From Dilla

I arrive in Moyale covered in dust. I have spent the last 18 hours drifting in and out of sleep on top of a truck. For long spells I gaze through the rattling metal bars at fields of black lava rock and swirling dust. The corrugations and holes in the road slow the lorry to 20 km per hour for most of the 400 km journey. When we arrive I haul my bike from the truck top, with the help of the guard and driver, and ride down a dirt side-street in search of a room. I have spent the last two nights sleeping on the floor of a hut and the back of a lorry and I fall asleep without eating or washing. 

I wake early and ride across the border into Ethiopia. I stop at a courtyard restaurant and get a shot of black coffee and a big sour pancake with spicy red sauce.  Men come in to drink the coffee and they shake my hand as they pass. The people have lighter skin here and the women are beautiful. I spend the day writing and planning my route north. Late in the afternoon I go to the bakery. The ceiling is very low and three men sit in the dark, scrubbing their teeth with twigs. Rows of square white buns rest on a stone block. I buy six and a jar of honey to eat on the way to Mega.

Out of Moyale a narrow band of worn asphalt unfurls across the windswept scrubland. Ten-foot high anthills and patchy-leaved thorn bushes cling to the loose red earth.  Every few miles I pass a cluster of mud huts set back from the road. They are circular with concave roofs overlain with torn black plastic sheets that rustle in the wind. The walls are cream or red and some have charcoal drawings of leopard and wolves scrawled beside the low door frames. Men lead large herds of horned cattle through the scrub and small groups of camel chew on Acacia branches. 

At the first village I pass, a large group of Borena women are tying branches together to form a fence. They all have plaited hair that hangs to just below the ears. Some have faint blue crucifixes tattooed in the centre of the foreheads and they all wail softly and sway from side to side as they work. I stop for a glass of tea and watch long lines of donkey being loaded up with bulging sacks, many of which bare the faded stars and stripes of the American flag and have ‘USAID: A Gift from the American People’ written in blue and red on the side. 

As I head north the land turns from red to cream and the sky is a solid mass of light grey cloud. It is very quiet and for long stretches the only forms on the roadside are the towering anthills. I pass a group of Borena women carrying heavy loads of firewood, who run from the road when they see me. I arrive at Mega, a little town halfway up an escarpment, in the early afternoon. As I sit to eat, children in rags stare at me like an alien has landed. I sleep here and ride 100km to Yabello through the vast flat scrubland the next morning. Occasionally lorries pass and men in flowing white robes whip their horses aggressively as they gallop through the dust. I pass a cattle market in a village and weave through streaming lines of trudging oxen. In Mega I was told that in order for young men to marry here they must prove their worth by jumping over bulls, whose backs are smothered in butter. 

From Yabello I climb out of the low-lying dust fields of the far south into Juniper forested hills. I am heading for Hagere Maryam, a town 100km north. By late morning I am out of food and the climbing wears me down. I take breaks every six or seven kilometers and grind my way slowly upwards, as my legs begin to falter. On the outskirts of town there is a large crowd in the road. There are many young men and women dressed in long black gowns, holding mortar boards. There is a great commotion as I try to pass and people rush from every direction and tussle to pose for a photograph next to me. I stand for fifteen minutes, smiling, while new-graduate after new-graduate stands beside me grinning excitedly into the old-fashioned cameras clicking away in front. Eventually I tangle free and ride the final mile into town. 

From Hagere Maryam to Dilla the road climbs and climbs, and flattens for a short stretch, and climbs again. Thick drops of rain fall in torrents from the dark sky and I am shivering as I pedal stubbornly up the steep slopes. Families shelter in thickly thatched round huts and I can smell the smoke of warm wood fires hanging in the soaking air. Tall flat-leaved plantain trees smoother the roadside and mangy horses stand pathetically in the curdling mud. When the rain stops crowds of 20-30 children rush from the fields screaming and tug at the bike as I crawl up the rising hills. I arrive in Dilla, exhausted, having taken eight hours to ride just 110km.  

From Moyale

In the dust and the searing heat I feel very far away. I am in Isiolo and must stock up for the ride north. I will carry 15 litres of water and enough food for three days. I buy chewing tobacco to give to Samburu on the road. I am told if they are aggressive the tobacco will make them happy. They cannot get it up there. I wander amongst the narrow rows of dust and stones, through collapsing wooden stands, past old men sitting on low wooden stools playing a game with dried beans. Sudden gusts of wind rouse the sullen grains of sand into momentary frenzy and the old men wrap their shemaghs tightly around their beards. The remnants of black plastic bags quiver like charred flags in the thorny branches of leafless trees. I am staying at the most expensive hotel here and the yard is full of white Land Cruisers with sky blue UN markings branded on the bonnets.

As I ride out of town the shimmering rim of the eastern sun blazes low between the silhouettes of two distant Acacias and the first rays of yellow light flash across the flat scrubland. I am stopped at a police post on the edge of town and told it is better to take a truck. The guard walks around the bicycle and looks curiously at me. He asks if I have a weapon. He lets me pass.

The road is empty and on the new tar, with the wind behind me, I ride quickly. Large swathes of the dry copper earth lie bare and the sun glints off the corrugated roofs of small clusters of rectangular houses. To the west a bank of purple rock bridges the scrub and a low pool of receding grey clouds. Soon I am crossing the Ewaso Nyiro River and am at the town of Archer’s Post. The police here tell me there has been no sign of trouble for some days. The guard points to two hills in the distance and tells me to be carful here. Bandits hide in the bush there and make ambush. Even the MP for the area, he has been attacked between these two hills.

Out of Archer’s Post the tar stretches straight for miles ahead and disappears in the vast orange flats. Ostrich on the road quicken their pace as I approach and scatter powerfully across the sand as I pass. Dic-dic stand alert in the dry bush and a lone eagle rises and falls with the currents of the empty sky. I ride on and pass two large mounds of bare stone that looked so small in the distance from Archer’s Post. I hear the faint hum of an approaching vehicle breach the desert silence. A man on a motorbike passes and waves. He has a rifle slung across his chest. It is hot now, and even with the wind behind me, the sweat is pouring from my forid as I stare at the waves of heat rising from the black tar.

By mid morning I am riding across a rough dusty stretch through a village. Small stone huts and rickety shelters made of tangled branches line the road. Samburu warriors walk bare-chested in twos and threes, marking each stride by pressing their spears into the dust. They turn as I pass and stare silently at me. I smile and stare back. They wear bright robes from the waist down and sandals made from tyres on their feet. Each man has a dagger sheathed in red leather strapped to his thigh. A chain of golden beads runs from large wooden earings that hang heavily from each lobe and passes across their faces between the nose and mouth. Some are bare-headed, others wear helmets with bright red plumes the shape of mohicans running from their foreheads to the back of their necks.

Women in long red and blue robes with rows and rows of beads, hanging from their necks to their breasts, carry buckets of water to their huts. Scruffy kids in torn shorts, with anklets tied loosely above bare feet, peek at me from the safety of their huts and disappear shyly as I wave. There are soldiers in green camouflage ambling up the road holding worn rifles and goats searching for scraps in the dust.

A man runs into the road in front and tells me I must not continue. He says between here and Laisamis the road is very dangerous. He says a Chinese road worker was shot just 6km from here. He says an American cyclist was assaulted between here and Merille. They didn’t steal anything from him, but they broke both his thumbs and smashed his shoulder. The sun is scorching now and I take a long gulp of water. I wheel my bike into the shade and light a cigarette. ‘You will wait here for a truck. It is better.’ I feel sad and try to summon the will to continue, but guilt, when I think of home, and dread, swallow my faltering courage.

A tall woman in long white robes comes out of her house and nods and smiles. She tells me they do not often get visitors here. ‘We like visitors. You stay as long as you need.’ Her daughter brings me a bowl of beans and ugali and sits in silence as I eat. She smiles when I finish the plate and asks if she may give me a thing. A necklace of multi-coloured beads slips from her fingers and she stands on tip-toes and ties it round my neck.

I sit for hours waiting for a truck, but none pass. The children gradually get used to me and poke at my beard and laugh and stare at the bicycle in wonder. Night falls and I drift into sleep on an old sofa, amidst the low murmurs of those sitting around me. I am woken in the middle of the night and told a truck is outside. It is all very rushed and I am ushered through the darkness and hoisted onto the open back of a metal framed lorry. There is an old Muslim lady wrapped in a rug on top of the crates and a man with an AK47 keeping watch on the front. Soon I am hurtling through the night towards Moyale with a hundred crates of beer beneath me, staring up at all the stars of the desert sky.

From Isiolo

As I leave Malaba, heading north-east, the prospect of what I will do when I reach Isiolo begins to dominate my thoughts. Since the start of the journey, four months ago, the road north from Isiolo to Ethiopia has been a distant, but impossible stretch. I have met many cyclists along the way; none of whom attempted it. I have been warned, and warned again, this stretch is rough. Do not try to ride it. Trucks travel in armed convoy. Bandits roam the desert scrub. Many have died on the road. Somalis, AK47s, warring tribes, 50 degree temperatures, 530 km of rock and dust stretching out into a violent wilderness. Now the road draws near the warnings grow louder and my desire to try stronger.

As I leave Malaba, I am still 620 km from Isiolo, and I am beginning the slow climb back across the Rift Valley. I ride 140km to Eldoret, over hill after hill, past the same maize, the same huts, on the same rutted tar. It is a different road to the one I took to Uganda, but I feel as if I have covered it before, and as the climb saps my strength, I stare blankly at the slow-passing landscape with growing weariness. The villages, the waving children, the great swathes of hillside carpeted in crops, would have filled me with wonder a time ago. But familiarity has drawn a grey curtain over the land and now I ride blindly back towards the east.

By early afternoon the sun is hot and I feel the energy of a storm growing in the surrounding air. Ahead a wall of blue cloud bruises the eastern skyline and thunder begins to roll across the hills. It is like riding into the night as I approach the darkening skies with the scorching sun still burning my back. Soon heavy droplets are falling like pebbles from the sky and I rush to the shelter of a little highway town. Within an hour the sky lightens and I ride onto Eldoret.

I stay at a guesthouse with smashed windows and take a bath in a bucket. In the evening I take a walk and pass a young boy digging for treasure in a junk-filled skip. A young mother sits slumped on the cracked pavement and stares at me with angry eyes. Her hands join together to beg and her eyes have lost all hope. I pass hustlers, and alley cats, and young men leaning lazily on Chinese scooters, and all the sidewalk skanks. From the shadows a man whispers: ‘Jesus, is that you?’ I laugh and he smiles and disappears down a smoky passageway. It was here, in Eldoret, three years ago, where bitterness over the election became violent. Thirty women and children were burnt alive in a church, and men slashed each other to death in the streets.

From Eldoret I ride 155km to Nakuru, climbing again, senselessly. As I descend for miles towards the valley floor, past Candelabras and Acacias, the thrill of the ride returns. After Nakuru I head north to Nyahururu, and onto Nyeri, and Timau. I cross the equator, and the last of the long Rift Valley ascents, and isolated wooden shacks in the golden grasses of Adebare plateau. At Nyeri I join the Great North Road and cycle through crisp highland air, passing the twin peaks of Mount Kenya in the east. I pull into a campsite just north of Timau and pitch my tent amongst Wild Olive trees and tall Cedars. I am only 65 km from Isiolo.

I go to speak to the lodge owner, Mr Wason, about the road north. He is sitting in a wicker chair on his porch, wispy grey hairs sprout from his open-necked shirt, and both his thumbs are hinged behind his braces. He invites me to sit and his wife brings me a cup of chai. I tell him about my journey and what I have heard of the road north. He nods, and strokes his chin, and rocks gently in his chair. He says the road is very bad. He says cyclists take trucks for this section. He says I should try. ‘Why fear? Never let fear decide.’ He pauses. ‘How do you want to die?’ I look startled and he smiles and says back in Afghanistan that is how we talk. ‘Do not fear death. We will all die.’ He tells me how years ago two people walked the road. They were fine. He tells me how, in the fifties, his brother hitchhiked there, across the frontier territories. His brother was picked up by a British army truck, who told him a nearby tribe would cut off his nuts and hang them from his neck if they found him.

He lists villages along the road and says I must camp at the police posts there. With each village name he tells a story from the old days. ‘After Serolevi, you will reach Merille. I was there in seventies, hunting lion, you know. Indeed just west of there I came across an elephant stuck in a swamp. I walked into the mud and tied a rope across its belly. Now, the elephant it knew. It knew I was trying to help. When I was beneath it, it moved its trunk very slowly towards me and sniffed. It just sniffed. It knew I meant it no harm. For two days we tried to pull it out, but it was no good, it was sinking. There was a crowd of 500 around waiting for it to die. After two days we gave up, it was suffering, you know. So we had to shoot. Before we shot I went up to the elephant, very close. And I saw tears coming from its eyes. It was crying. It knew we had given up.’ He sighs. ‘I couldn’t take the shot and from that moment I never shot another elephant.’

‘…. And then to Laisamis, yes, Laisamis. My good friend, a vet, he was speared by a rhino near Laisamis. He would have died if we hadn’t had my 4x4.’ He tells me story after story: lion, Samburu, deserts, guardian angels. As he talks I feel the apprehension drain begin to drain from me and the will to try, and to trust those I meet along the way, begin to grow. As I get up to go he gives me the names of men in Marsabit and Moyale: ‘the most powerful men in the towns: If you have any troubles, you will call them and mention my name. They will help you.’

The next morning I zoom from the highlands into the oncoming desert. It takes me only two and a half hours to ride the 65 km to Isiolo, and soon the land is golden and the grass has turned to dust. Ahead the desert rolls out before me and I am on the fringes of a great wilderness, staring out at vast ochre plains and mounds of far-off black rock, burning beneath the scorching crimson sun.

From Malaba

I ride out of Busia while it is still dark, to see the sun rise from the road over my first morning in Uganda. The air is fresh and cool and the road deserted. As the sky begins to pale I can see the stout forms of circular huts and tall straight palms emerging from the shadowy flats. Silhouettes move slowly between the shacks and the first fires of the day are being lit. Soon the sky lightens and distant mists gleam before the rising sun, coating the horizon the colour of frozen honey. Above clouds drift softly over the low forests and beyond, unfurling and collapsing like giant rose petals released into the breeze.

I ride on west, heading for Jinja, through soaking paddi fields which line the road and cover the land as far as I can see. Men are already in the fields, picking at bright green stalks and sifting through the muddy water. Cormorants and slender long-legged birds with sharp beaks stand in the shallows and peck below the surface. I ride fast on the cool flat road and pass pools full of floating white lilies. As I come nearer to Jinja, the road rises and drops across little hills, and all along the tar people sit in front of huts watching the cars pass and stirring pots and laying washing out to dry on the grass.

By lunchtime I am in Jinja; the source of the Nile. I spend a night camping out of town at Bujagali and watch the wild rapids rush towards the north. There is a giant storm and I stand beneath a slanting corrugated orning, with heavy drops beating the ground at my feet, and watch the river turn red as soil flows from the steep banks. In Jinja town I wander up the main street and four old men in flowing cream cloaks, with long grey beards and wrinkled yellow faces, lead me down a side road. They tell me they are from Egypt and smile and speak in Arabic and nod their heads and point to the sky and I am bemused. There is a young black man with them, who I only notice now, dressed all in white, with a red shemagh draped loosely around his neck. He stares straight into my eyes as he speaks, translating the crowd of prophecies and proverbs that flow from the old men’s mouths.

The lead cleric looks at me kindly and says ‘La ilaha illa allah.’ The young black man says: ‘There is no God but God.’ The lead cleric looks at the floor and slowly raises his head and extends a finger to the sky and talks at me in words I cannot understand. The young black man’s words follow softly behind: ‘Can man make the sun?’ They all shake their heads earnestly. ‘Can man make the moon?’ They pause for me to consider. ‘Can man make the stars?’ One of the old men has his hand on my chest and they stare at my face and all shake their heads and smile serenely. They invite me to the mosque and I say I must go. ‘Before you go, you must take a Muslim name.’ They begin to list names at me and I stop them at Hassam. ‘So’ the old man says in his first English words, ‘next time, when I shall see you across the road in Cairo, I shall shout out “Hello, Hassam” and you will answer, and we shall greet.’ I smile and shake his hand and wander off into the bright sunshine.

From Jinja I ride 145km to Mbale in the north-west. I start late and the equator sun burns high and hot in the cloudless sky. The land is green all around and when I leave the main road I can see nothing but maize and plantain trees and collections of four or five mud huts with conical roofs, thatched elegantly in layered circles that narrow as they rise above the fields. Kids slashing at grasses with worn machetes shout out to their brothers and sisters to watch me pass. The land becomes swampy as I head north and tall reeds with flowers like peacock feathers crowd both sides of the elevated road. I stop in a roadside bar at Tirinji and a woman in smart clothes asks where I am going. She tells me, in Mbale, I will find lots of my brothers and sisters from London, America, Japan. As I approach town, I can see long metal antennae cluttering the sky with angles, and two-storey cement blocks, rising above the rice fields, at the foot of the purple rock-face of the Wanale Ridge.

The next morning I ride 50km up to Sipii, a little town in the foothills of Mount Elgon. The final 10km is a continuous steep climb. The road latches onto the mushrooming hillside and winds and bends up relentless slopes. I grind my way up past collapsing adobe huts, held together with winding tree branches. Kids pour out of the low door frames and rush to the road past chickens and goats and mothers, who sit serenely tending to pots by the fire. They shout and whoop and slap the back of the slow moving bike and look in wonder at the weak bedraggled white man, clambering towards the sun.

I am almost falling now and my thick wheels will barely turn. The sweat is pouring from my temples, stinging my bloodshot eyes. Women call out from the roadside: ‘You are tired, muzungu, come and rest here. You must rest.’ I smile and try to suppress the deep pants that shake my whole torso. For the first time in 8000km I get off and push. I stare, defeated, at the land dropping from the roadside precipice. The clutter of huts and livestock and screaming children melt into the vast flats that roll out to meet the western sky below. I pull my legs onto the pedals and ride again and soon I am forced to push once more. At last I can hear the crashing falls of water that rush from the highland rivers around Sipii and I know I am close and I ride the final bend to a campsite in the village.

I spend the afternoon roaming the muddy hillside paths in the driving rain to look at the waterfalls up close. I walk through plots of head-high maize, past old women, carrying huge sacks of cut grasses, who scuttle nimbly up the steep hillside tracks, while I slip and slide past, my legs covered in greasy red earth from earlier falls. Everyone is huddled in huts peering out of dark doorways at the storm. At the base of the biggest fall, water cascades down a sheer ochre rock-face and foams and froths in a rocky pool below.

Back at the campsite I stare out into the night across the ravine. There isn’t a single light burning, though there must be a thousand huts spread across the valley. I freewheel down the same slope the next morning, in quarter of an hour, and ride 100km across the flats through Mbale and Tororo, and just after midday I am back across the border in Kenya.