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.