

‘Huh! You don’t know me!’ I thought and rode out of town a couple of kilometres and found a perfectly acceptable place for a fraction over a tenner, including breakfast and hot water, well below even my budget.

*

I’ve left Lake Victoria and its clammy heat and mosquitoes and ridden somewhat inland and 900 cooler metres higher to the amazingly fertile hills of Kericho, surrounded by the beauty of tea estates. These are the biggest estates and this area produces much of Kenya’s tea, and Kenya is the third largest tea producer in the world. Here there is a microclimate such that rain falls most afternoons, producing just the conditions for tea propagation but not for motorcycle touring, but once again I was safely in the hotel before the rain came, all but a few drops as I rode about the well developed town, complete with a range of high rise buildings that I don’t remember being here fifteen years ago.

*

Well, I have braved the outside terrace again! The pounding of the music and the confusion of the TV as well was just too much for sensitive me. I’ve fetched my fleece and jacket instead. Everyone around me is extremely friendly, many making formal greetings, handshakes and name swapping, as is the very polite Kenyan way. It’s interesting, I am communicating so much more on a very human level now I am back in Kenya – as, indeed I enjoyed so much in Uganda. Rwanda and Tanzania just don’t have that outgoing, congenial habit. As customers pass me here, they give me a big, happy smile in greeting and make some congenial aside. Yes, I am happy to be back with gregarious people. I so love to travel in places where I am able to connect and interact so simply, on equal terms and with wide smiles and kindness and politeness. Kenyans, like Ugandans, always react to a smile! It’s simplistic to make judgements on four days’ experience, but I didn’t find the northern Tanzanians very receptive to my approaches, and as for Rwandans, I just felt as if I was such an unknown that I might be from another planet. Kenyans are urbane, generally quite well educated and familiar and confident with English. We can joke together; maybe THAT’S what I’ve been missing! So much of casual social intercourse requires that jocular familiarity that really only comes when two peoples share an understanding of language.

*

My ride was pleasant enough, the lake away to my left much of the way, passing through straggly villages with hills to the right hand horizon. It was warm and the traffic light as I was on a B road until I intersected one of the main north/ south highways, which was actually narrower and older than the roads of the morning. At the junction I stopped for a flask of tea (yes, Alice, tea!) at a roadside food kiosk, serving the usual fare of ughali, chapatis, goat and oily vegetables. The business was run by Agneta, a smiling matronly woman with a cheery red cap. Refreshed by her brew, we chatted a bit and she told me of a fine short cut from where I was to Kericho; a lovely minor road that climbed into the forests, back to the Kenya Highlands that are so attractive, and ultimately to the hills of brilliance; the carpets of luxurious tea bushes that cloak the hills amongst tall dark conifers, some of East Africa’s finest scenery. As I was leaving Agneta she insisted, as is often the way, that she should give me her ‘contacts’, and wrote her phone number on a scrap of paper. “Call me when you are in Kericho!” she suggested, the mobile phone here being virtually a body part now. In fact, I did send her a text message thanking her for her reviving tea and the short cut. Thus did I comply with Kenyan social etiquette.

*

The hotel staff are all charming too: Ruto, the receptionist; Patrick, the cook, congenial, polite young men amused to have a mzungu guest. My piki-piki is right in the heart of the building and my room on the second floor at the back. The only drawback to my peace is a bloody speed hump, the Kenyan obsession, over which the many lorries that ply this rather busy road rattle and bounce. Oh well, ear plugs again!

DAY 66 SUNDAY 12th FEBRUARY 2017. KIGALE, RWANDA

Swansea versus Leicester tonight. Football: it is endless, omnipresent and inescapable and the ONE thing everyone in Africa knows about my country.

*

I dedicated today to the Kigale Genocide Memorial and Museum – and very sobering it was too. Enough to consider for one day as a tourist in Africa.

The one aspect of Rwanda that commands the most respect is the fact that they have faced their appalling crimes and the horror of the 1994 rampage of vicious slaughter and the madness that inspired it. The Genocide Memorial is a testament to that honesty. It is a museum and graveyard, for over a quarter of a million Rwandan bodies – of men, women, children and babies – are buried on the site. It sits just above the valley bottom behind the main ridge of the city, overlooking the shiny towers and glass of the banks that pile up over the opposite hill top. It’s a well designed museum with gravitas but not overtly sentimental; it allows the facts and stories to speak for themselves. And they are so appalling that they cry out incredulously. Man’s inhumanity to man has seldom been better expressed than in those 100 days of 1994; man’s violent animal instincts seldom more exposed. Alongside the museum of events in 1994 is a more general exhibition of genocides of the past 100 years, and it does nothing to elevate the dignity of humankind – Namibia 1907 (see last year’s journal January 27th), the Armenians, the Serbs, the Jews, Cambodia and Pol Pot – millions of people butchered in the last century for imagined ethic jealousies instilled by evil, crazed politicians. And my over-riding thought at the end of the day: that mankind doesn’t learn by its folly, horrors and hatred. To this day it votes for hate-fuelled policies and bigotry. Do not fool yourself that Trump’s rhetoric is far removed from that which I learned today; or of 1933 in Germany, or 1907 in Namibia or the Armenian, Serbian, and all the other hatred and genocide of the last century. They all started with the same bragging pride, sectarianism, fanaticism, blame, untruths and manipulation of the ignorant.

My world travels do little to inspire confidence in the future of mankind on this planet.

*

Germany colonised what is now Rwanda between 1895 and 1916, then during World War One the land was occupied by Belgian troops, who in 1923 were given a mandate by the League of Nations (league of self-interested rich nations…) to govern Rwanda-Urundi. The mandate was soon turned to colonial occupation, which lasted until independence in 1962. During this time the Catholics (never far from the seat of these conflicts, it seems to me…) influenced education in Rwanda, increasingly teaching a racist ideology that the Tutsis were a superior group. ID cards were introduced in 1932 to further discriminate between the previously peaceful peoples. Believe it or not, anyone owning ten cows or more was classified as Tutsi; with less as Hutus. (There were also the Twa, a small tribe of peoples who lived quietly in the deep mountains, whom we know as Pigmy, now something of an insulting term). The racial delineation of Hutu and Tutsi applied to the descendants of those first classified peoples in 1932 and the division began, encouraged by the Belgians, who instituted forced labour to build roads and infrastructure, favouring the Tutsi minority. By the 1950s the Catholic church was further instrumental in encouraging the divide, the (Belgian) bishop supporting the division of the largely invented ‘race’ discrimination, portraying the minority Tutsis as oppressing the majority Hutus. Jealousies festered. There were massacres in the late 50s and in 1967 the first prime minister led a party for the emancipation of the ‘oppressed’ Hutus with fascist policies, persecution and ethnic cleansing. During this time 700,000 refugees left the country and formed a Patriotic Front, the RPF. They invaded in 1990 and civil war followed.

The Hutu ‘Ten Commandments’ of 1990 read just like the Nazi propaganda of the 1930s: racial purity, division of business interests, social divides. The then president, a Hutu, intensified the hatred, while making specious peace moves in peace conferences, meanwhile quietly pushing through the biggest Rwandan arms deal ever – with a French company guaranteed by a loan from the French government – for $12 million. On April 7th 1994 the (Hutu) president was killed when his plane was shot down by a missile as he approached the runway at Kigale – the wreckage falling in the ground of his own palace, and Rwanda turned into a nation of brutal, sadistic, merciless killers and neighbours rampaged against neighbours, colleagues on colleagues, family on family, fuelled – as always – by propaganda and a ruthless media (heard that anywhere recently..?).

In one story related on screen in the memorial museum, a woman told of her neighbouring family: all the children played together and the fathers were godfathers to one another’s children – until the killing started, when the one father caused the slaughter of most of the children of the other. He was a ‘GOD’father and he failed his GODchildren whom he had stood in church and vowed to protect! Can anyone explain to me as an increasingly convinced atheist how you can justify these actions and then profess to be Christian and go to ‘confession’..? Sorry for the aside, but it constantly staggers my belief in humanity. The vast majority of the killers were ‘Christians’ – Catholicism is a major influence here – and presumably believed they had authority from their god for this slaughter, and felt justified in bashing out babies brains against walls… Catholic churchmen and women weren’t blameless, although a few stories of bravery stand out. One ‘Father’ with 2000 people sheltering in his church, gave the command to bulldoze the church – with his congregation inside; others are known to have collaborated and at least a couple of nuns were tried and found guilty of war crimes… One church, convent and school became the killing centre for 20,000 people and another church saw 10,000 raped, abused and killed. Terrified people took refuge in churches and other Christians threw in grenades to destroy them. Religious belief becomes more impossible to me the more of the world and mankind that I witness.

Over a million innocent people were butchered by their friends and neighbours in three months. The UN and the world shamefully withdrew, and now admit their inaction exacerbated the incredible suffering. The general of the UN forces reckoned that 5000 soldiers could have controlled the outrage, but they were never sent. Tens of thousands were tortured, mutilated, raped and murdered; babies were dashed against walls, children cut apart by machetes, women forced to watch their children killed by bludgeons filled with nails, raped and then killed themselves, others intentionally raped by the HIV positive. Tens of thousands more suffered bullet wounds, infection, starvation, disfigurement. 300,000 children were orphaned and 85,000 children ended up as heads of families of orphaned siblings. A UNICEF report reckons that 80% of Rwandan children experienced a death in their family in 1994; 70% witnessed someone being killed or injured and 90% believed they would themselves be killed.

This didn’t happen in the Middle Ages: it happened 23 years ago. It’s put a new light on my observations that Rwandans have a reserve and detachment from me as a tourist…

*

The efforts to reconcile all this – and so many survivors and perpetrators are around me as I write – have been impressive. 12,000 local community courts were set up, called Gacaca, meaning ‘grass’, to investigate the crimes and bring together the accused with the survivors, many of whom only then found out what had happened to their family members and, in some cases, were able to trace their remains. It stands as one of the most comprehensive attempts to bring reconciliation in modern social history, bringing together those involved – on both sides. There are many very moving stories, not least of the sense of forgiveness inculcated by the process of the open local courts. The political perpetrators were tried under a UN resolution for crimes of genocide and many are still in jail around the world. As recently as 2013, they were still being brought to justice by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Some extraditions are still sought.

*

My visit was emotionally disturbing and ultimately disillusioning. As I wrote above, nothing changes despite the horrors. Trump vilifies innocent Moslems and Mexicans; Brexit thrives on fear of immigrants and outsiders; Shias and Sunnis; Arabs and Israelis; Catholics and Protestants; and at any time, about fifty religious wars rage around the world: MY religion is truer than yours’, ‘God is on MY side’. Huh. The language of hate never really changes and as times get hard, people look inwards, close ranks with the known and fear the unknown, and pull up the drawbridges. No, my travels don’t make me look at the world with much hope… We are really only animals with a thin veneer of learning and civilisation and deep-seated Darwinian instincts for self-preservation.
*

By coincidence, I had an email from Rico while I was at the Memorial. The cafe at the back – and by then I needed refreshment – had a wifi connection and I had the iPad with me to look for just that for the first time in some days. Rico, now in South Sudan, was working in Rwanda in 1994 and admits it was a deeply emotional time. I’m going to copy some of his email here. It adds so much to what I saw today:

‘…Reading about Rwanda reminds me of my intense time there during and shortly after the genocide. I was based in a place called Gikongoro. You most likely pass through there after you have left Lake Kivu behind at Cyangugu, (now Kamembe where I stayed three nights ago. JB) at the border, a narrow bridge, with the Congo.

I did spend time in Cyangugu as there were quite some child casualties, caused by special land mines, designed to attract children. If they picked up their new found toy, it would explode. Many kids lost limbs and the sight in at least one eye. It was of course also the (bottle-neck) border crossing to Congo. Tens of thousands passed every day, prompting us to set up refugee camps in and around Bukavu. I was working for the “Fund” (Save the Children) that year.

The road to Gikongoro goes straight through the forest, but no more elephants there! I remember the small but refreshing waterfalls coming from the mountain sides. I always enjoyed travelling through the forest, despite the long lines of people escaping the massacres walking to Congo.
We also supported many displaced people camps deep into the interior. We always used the main road from Huye to Kigali. The capital is so much unlike Kampala or Nairobi. However, as we were always a bit in a hurry and while the road was sometimes littered with bodies… we never looked for an alternative route.

Anyhow, many memories come back, it was definitely my most emotional year. 1994!’

Rico’s memories also give me an insight into the number of wheelchair-bound amputees I have seen in the past days… I don’t find people here interact much, so it was an introspective day filled with melancholic thoughts on mankind.

*

Well, I’d better try to end my entry a bit more upbeat! It was a warm, humid day and I walked a lot, leaving the bike in the hotel yard. This city is SO quiet and SO clean.

I need to think about the next three weeks, for there’s not much more than that left of my journey now. Sadly, I won’t meet Rico again on this trip, as he’s going to northern Congo next. I am thinking of keeping the little blue bike in his garage in Kitale for another winter trip, having started to bond a bit more with it and having invested SO much in it. It’s silly to sell it again without trying to get to Ethiopia! So we’ll get together again, all being well at the end of the year. Meanwhile, I have pretty much decided to head round the south of Lake Victoria through Tanzania back to Kenya, mainly because I fear the rains may be coming in the middle of Uganda by now. But I think before that I will ride back to Lake Kivu as I enjoyed the scenery and riding there so much. So tomorrow I am heading back to Kibuye and that lovely view of the lake from the faded hotel balcony…

DAY 67 MONDAY 13th FEBRUARY 2017. KIBUYE, RWANDA

Some rides and places are so good it’s worth repeating them. That’s what I thought when I set off from Kigale this morning so that I can enjoy the road south that I took last week and the ride through the forest that I so loved a few days ago. I hadn’t expected the bonus of a wonderful ride today as well!

I was quite content to leave Kigale, a fairly tedious city without a lot of attractions. Quiet and orderly, clean and disciplined – but not very engaging. The guest house was basic and very ‘concrete’ so I was happy to get back into the countryside. Rwanda’s roads are so quiet and empty that I rode along very relaxedly back to Muhanga, the town where I slept on Friday. From there I was onto new roads for me, a fine road to the west, over a surprisingly high range of mountains, terraced and cultivated from the bottoms of the valleys to the tops of the hills. I rode slowly and in delight, happy that I’d decided to ride back to Kibuye. It was only a seventy mile day but a very fine ride.

*

Stopping to take a photo of an intricately terraced valley, I was soon surrounded by a crowd of local people, who seemed to appear from nowhere. It’s always like that in Africa: you think you are all alone, and then someone pokes a head over an embankment, appears through the banana trees, walks round the corner carrying a load. I took my photo, laughed with the group of mainly young men and children; one young man keen to try on my goggles – and then began the demands: “give me money!”, or food, or the clothes off my back, or cigarettes. It seems no Rwandan can resist the chance that my capriciousness might just render something for free! Rico concurred that this is a very Francophone problem in Africa, and he has probably more experience than me by now. He wrote, ‘If somebody doesn’t give to you what you consider to be entitled to, then you must demand it’. A couple of Rwandan people to whom I have mentioned this endless frustration, have independently put forward the opinion that the French (and Belgian, in this instance) paid money to their colonial subjects while the British taught them how to earn it. I wonder if this is the root of the habit? It really DOES get irritating and it is pervasive in Rwanda, an otherwise fine and proud country. However, I try to rise above it because this is such a lovely country in every other aspect, not least the cleanest through which I have ever had the pleasure of travelling.

My, that was a magnificent ride, on empty, high roads in grand scenery, twisting and curling about the mountains. But I am even more delighted with my decision to return to Kibuye by my walk this afternoon, out onto one of the straggly, convoluted headlands by the small town. It is a splendid place, is Kibuye! Steep wooded slopes fall away to the calm lake, the sun was softening into the late afternoon, making a silver pathway across the water into which a series of large fishing canoes, tethered three together like trimarans with long poles arching out fore and aft from which nets will be winched and lowered, paddled smoothly, their crewmen chanting rhythmically to maintain their strokes. The evocative noise of the chants carried far across the gleaming water as the paddles dropped rings onto the mirrored surface. Small islands dotted the lake as it disappeared into distant haze that obscured the Congo such that one could imagine this to be a great ocean, not an inland African lake. As I sit later on the darkened terrace of the hotel, with a view worth hundreds more than my fifteen pound accommodation bill, I can make out the lanterns of those heavy plank canoes winking in the night, the same vessels I watched paddle so picturesquely below my wooded headland.

*

When I stayed in the Eden Rock Hotel last week I enjoyed my best night’s sleep of the trip. I am back in the same room, with its balcony above the tranquil bay and the scattered wooded islands. Most of the hotels hereabouts are expensive and really no better placed than this one. I was remembered and welcomed back and I have no doubt that by morning Munvaneza, the handsome, kindly security man, will have my little blue bike gleaming again, as he did the other day. When a service is done so willingly, with such a wonderful smile, it becomes a gift rather than a merely mercenary activity. He was delighted that I recollected his name.

*

Bicycle taxis are more common here than the ubiquitous motorbike ones. Out in rural areas I see so many straining cyclists, frequently resorting to pushing their heavily laden Chinese cycles up the long slow hills. With either passengers or goods, they ply the roads, a padded seat on the rear carrier, often piled high with heavy branches of green bananas, milk churns, sacks and bags, crates, firewood, baulks of timber, doors and frames, stacks of plastic chairs, water containers, crates of beer and soft drinks, trussed pigs and goats, dangling chickens, steel rods dragging the road behind, crops, tables, furniture and all manner of goods. And you may have kilometres to push, sweat and toil uphill to enjoy the rush down the other side. All this for a few pence each day.

*

Rwanda and Uganda would be a bird watcher’s delight. I’m sometimes sorry I know so little about them, for I see some startling birds. There are many vast raptors swooping about the hills and valleys on sharp updrafts; exotically hued birds flitting about the bushes; ungainly storks and herons, hideous vultures, pretty darting finches with bright heads, dazzling shiny birds, the brightest feathers imaginable and, today, the smallest birds I have ever seen. I doubt they were as much as two inches from beak to tail tip. Tiny, tiny birds, smaller even than hummingbirds. Nature has many extremes on this continent.

*

In a country in which the majority of the populous has no access to power and which is having to harness the noxious gases of the lake to generate electricity, Kibuye town council (one supposes) has installed modern lamp standards out into the beauties of the headlands and along the dust tracks frequented only by goats, pedestrians with the habit of sleeping when darkness comes, and an occasional expensive 4X4 with headlights. The result is useless waste and light pollution. It’s even more ridiculous than Harberton being bathed in light through every night when nothing but cats on the prowl are moving! Maybe it suggests ‘sophistication’..? I have seen these new lights in many rural villages and towns in this small mountainous country. I wonder if they will be maintained or left to wither like the plumbing in every hotel and guest house in which I have stayed in the last couple of months. Not ONE bathroom has worked fully! Loose taps, broken shower heads, terrifying electrics, blocked drains, loose lavatory seats, ineffective flush mechanisms, leaking joints – I’ve seen it all, everywhere. Africa in general has a problem with maintenance – or lack of it… Instead of fixing things before they break, they are left and become unmendable. It’s a sort of mental blockage shared by all Africa.

*

Pulling into a garage leaving Kigale, eight under-employed mechanics were much entertained while one of their colleagues effected an oil change on the little blue Suzuki for me. I have ridden about four and a half thousand kilometres (2800 miles) so far. I’m used to the bike now, and it’s getting me around cheaply and reliably. It’s certainly an easier bike for a ‘senior citizen’ to ride, and sufficient for the distances that I need to cover in these relatively small countries. I wouldn’t want to be riding round the big expanses of southern Africa on it though. Yes, it’s doing quite well on the whole.

DAY 68 TUESDAY 14th FEBRUARY 2017. KIBUYE, RWANDA

A day of rest today, not, I hear you mutter, that there’s much from which to rest! It just seemed, as I gazed at the lake over breakfast on another sunny morning in Africa, that leaving this lovely place was unnecessary for a day. It’s not often that I find places like this: tranquil, exotic, beautiful – and affordable! So I stayed. Time allows: I have just over three weeks left of my safari and only have to get back to this side of Kenya.

*

About twenty kilometres south of Kibuye I turned off the sweeping tar road onto a bad rock and gravel track that climbed through the steep terraces towards the Gisovu tea estates and the Bisesero genocide memorial, about six or seven miles off the road. At Bisesero many thousands of Tutsis put up resistance against the Hutu killers, gathering en masse on a mountaintop and using spears and rocks to defend themselves. Of course, the resistance failed: the ‘genocidaires’ were armed with guns and grenades by the manipulative Rwandan government, courtesy of France… Many thousands of people were butchered on that mountain in the rural landscape that looks so charming today. The complicity of the French government in arming the butchers and orchestrating the genocide can’t be ignored, nor the evil machinations of the Belgian Catholic church in fostering the sectarianism, or the folly of the UN in choosing not to interfere. These all can be seen, with hindsight, to have caused the horrific massacres. The stadium in little quiet Kibuye was the scene of another mass killing of thousands. It was everywhere. To this day French diplomats do not join in the commemorations at the genocide memorials in April, although all the other diplomatic missions are represented. That seems significant.

The Bisesero memorial is built on the adjacent hillside to that on which the battles took place and climbs the steep slopes with three ossuaries, each split into three sections, to represent the nine communities of the locality. Hundreds of battered skulls and leg bones stand testament to the abomination of April 1994. You can see the machete cuts, the bullet holes, the crushed bones from the nail-filled clubs. You can see the skulls of children and adults. You can see the charred skulls of those burned to death. It’s thought-provoking indeed. At the summit of the hill is a mass grave of tens of thousands of people whose only crime was to be judged of a ‘wrong’ tribe of peoples, despite being the former brothers and friends of the opposing warriors… The world is full of evil. And it doesn’t go away…

…Glinting on an opposite hillside a mile away are the tin roofs of a massive camp of Congolese refugees, fleeing political infighting and civil war in the country across the lake. It made even more of an impact, looking across from the bones of the memorial to the waste of thousands of displaced people confined to a refugee camp by such similar jealousies, sectarianism and self-interested politicians. Mankind does NOT learn. We are no better than animals in the final assessment.

*

I began to write a short time ago, down on the narrow beach by the calm lake, with a Turbo King at my side. Suddenly a HUGE storm and torrential rain crept up behind me. Fortunately, I was under a large sun umbrella. Soon I ended up standing on the log table as the rain cascaded and bounced all around. It’s been threatening all day, and in fact I cut short my ride to the tea estates because I could see rain clouds gathering and don’t choose to ride on sandy, earthen tracks in the rain if I can avoid it. Thunder is rolling very atmospherically around now, deeply reverberating above the lake. Maybe it will clear the air for a bright day tomorrow… I’ve said it before: I don’t care if it rains while I am drinking my evening beer. These storms are usually short-lived and reduce the humidity. A kind young waitress rescued me with a dripping umbrella so that we could run splashing across the flowing road to the hotel.

DAY 69 WEDNESDAY 15th FEBRUARY 2017. NYANZA, RWANDA

Perhaps If I had realised the quality of this hotel I’d have been embarrassed to bargain so hard with the manager. (Perhaps..!) I seem to be in the best hotel in town, a ‘real’ hotel; new, I should think as it hasn’t had time to deteriorate yet… I have a pleasant modern room with a balcony with an extensive view across the western mountains. There’s a large swimming pool set in well kept gardens with a thatched bar, a proper dining room, waiters in smart uniforms, green grass (not dust!) and all the accoutrements of a proper hotel. £16 B, and then, Andrew the manager, eventually threw in the other B with a laugh! So long as I do it with big smiles, it just about always works!

*

All the roads I have ridden today, 150 miles of them, are roads I rode last week. Sometimes it’s just worth riding them twice for the sheer pleasure of the scenery, the sweeping, curling roads and the joy of being in a very beautiful part of this African continent. I had a good day, and today I quite enjoyed the little bike.

The road through the Nyungwe national forest are some of the best fifty miles of East Africa, twisting and climbing to 2500 metres through lush, dense forest of towering creeper-hung trees covering steep slopes above and below the road. Monkeys scamper about the verges and here and there huge vistas of misty ridges thick with trees are disclosed between the foreground trees. There’s a refreshing smell of dampish undergrowth and brief showers are frequent but so localised that I seem to avoid them, each one little more than a condensing cloud dropping its new rain back onto the forest below in an endless cycle. Maybe this is what the world was like before we built roads and concrete hotels, just this exuberant, luxuriant greenness?

The approaches to the forested area, down along the silver lake to the west, are pretty striking too, with panoramic expanses of terraced mountainside peppered with small brown homes with their brown pantiles or shiny zinc. Growth is prolific, bananas, cassava, coffee, tea, vegetables, onion fields, even rice paddies in some of the low flat valleys, backed by sharp ridges. The water sits still below, calm and misted, Congo pretty much invisible across the looking glass lake. People wave or stare dead-pan; it’s a toss up, some are excited, some completely expressionless, whatever my reaction. I can’t really make head and tail of the Rwandan people. In one area I was like a passing celebrity: everyone, young and old, waved and smiled; a few miles further on, laughing at such extravagant reactions, I passed into another area entirely, where people stared blankly and no one returned my smiles. I can’t account for it. In the friendly region, fortunately also the most beautiful, where tea cloaked the hills and gentle blue eucalyptus leaves made a magnificent and photogenic counterpoint, I stopped a few times, unable to resist another photo. Each time crowds gathered, mainly small children, for school had finished for the afternoon and they have long roadside walks home, but with adults, hoes across their shoulders, babies on backs, too. They crowded round excitedly, watching and commenting, joking with each other at the cheerful expense of the old granddaddy on the motorbike. It’s just a shame their waves always turn in a reflex action into an outstretched palm and the Rwandan National Greeting: “Give me money!”, often abbreviated to just “…money!” I keep reminding myself that these are uneducated people who have been taught this irritating habit because, at some time French people have done just that: paternalistically and imperiously handed out pennies to the natives. Since entering Rwanda this has become a sort of soundtrack to my travels: choruses of “give me money! Give me money…”

And in other stretches of the beautiful road, totally blank reaction… It’s beyond me. Not a smile, not a wave, just a stare… But no one means harm by it, it’s just the way they are, it seems. Sometimes it is difficult to be such a casual observer of foreign cultures, understanding only a little, knowing few of the influences and social habits, comprehending manners only in reference to my own instincts or comparing to other, disparate people.

*

All day the clouds have gathered and dispersed, leaving me dry, but chilly on the heights. Apprehensively, I have watched great blue storm heads gather and disappear. I suppose the seasonal rains are on their way. An email from South Africa today tells me how much it has been raining this year. Happily, here a thousand miles north, I have not actually been properly wet in all these weeks, only a couple of brief showers not even worth getting out the waterproofs for. Here, a couple of degrees from the Equator, altitude makes the difference. As I write, I am sitting in the hotel garden beside a thatched bar complete with pool table – and the inevitable British Premiere League football on the box. I have had to race back to my room twice for long trousers and then a fleece. I am determined to eat my supper beneath the stars!

In effect, my journey home began today. From now on I shall be travelling generally eastwards, back round the bottom of Lake Victoria to Kenya, to return the little blue bike to Kitale for future travels.

Crikey! The first of my supper just arrived: a mixed salad. It is HUGE, a plate piled high. At this point in my journey, it’d probably be entirely sufficient – without the spaghetti I ordered! My appetite reduces so much on these journeys. I had a night of fitful sleep last night punctuated by bad dreams, then I remembered: I took my weekly malaria prophylactic yesterday. It’s known to affect some people with psychotic disturbances. The British Army has been fighting against all sorts of accusations from soldiers affected. Still, having suffered cerebral malaria – and only survived, according to the hospital specialist, because I’d been taking anti-malarials, I guess a night a week of disturbed sleep is acceptable. “Yes, well, you’d probably have died last week if you hadn’t been taking the prophylactics..!” I can still hear charming Pakistani Dr Ijaz in Bedford Hospital when I complained that I had contracted malaria despite the pills. But I am tired tonight, after poor sleep and 150 miles of fine roads and fresh air.

I’ve spotted a road on my tourist map that avoids riding all the way back through the capital city on my way to the south east of Rwanda and the Tanzanian border. I must try to find out if it’s a viable route. Mile upon mile of gravel and rock isn’t a short cut…