MY BROTHER, WECHIGA FROM GHANA MEETS MY EAST AFRICAN FAMILIES; ANOTHER HIKE DOWN THE SIDES OF THE RIFT VALLEY; ROCK GARDENS GETS MANY GUESTS – AND A TOURISM AWARD! THE RAIN CONTINUES IN THIS DRY SEASON…

Wechiga, my closest and fondest African brother for 34 years, left Nairobi well before dawn this morning, January the 29th, to fly back across Africa to Ghana.

Our meeting on December 22nd 1989 was an event that profoundly influenced both our lives, as we came to understand one another’s cultures and values. He’s a man of integrity, curiosity, kindness, humour and sociability. We are both products of remarkable mothers. His mother, Akay, born within a year or so of mine, was the wisest of women, the most admirable African I ever met. She didn’t know her birth date – no one kept records then; we can only surmise from her name, Akay – meaning ‘I have survived’ – that she was perhaps born soon after the influenza pandemic of 1918. She was illiterate but wise. My mother, Joy, born in 1917, used to describe herself as, ‘not much brain, but bags of common sense’, self-deprecating words that both women from such different cultures might use, both extraordinarily sociable and curious, gifts they’ve passed on to their two sons. They’d have recognised this in one another, had they ever had the chance to meet. Wechiga bonded closely with Joy on his visits to Britain, as I did with Akay on my many journeys to Navrongo, before she died in 1999. She was a remarkable woman.

Wechiga has inherited much of Akay’s spirit and curiosity. He loves new experiences and approaches life with a sociable, easy-going nature moulded by his remarkable mother. As probably do I, from my mother.

***

Full of tales and excitements of my second motorbike crossing of the incomparable Sahara, I arrived in Navrongo that afternoon in late 1989, with Wechiga, who’d met me at the Ghana border a few miles to the north, sitting atop my spare tyre. Introduced by Perry, now back in England, I knew nothing of Wechiga’s culture or the habits of the household, and he knew nothing of mine, three thousand miles away in another, northern world. Everything was new and much of it mysterious. We both started with a clean slate and, I think, there and then decided we must abandon all diffidence. Like Akay, to whom so many young neighbours came for advice, Wechiga has an innate wisdom. He seemed to know what I needed to understand to operate within his culture, an extraordinary gift for one who’d not travelled further than Tamale, that so much enhanced my understanding of this new way of life. It’s a brotherhood that has changed my life, my values, and my opinions. It’s been the greatest privilege: to get inside another, so-different culture and learn its benefits and problems. With all the new devices that the world has invented since we first met, Wechiga and I talk at least every week, and he’s been my cheerful guide, friend, and brother on 21 visits to his home town, and the three long visits to my world that I facilitated for him over the past couple of decades. I planned to visit him last November, but was called to America for work instead. A joke comment from him prompted me to think what a thrill it would be for him to fly across Africa and meet my East African families instead…

So, this episode is much taken up with Wechiga’s visit to East Africa, another adventure in his life, earned by his integrity, curiosity and kindness. 

***

His arrival time in Nairobi was set for 01.20 on the 9th of January. I’d booked us two rooms at the old fashioned United Kenya Club and travelled down, by plane this time, from Eldoret, the day before. After three international trips – to Britain – I had no doubts of Wechiga’s ability to negotiate the intricacies of airlines and airports, but by 03.20, I was uncomfortable, as I waited outside Arrivals, most of the other meeters and greeters fading away into the night. A text message, timed at 01.15, worried me: ‘I am in Addis Ababa’. Was he even on this flight? All the stragglers had cleared baggage and customs and the airport was increasingly silent. I considered returning to the city and bed. But if I wasn’t here, how would he cope? No money, no idea where to go, in the pre-dawn hours at an international airport? Finally, at 03.30, I spotted a smocked figure with a very small backpack (I taught him to travel light!) emerge from the immigration corridor. “Eh! There was some form I hadn’t downloaded. There was no signal, no connection! Huh! And I didn’t know I could have given the official a few dollars and they’d have let me go! Just two of us, last out of the aeroplane!” But here was my brother, whom I haven’t seen for four years, looking more and more like his lined father, now with some grey to his hair, but still the irrepressible smile and happy curiosity, come to see more of the world. “You taught me to travel!” Questions began at once, on our weary race back to the city on empty highways with a crazy young taxi driver.

“But what about that text message saying you were in Addis at one fifteen?”

“Oh, I hadn’t reset my phone from Ghana time!”

***

We stayed two days in Nairobi and then bussed up to Kitale, the usual ten-hour ordeal on a battered bus that left the mud-clogged, chaotic terminal almost two hours late.

The rain persisted, as it has done so much this year, obscuring the fine views of equatorial Kenya. Wechiga was impressed, even on arrival, to be at the highest altitudes of his life on land. Nairobi is at 5300 feet above sea level, and our travels were to take him up to 10,037 feet, two up on the little 200cc Mosquito, Wechiga sitting uncomplaining on the rack, padded by aged foam pieces in a plastic sack. Crossing the Equator was also a high point, literally, as here the road grinds to over 9000 feet.

He has a great ability to make friends, a result of being a sociable listener. We’ve stayed several days in Kitale, some days in Kessup, with a major hike into and out of the Rift Valley, and a trip around the mountain slopes to Sipi and the Ugandan family. The days have been filled with goodwill, novelty and conversation, Wechiga charming multiple nationalities, but everywhere mistaken for a Kenyan. 

***

It seems my lot in life to introduce people to one another. Here I was, bringing my brother across the continent to make new friends. And on arrival in Kessup at the very lip of the Great Rift Valley, our first ride two-up – in drizzly rain – here were Wanda and Jörg from Koln in their elderly camping car, friendly folks who’ve spent many years exploring Africa, whom I befriended several years ago and introduced to Adelight and Rico in Kitale, and to Alex and Precious in Uganda. They would soon be moving on to Kitale. So that Sunday, Jörg joined Wechiga, William and I on a clamber up the mountainside from Kessup’s plateau part-way down the steep escarpment. It amuses me that that morning, before our walk, I was thinking how excited children would be to have THREE mzungus to shout at and greet. It was some hours before I recognised that Wechiga isn’t a mzungu! A stranger, yes, but certainly not mzungu…

I wanted to introduce Wechiga to moratina, a local drink made from honey and herbs that is sunflower yellow in colour and brings smiles to faces from its alcohol. Leonard, a beekeeper, brews it for Sundays at his tidy compound behind the peaceful Kessup Forest, the stretch of providentially protected indigenous woodland that lines the steep edge of the plunging valley. I also wanted Wechiga to be able to claim that he’d hiked from top to bottom of the great split in Africa, a height here of over four thousand feet. From the rocky viewpoint we could gaze far far down to the white dust road on which we planned to hike next day, down in the fiery depths, past the Kessup plateau, like a giant fertile step in the giant incline.

***

The hot white road deep in the Kerio Valley, a spur of the Great Rift, is long and boring, joined to the upper plateau by a few tortuous footpaths and a couple of astonishing dirt roads hacked from the cliffs. One ambitious project of road engineers’ will forever remain unconnected, the cliffs too steep to join the spaghetti curls of rocky track where, presumably, the surveyors miscalculated. A green and rocky road wriggles down until it stops bluntly, unstable slopes dropping away impossibly on all sides.

We must take to a winding, slippery footpath through aloes, thorn trees and seed-catching undergrowth, down to the lower track, 800 feet below, that winds steeply downwards, the road-makers’ ambitions slowly returning to a broken path, down to the depths. We slip and slide, catch seeds in our socks and red dust on our clothes. The heat increases with every metre we drop. We puff and pant, and sometimes I wonder just how much longer I can do this! Always at the back of my mind is the gruelling truth that every metre we go downhill will tomorrow bring a ghastly metre back uphill… We gasp as we stagger down the eleven miles of uneven trail to a couple of springs of cool water. I haven’t brought my metal water bottles this time: we were two-up on my little bike; I travelled as lightly as possible, already carrying waterproofs for us both. There’re still rainclouds boiling about above the cliffs. It’ll rain again tonight. This year, the weather’s terrible: rain most days, in what should by now be the dry season. People blame El Niño, but it’s probably also what we’re doing to the planet, I reflect as I crunch over endless plastic waste, even here in what should be the ‘Depths of Nature’. We don’t deserve this beauty around us. We certainly don’t look after it.

But Wechiga’s too full of the hike to notice these things. He’s chattering away to William, exclaiming at the scale of scenery, comparing the plant life to that of home, telling William about customs and beliefs in his home across the continent. He still limps a bit from his broken leg; a motorbike accident ten years ago. And his shoes aren’t really suitable for hiking, but most Africans don’t have the luxury of multiple choices of footwear: just last time I was here, William had to rush up to Iten at the top of the escarpment to purchase some secondhand shoes for our walk.

We sit under a sparse thorny tree and gaze into the distance over the vast valley. We’ve still several miles to go down, then more miles along the long dust road that draws a line into the distances both ways, disappearing behind a great tree-covered bluff to the north. Somewhere that way, we will stay at the simple guest house at Kipkoyiwo, where the elephants come to drink at the village water source in the dry season. We won’t see them this year, though. There’s too much rain, so they’ll stay discreetly in the midst of the bush. It will rain heavily tonight, rattling on the tin roofs over our basic rooms: just a bed with a none-too-clean blanket, a plastic basin for washing and a holey mosquito net. There’s not much to eat, just chapatis, mangoes and the delicious, copious ten-pennyworth bag of spinach we’ve carried every inch of the way from a field on the plateau high above. But the body can take care of itself when the soul is so rewarded by such magnificence. For a day at least…

It rains hard in the night, but down here in the inferno, it doesn’t turn to mud. We plod along the road a kilometre or so further towards the northern deserts to buy Kerio Valley mangoes from a farmer friend of William’s. They’re surely the best fruits in the world – after Ugandan pineapples, of course. We add them to my old faded and patched backpack that’s been to Africa so often. We’ll take turns to carry our few possessions as we clamber and struggle back up, but stupidly I elect to take the stretch where we must climb at the steepest. I’m struggling; determined not to give up; questioning my sanity at 74; one foot in front of another; lugging the few scant kilos of the bag. It’s heavier at every step, but no, I won’t accept help. Wechiga’s 64 and William’s 58, mere youths. But as always, I have something to prove… The last miles are ghastly! Maybe I really AM getting old! But then, I realise, I have climbed three and a half THOUSAND feet up this slippery, unstable, hot slope – in searing sunshine, floodlit like a moth on a light bulb on the side of this incredible cleft in the Earth’s crust. Life in the old dog yet…

***

Next day, we ride back to Kitale. It’s harder, two-up on the little bike. It’s the innumerable speed bumps (an obsession of Kenyan road engineers) that make it wearing. On my own, I can stand up and coast over them at speed, but now I must brake for every one of them, hundreds back to Kitale. But I take Wechiga over the magnificent Cheringani Highway. It sounds like a major toll road, but it’s a lovely curling tar road – that used to be one of the hardest and most rewarding trail rides in East Africa – that winds and twists HIGH over the green hills. I’m taking Wechiga higher than he’s ever been on land, up to 10,037 feet. We stop for a photo and gaze at the vistas of these high hills – that anywhere else’d be called mountains, as Rico always says, but are insulted as mere ‘hills’ where they sit atop the high lands of this part of Africa. 

Then we curl down newly constructed link roads – that used to be difficult rock tracks when I started coming this way – chased by rainclouds. We outstrip the rain on the descent, and ride back ‘down’ to Kitale, at its 6000 feet. Wanda and Jörg have pulled their camping car into Rico’s garage for some repairs. We have a happy, cheerful evening on the porch all together. Wechiga meets more people and charms them with his cheerful conversation and endless curiosity. Jörg’s been to Ghana a few times in his African travels. There are stories to tell over our beers and supper. Our friends from Germany enjoy a night ‘indoors’, listening to the heavy rain on the garage roof, protected from the deluge, their windows open. Still this awful weather…

***

Time’s against us. I’ve already paid the airline to extend Wechiga’s visit until the 29th, but there’s a lot to do in our twenty days. I have to spend a frustrating hour before we can leave for Uganda, filling in arcane and pointless bureaucratic nonsense to buy him a permit to re-enter Kenya in four days time. It takes three days to process… A couple of weeks ago, with great fanfare, Kenya’s president announced that Kenya was going to be visa-free for all travellers. It’s propagandist nonsense. Now we must all apply for an ‘Electronic Travel Authorisation’. It’s a visa by another name: all the same pointless questions and form-filling, photos and permissions. It’s a bloody VISA! And it’ll cause me a lot of hassle in future years. At present I obtain (with hours of online angst), for $100, a visa that covers me to go in and out of Kenya and Uganda and Rwanda for three months. With the new system, I’ll have to apply for each country separately, $50 for each Uganda visa, $35 for each Kenyan return. It’ll double my costs. My only thought is how shamefully WE treat any African crazy enough to apply for a visa to our xenophobic, arrogant, cruel country. I’ve heard enough stories, and been involved in sufficient applications to reduce my irritation at African countries’ treatment of me, a privileged mzungu, whose admission is guaranteed so long as I pay the fees and accept the nonsense (largely invented by the colonial British of course).

So we leave late for our ride round the shoulders of great Mount Elgon, a favourite ride. It’s 90 miles to Sipi, now on the impressive Chinese road that’s carved its way across the mountainsides such that we can make the journey in two and a half hours plus the border crossing. Wechiga needs no visa for Uganda (it really IS visa-free there for him. It’ll cost me £27 to be able to bring him back into ‘visa-free’ Kenya…). The Mosquito performs well, despite its meagre 200ccs. It’s dry today, but the wonderful views are obscured by moisture rising from the damp expanses of Uganda below us. “There should be a great view here!” I keep shouting over my shoulder to Wechiga. Happily, the return journey in four days will prove to be sunny and bright: the vistas stunning as always.

***

Rock Gardens at Sipi, our project to build a guest house and make the family independent, has taken off! It’s astonishing. It’s the power of the internet. Alex has the rough-round-the-edges ‘traditional’ guest house on Google Maps and the all pervasive B.kom (once again spelled that way to prevent it uploading links to your device as you read!). A few days ago, he received an award for a 9.2 travel review score by visitors. Reviews of our rough place are ecstatic. My fears about the lack of sophistication of the guest house were unfounded: it’s the welcome and food that are impressing guests. 

We arrive, happily welcomed by the family, to find no less than THIRTEEN international guests staying in the two round thatched rooms, the basic room that was recently a kitchen – now with a very basic bathroom and the other room that hasn’t even a bathroom. Wechiga’s in the storeroom and – of course – The Money: me – in the derelict tent once more.

It’s the fire pit, made by me in 45 minutes of inspiration, that’s so popular. Now Alex and Precious cook up plentiful and delicious buffet meals, served from warming trays by the fire. We all sit and chat and exchange stories. Alex is a caring host, Precious a happy hostess and the children loved by all.

Debra and I are surprised how timid some of these younger-generation travellers are – I’m sure because they are filled with doom and gloom and dramatic stories from their phone screens – all those Prophet of Doom stories that happened to ‘someone who knew someone’, but never with actual first hand proof.

Debra’s travelling with an orphan girl from Jinga, down by Lake Victoria, called Rebecca. She’s shy and innocent, and thinks she’s about 19. Orphaned at three months from parents with AIDS, the father a drunkard, she suffered malnutrition and lived rough with three only slightly older siblings, scratching for scraps. She has little idea of family, despite searching for relations. In this ghastly Ugandan culture, there’s little room for compassion and it’s every man – or baby child – for themselves. Helped for a time by a charity, she now lives with a slightly older sister and has been ‘adopted’ by a friend of Debra’s. Her sister, she tells me, got married very young to find ‘security’… 

‘In Uganda?’ I think to myself as she tells her sad story. With these men who have a vacant space where Morality and Responsibility should reside? 

This is an adventure for Rebecca, who’s never had the chance to see even her own country. Hers is a not-unusual, desperate story, but also a tale of fortitude and strength: determination and hope kept alive somehow in this young woman. She’s having fun as she slowly gains confidence to talk with the United Nations around the fire pit at Sipi. 

***

We enjoy a happy group activity, making mud for the earth bread oven and decorating the new outer layer to protect the structure from the rains. Our bread is another attraction for Rock Gardens, along with the walks that Alex is happy to arrange since he and I started to hike through surrounding communities. One day, down to eleven guests today, we walk all day, four mzungus exciting the local child-population to constant calls and waves.

I’m content. My instincts were correct five years ago when I met Alex and Precious and started my support for their project. They are very good at this work. They make their guests happy, look after them and feed them well. I’ve a feeling they’ll always need my support, but Alex admits they now earn enough for their family necessities – although, doubtless, Uncle Jonathan will pay the school fees next week..!

***

I find I’m now the old man and mentor, telling travel stories of another era – a more adventurous one, I believe, when we went out with our own curiosity, unburdened by the universal bland knowledge of the internet and numerous spurious ‘guides’ who’ve set up business in tourist centres where young tourists feel so threatened. It’s comforting to meet and bond with Debra from Australia, a quiet, older woman who travelled, like me, before the all-pervading internet. Debra and I spurn it all and tell of a time when we made our own decisions – and mistakes – without ‘reviews’ on the internet – (also frequently spurious). We went and explored and found our own hotels and destinations and bargained. These youngsters don’t understand the concept and have been conned into booking ahead (for ‘security’) through the horrible websites. Sacha from France tells me that he likes to book through B.kom, “Because if I use it often enough, we get a discount”! Debra laughs at my retort: “I ALWAYS get a discount, sometimes 50%! And without boosting the profits of a multinational corporation – who are destroying independent hoteliers… I just bargain!”

Riding back round the mountain, the sun shines and we make good time. We spend a couple more days with Adelight, Rico and Maria and then we get the early morning bus back to Nairobi, 240 miles back down the country.

On this worn, damaged, single carriageway, we crawl slowly, at the speed of the tuk-tuks, donkey carts and straining container wagons trading to and fro to Uganda and even Rwanda; the struggling petrol trucks that fuel Uganda; the clapped-out boda-boda taxi bikes. It takes a special patience to sit and watch, never to anticipate arrival – except as a vague concept in a delayed future. We stop, for no apparent reason, in a car park for almost an hour. We must develop a zen-like acceptance and sense of resignation to the fates of travel. Irritation speeds nothing but disappointment and destructive moodiness. We wonder at the antics of other road users. Time passes slowly. Life passes slowly. Nothing achieved but a mile or two nearer our destination – and the lessons of patient fortitude. The antique battered bus shakes and rattles; the radio insists for attention, but it’s in Kiswahili and happily meaningless to me. The seats are comfortable – for an African bus – legroom surprisingly generous up here at the front with a view of the creeping landscape. The driver yells into his phone, another indecipherable noise. We creep at a snail’s pace across the African mountains. The driver has terrible taste in ‘music’. For hours we listen to ‘techno-pop’, that tedious production of engineers, not artists or musicians – mechanical, repetitive and ear-scratchingly treble-toned, stuff that’s never been near a musical instrument. 

But my brother knows this patience well. He lives with it across the continent. He gazes philosophically out of the grimy window – and dozes off now and again. He’s African, and lives without my privileges, puts up with things. He’s a better man for it. And a wonderful travelling companion. I’m so content that life has given me the ability to show my friends these things. And to learn by their reactions to them. 

At last we reach Nairobi. Wechiga’s still cheerful and positive. “It’s just part of travel!” he says, still smiling. When he gets back to Ghana, after hours of flying, he’ll board a bus to Navrongo, 500 miles to the north of the capital. His journey down took twenty hours…

***

Wechiga’s now back in Ghana. I am back in Kitale, and the next part of my safari can begin – tomorrow. I’ve promised two more weeks in Sipi to decorate the new round house and direct building operations, a visit to Scovia, now living in Narok, southwest of Nairobi, and perhaps a visit to Mombasa, where Adelight’s cousin, Reuben and his Dutch wife, Marienne – whom I met at New Year, invite me to visit. I’ll also have to make another hike in the Rift Valley and want to explore more of the Cheringani Hills and the Kerio Valley escarpment. I’m pondering on a sortie into Tanzania too, if I can put up with the costly bureaucracy now intruded by Kenya’s nonsense ‘visa free’ status – that will cost me hours of online hassle and at least $100! 

I have 38 days left to do all this…

EPISODE ONE

BACK ON THE ROAD, THE MOSQUITO GETS ITS BITE BACK, AND CHRISTMAS LOOMS

I’m standing on the very lip of the African Great Rift Valley, leaning on my motorbike. This has become one of my favourite landscapes – after the Sahara Desert, of course. This topographical wonder splits Africa from top to bottom, from Jordan to Mozambique, surely one of the finest geographical features of this wonderful continent that has so fascinated and engaged me for 36 years. 

I’ve just ridden a winding rocky trail, difficult travel, through a forest on the slopes of the highland hills, riding up to 3050 metres, according to my phone. 10,007 feet, I calculate. Now, on the edge of this wonder, I am gazing eastwards upon mile upon mile of green bush land far below; over 4000 feet below just here, so deep is this great cleft. 

It suddenly strikes me, as it does more frequently these days, that I’ll soon be 75! By popular convention I am supposed to be old enough to ‘know better’ than this continuous footloose exploration of the world around me, but really, this is the only thing I know. The thing I’m best at. The activity that’s kept me young enough to still be doing it! An old mzee mzungu on his piki-piki. (Old white man on a motorbike in KiSwahili) “How OLD are you?” I’m often asked now, for elderly Africans are a tiny minority in countries with average life expectancies often in the 50s. Astonished strangers exclaim in surprise. “So old!” I chuckle inwardly, and bask in the respect that old people usually enjoy in African cultures.

Anyway, why would I follow convention? Why start now?

This travelling has been the major influence of my life: this odd desire to see beyond the next hill, meet unknown people, have new experiences. It’s the activity I do best. Certainly the one that engrosses me and takes most if my money and keeps me forever curious. 

With a glance eastwards, I throw my leg over the bike and ride on, spinning down the curling road that weaves 4000 feet down into the depths, green this El Nino year that has brought floods to many across the  African continent. There’s a weedy green lake in the middle of the hazy Kerio Valley. Elephants wander the bush country below. I know they are there. Last year I crossed the burning valley on foot, a huge effort, pushing through the thorny scrub, blood spattered and dusty – and disturbing a couple of giant elephants breaking boughs from trees. They gazed at us in wary interest from about 100 yards away, HUGE they seemed, and returned to their grazing, probably well aware that they could outrun us, or attack if the need arose, three puny humans of not much threat, on foot in difficult bush country. One of them ‘old enough to know better’ anyway. I’ll walk down again tomorrow, 3500 feet into that furnace, where I’ll buy the best mangoes in the world, and return to the Kessup plateau weary, red as beetroot but satisfied with another story to tell. 

Today, already day ten of this year’s safari, I am riding back to Kessup to visit my hiking pal, William, a wiry ex-policeman, with no extra ounce to his skinny frame. He lives on next to nothing on his acre or two of shamba on the fertile plateau, caring for his cow, Dutch, that I bought for him a year and a half ago. He’s so proud of his well bred cow and will not leave home for more than a day or two, leaving Dutch in another’s care, for he believes she’ll pine for him! Dutch is pregnant now, “Eh, I sacked the veterinarian! He failed to make Dutch pregnant THREE times! I wasted several thousand good shillings. Then I took her to to the secondary school where they have a good bull of the same breed. Now she’s pregnant! Free!” When Dutch gives birth, scheduled for April 5th, he hopes it’ll be a female calf, “In our belief, a development here, a swelling…” he indicates the side of his torso as if it were his cow’s, “we believe it will be female.” If it’s a male calf, he’ll sell it after two years, but a female will start a dynasty that has the potential to make him financially independent at last. He can sell milk to the schools around his village. A small investment for me – far beyond the reach if most here, and certainly beyond the resources of an ex member of the Nairobi  Flying Squad, who resigned from the force after a vicious attack by a machete-wielding criminal that left him in intensive care for many weeks and slightly disfigures his face. His cow, and maybe more of them, holds the chance of independence into his old age. He’s 58 now and appears to me to live on fresh air and the pennies his daughter, a nurse now in Australia, sends home. This is the way for so many on this continent. Dutch cost me £375 – a lifeline for William’s future; a couple of months electricity bills for me at home… 

He’s waiting for the sound of my Mosquito, my little 200cc magic carpet that flies me over these highland landscapes – and across the neighbouring countries, these past six or seven winters. I bounce down the track to the campsite/ guest house on the very edge of the valley, here on the plateau some of the way down the steep escarpment. He sees this view every day of his life; his opinion probably more of the inconvenience of living in this terrain than my delight at the extensive shimmery view. 

Hearing me approach, he hastens down his scrubby shamba, kept lanky for Dutch to graze. And here’s Dutch shadowing him. I must greet both! The cow looks healthy, and so she should, since she gets first dibs at any good fortune that comes William’s way. I must admire her before our greetings and brief news of the past twelve months. Then I ride on into the neighbouring guest house, where as always William has beaten down the price of my room – and this year it’s almost embarrassing as the Kenyan shilling, 150 to the pound sterling in March, is now exchanging at 195… I have a small room at the side of the compound, with a view of 20 miles across the Kerio Valley below. “We’ll walk down tomorrow! Then on Thursday we’ll walk right along there, see where the forest is, and back up to the top.” 

“But tomorrow, we’ll come back by ‘means’!” I say. “I’ve only been here ten days and I’m not acclimatised to the heat, the sun or the altitude yet…” We are standing at around 6500 feet above sea level and even now, I can feel the restriction of oxygen. “I’ll adapt in a few days and maybe then we can walk down and up in a day, but not yet!

The next day, we do indeed scrabble down into the oven of a valley. It’s gravelly and I AM more cautious than I’d’ve been a decade ago. Injuries DO mend slower now, there’s no hiding the fact! But I’m still determined. And I know the satisfaction I’ll have when I sit down for my beers tonight. It’s hot as hell, and despite Mr Currter, the awful old oversized shirt that Marion bought for me last year in the secondhand clothes market – it’s written on the tail: ‘Currter 4’, probably the late owner – despite the shade of the grubby white shirt, my skin soon glows. We hike down the unstable path to the long dust and rock road that sweeps through the valley, and after mugs of sweet chai, hail a taxi motorbike and then a 12-seater minibus – joining the 16 people already aboard, back up the winding hill road to Kessup.

“The goodness is, we both like to walk!” The day after, we walk along the plateau, up and down on the red dust between small fields of maize and local vegetables, on which people live. We visit William’s aunt, youngest sister of his aged mother. In these rural areas of multiple children and often polygamous marriages, Josephine is William’s age-mate. They schooled together. They haven’t seen one another for years, so there’s news to exchange over tea and passion fruits on the grass of her compound, greeted by neighbours and relatives. We walk on, the sun beating down. I can feel my cheeks beginning to glow despite the hat. Soon we will clamber up the escarpment, back up to the regional town of Iten, where international runners train at the altitude of almost 8000 feet. A drunk joins us from shack bar at the roadside. He’s been on the dreadful gut-rot of a local rum, ‘KK’ – Kenya Kane. It’s a frequent killer. “You saved me JB!” exclaims William several times a day as we walk. “You stopped me from the KK and wirigi and smoking too! Now I take tea, and I even gave up the bulsa (local beer from maize). Look at me, so much healthier!” But the drunk with us hasn’t had the benefit of my advice. He’s garrulous, a bit smelly and has a sharp-edged voice. He’s proud that he can run, so he spurts ahead, then stops and shouts, “I can RUN!”

“Well, run along then and run home to sleep!” I tell him, as William laughs. Eventually, with no thought process working at a logical level, it seems he does just that. He begins to run ahead up the curling red dust road. “Hey, look,” I say several minutes later, catching sight of him most of a mile ahead, “he’s still running!”

We wind through lovely forest hillsides, the sun shaded by thick growth, until we join the tar road into Iten. There we buy potatoes for our guest house supper – the cook roasts them very well – and get a couple of boda-bodas back down the escarpment to the Kessup plateau and our evening beers. This time, I AM tired! Yesterday the valley hike, down three and a half thousand feet, and today the plateau and mountain walk, up 1000 feet at the end. 

There are no other guests in the whole guest house. “There’s no money!” says William. “But our president, he’s doing well. If he can stop corruption, he will be a good president, but…” his voice tailing off tells me just how hard that will be. “But he made a speech. He said, ‘I will subsidise production, but not consumption’.” Wise words indeed. Like me, he will subsidise a cow for future prospects, but not idle consumption of newer ‘devices’… 

***

But I’ve started my journal already ten days into my 90 day trip. What of the first week and a half..?

I’m well accustomed to the routine of my journeys to Africa by now – I guess this is at least my 36th time. This trip, though, I tried a new route: appalled by the standard of ‘hotels’ around Bristol airport, I opted for a late afternoon flight that would see me overnight in Schipol Airport, Amsterdam, where a smart hotel cost £95, about the same as a laminate and cardboard-walled dump at Bristol amongst the tacky coffee sachets and cheap tea bags, with the manager having noisy sex with the receptionist through the plywood floors (yes, that was last year, and I swore never again!). The other Bristol option is the efficient but utterly faceless American chain hotel for no less now than £175 – greed-flation at its most aggressive. So, Schipol it was. And what a delight: friendly, bright and so satisfyingly well designed – and a ten minute walk from Departures (turned, of course, into a bureaucratic obstacle course and two passport stamps by Brexit. Huh.)

Next morning, I was early away to Paris and on to Nairobi, arriving in the mid-evening. Pity my luggage didn’t come with me… How infrequently I carry more than my little backpack on travels is now fully justified by the frustrating experience of trying to retrieve my bag – holding, amongst other things, a new helmet, waterproof and goggles; two Christmas cakes for the children here and in Uganda; a kilo and more of cheese, chargers, and books; but most crucially the photo books and photo prints I bring back for all the smiling Africans, who are so happy to receive them, even ten months later. Air France responds with typical meaningless computer-generated palliatives and mitigation, constantly asking for my patience, while doing nothing. I recognise, over two weeks after arrival, that the only way to get my bag will be to return to Nairobi (at least three days’ journey and 400kms away) and search the baggage room myself. It’s a large room filled to the ceiling with several hundred abandoned bags about which no one is doing anything! I saw it when I went on my second night to the airport… 

For days, I have washed the same shirts, pants and socks and spent hours attempting to replace chargers, medication, ear plugs, clothes and the rest. It’s possible I may return to Nairobi in January. Maybe I’ll trace the bag. Meanwhile, fortunately, I can use the old clothes and bike gear that remains in Kitale with my Mosquito. On my flight alone, 37 bags were missing – and forty irritated, weary travellers jostled to register their losses with the one clerk available in the arrivals hall. The romance of travel. Lesson: check no bags. Now I have to spend hours assessing the replacement value and submitting a claim to Air France for about £700 worth of belongings… 

****

Two nights at the old fashioned United Kenya Club in Nairobi, with its gardens, tired but rather charming rooms, and its parking spaces from a colonial era: Chairman; Deputy Chairman; Deputy Vice Chairman; Vice Treasurer, and its funny old rules. But it’s right downtown and a delight at £21 a night. NOT the Old Forge Motel at Bristol! (warning: don’t!)  Then a wearingly long bus ride up to Kitale, a nine-hour ordeal. The major highway across East Africa, from the ports of the Indian Ocean at Mombasa, the only link to Uganda, Rwanda and onwards, is single carriageway, and we must travel at the speed of the slowest – and the big articulated trucks and tankers are slow on these rolling high altitude mountains. The bus has few springs and is unrelentingly bumpy, the pain alleviated only by a few trotting zebras, monkeys awaiting scraps from passing cars and the signboards of ‘The Equator’ adding a certain exoticism to the laborious journey. 

***

So, ‘home’ to Kitale and warm welcomes from my Kenyan family whom I left nine months ago. For some days, Rico and I worked on the Mosquito, still with an irritatingly elusive fault. I say ‘we’, but of course, Rico worked while I dutifully watched… 45 years a biker and the engines are still a mystery. Rico’s a professional engineer though, so he identified the problem: worn parts in the carburettor and parts were sent up from the Suzuki dealer in Nairobi – rather efficiently – by the overnight bus. Now the Mosquito has its bite back. On my last trip, the bike broke down mid-February, abandoning me, memorably, to public matatus and boda-boda taxi bikes. The cause was a ‘Woodruff’ key, the tiniest piece of hardened metal in the crankshaft, less than half the size of a little fingernail. Of such is life. For the want of a nail…

***

Now we’ve all gathered for Christmas. With Adelight and Rico and Maria, now growing to a chirpy seven years, is also delightful Shamilla back to stay. She’s Adelight’s twin sister’s 13 year old, a pretty, quiet, warm-hearted charmer. As is often the case in African extended families, she’s making her home here in Kitale where there’s better schooling. Anyway, she’s always welcome in this household and has spent a good deal of her life growing up here. Marion, now with a Bachelor’s degree in Tourism and Hospitality (a distinction, no less) from Voi University down towards the coast, returned to the fold a few days ago, and yesterday, the 23rd, Scovia, Adelight’s junior sister and one of my favourite Africans, arrived with her quite lovely one and a half year old boy, Deon. He’s intelligent and curious, very quiet but deeply observant and very charming. Recently having learned to walk, he trots about as if a string puppet, jerky legged and arms outstretched, serious faced and eyes everywhere. An utter delight.  

Down in Mombasa, two more of the many girls adopted and raised by Rico, have no time to make the extensive journey up here to join us. Maureen, whom I visited in 2021 also now has a BA, in journalism and media. Education is the only way to rise above the poverty trap of African life, and these young women have embraced their opportunities, given them so generously by Rico and Adelight, to make the best of their good fortune, and government education sponsorship. They’ve grown into independent, intelligent young people – with a future. We’ll all have Christmas together then head to Uganda for New Year. 

***

Meanwhile, in Sipi, Uganda, we’re in daily touch with Alex and Precious at Rock Gardens guest house – my project to make that family independent too. I met Alex and Precious in 2017 and immediately recognised extreme integrity and determination, despite the vast obstacles spread before them in such a crumbling country. Trained in hotel management – when he could have become a doctor or such if he lived in a country in which families had sensible numbers of children (Alex, like most children in the most child-populated country in the world (50% under 15 years) has eight direct siblings and three by other mothers; Precious is one of 13) – Alex shared with me his dreams of turning a plot of land in Sipi, a location popular with tourists thanks to its waterfalls, into a guest house. Naively perhaps, I decided to assist him, not realising just what a commitment I was making! But Alex has used every penny of the considerable investment I’ve made in their future to the best effect. I’m so proud that after a long period in which he believed customers would come, but I began to despair, he’s beginning to get regular bookings and terrific reviews on Google Map and (the horrible, all-invasive, IMO) bookingdotcom (which I must type that way to avoid an automatic link to your device as you read this). All reviews commend the warm family welcome, the traditional feel (designed largely by me!) and the delicious food of Rock Gardens. One duo, a pair of Australian ladies stayed last week and loved it so much that not only do they intend to return, but on asking why Alex had to go ten miles to get fish for their supper and hearing the explanation that he had no way to preserve food, donated money to purchase a freezer! So other recognise his hard work, trustworthiness and charm too.

Next week, we are ALL travelling round the mountain to Sipi for New Year, a return visit to the one that Alex, Precious, my absolute favourite, the charming, delightful seven year old Keilah and my namesake, Jonathanbean Cheptai, made to Kitale last year. I’m looking very forward to seeing what I now think of as my grandchildren. Our party will be me, Adelight, Rico, Maria, Shamilla, Marion, Scovia and Deon. We’ll be joined by Adelight’s close cousin, Reuben and his Dutch wife and her son. AND… Alex has a booking from some tourists who will have to join what I am sure will be a happy band and provide them with a very memorable New Year! But all this has put stress on the nascent resort. Alex is desperately constructing more rooms, getting beds made, fitting toilets and buying bedding and so forth. Happily, Uncle Jonathan is there to be ‘The Money’! We’re all looking forward to a cheerful expedition after Christmas.

For now, it’s a home Christmas holiday without the commercial competition of my northern world. We’ll drink some wine, give a few simple gifts and be together as family. Family of which Uncle J is part and parcel. 

MARCH 12th to MARCH 16th – The end of the safari

It was with some relief that my visa approval arrived on Monday morning, having applied for it last Thursday. Of course, I was long in the country by then thanks to Chirchir at Suam border, who agreed that his department’s website just isn’t fit for purpose. It supplied me with sleepless hours, those disturbing ones in the small hours of nights when your brain stresses about useless things. Well, I can only find patience in the fact that we in Britain treat incoming African tourists with a great deal more callousness, cruelty and disdain (especially these days…) at all levels of the process…

A final few days at home in Kitale, sorting the debris of another three-month safari, drinking beer on the porch with Rico and playing Scrabble with Adelight (2:2 over four nights, so I leave with honours equal). Then it’s time to get the morning bus to Nairobi, the day before I fly out, back to hot water bottles, blankets and woollen hats. It’s a tedious but not uncomfortable ten and a quarter hour ride down to Nairobi, the last one and a half hours moving about five miles. I arrive jaded, in no mood to bargain with touts and taxi drivers, and walk to the old United Kenya Club, where I am welcomed like an old friend and have one of my usual rooms, a bit faded, but overlooking the car park and large grounds from a small balcony. The old, once-colonial club is right downtown, and very reasonably priced at £22.50. I like the old fashioned ambience and the spacious extent of the city centre property. It was a find, thanks to Adelight’s recommendation four years ago.

My last day is always boring: I wander the city streets looking for things to do, but I’m not a city person, so it’s just coffees and juices and foot-weary plodding in the sun. My impecunious travel habits are too long-established to allow me to book my £22.50 room for another night that I won’t use… I wander, and drift back to the Club garden to read a book until it’s time for a couple of beers before I book a car to the airport in the mid evening.

Messages of love and goodwill come in from my families. It’s been a good winter, even if I didn’t get to ride my Mosquito much. But I spent good times with the people I’ve come to value so much in East Africa, a part of the world that’s become familiar and comfortable, these past years.

In Kitale, Rico and I do our ‘elder citizen’ stuff and sit and ruminate over beers of an evening on the porch and remember being young and crossing the Sahara all those years ago, unforgettable memories we share; Adelight loves her Scrabble, and we’ve become comfortable friends even on shopping visits to town (!). The Rico Girls have become my nieces and I watch their young lives develop with interest and fondness.

In Sipi, I leave building works and development of the young business that I hope will make Alex’s family independent and kick-start a future for the two children, whom I’ve come to love rather surprisingly. Their future has become of great meaning to me. My support will guarantee their education at least. And what better legacy can I leave in Africa than a couple of well balanced, educated young people? I’ll watch their development with special interest.

I’ve made so many friends on my safaris. My travels have changed: not so much the gung-ho adventures of my earlier trips, more consolidating the relationships amongst my ‘families’ and friends. Perhaps that’s something that age has encouraged? I’m not sure. I still have nearly all the energy I ever had before, although I get more physically tired a little sooner. I have all the curiosity and fascination I ever had for my world travels: how people think, how they live, what makes the world go around. I find it VERY odd to realise that in six weeks time I’ll clock up the apparent ‘old’ age of 74. It sounds so ancient! But I don’t feel that way until I look in the mirror… I remember my mother telling me that, when she was in her late-80s: “I look in a shop window and see an old woman that I don’t recognise…” I guess that’s the way it is. But her maxim was always, “No point giving in!” And I’ll continue to repeat that just as long as I can too!

Still lots to see, so many places to go, people to meet…

It’s difficult to select a few favourite photos from three months, but here are some that I particularly like: