DRIFTING DOWN THE NILE

IN REHANA'S WORDS

Thursday, 31 October

Got a brand-new alternator, got a tiger in our tank – Jules and I are queens of the road again!

I’m going to spare all of us the boring, irritating and maddening details of trying to get a car part quickly from SA to Kenya. Believe me, it’s not possible.

Last Saturday, after Garmin took us on a quick tour of what looked like Nairobi’s Alexandra township (we still drive in circles when we leave places, but we’re getting better) we finally left Nairobi.

To turn my head and see the rift valley dotted with blue lakes, not an unplastered strip on a wall in a cheap guesthouse, makes me feel free at last. It’s a perfect day for driving. We have the right sounds – Simphiwe Dana accompanies us out of Nairobi. A rainstorm chases us all the way to Lake Victoria and occasionally catches us.

Free at last doesn’t last long. Trucks trundle uphill at 20km/hour on the single-lane highway. Suicidal drivers try to overtake up to 10 cars tailing behind lumbering trucks. They frantically try to squeeze back into the lane they left when they realise there are cars speeding towards them.

When Google or Garmin say a 200km journey will take four hours it can take much much longer, depending on the roadworks. When will an accurate ETA will be possible in the countries we’ve visited – how long will these Chinese roads last, who will maintain them?

When you don’t travel for a while you forget the tendency of campsites to put photos of the view across the lawn, and not of their toilets and showers, on their websites. You forget how much you hate looking for a place to stay when it’s getting dark.

After what seemed like hours, we finally found Rida Haven Guesthouse in Kisumu, our last destination in Kenya. The house had no water, other than that it was very comfortable. They carried buckets to our room upstairs and promised that they had found a fundi to fix the burst pipe. We had water and a discount on our second day.

Our haven of comfort

We found the perfect restaurant, Haandi, just up the street. Jules had palak paneer for fourth day in a row - she started this trend at Saffron restaurant at Yaya mall in Nairobi. I had masala grilled tilapia - the sweetest fish, better than snoek - on day one and breyani (goat, of course) on Sunday.
The restaurant owner was from Watford, the same place as Jules! Her parents were born in Uganda and kicked out by Idi Amin. Her sister married a Ugandan and moved there. She met her brother-in-law's Kenyan cousin at the wedding, married him and moved to Kisumu.
Her parents were left childless in the UK, she and her sister were persuading them to move back home to Uganda.

Kisumu was a sweet little town, most of its commercial buildings erected by Indians and most businesses seemingly still in their control. A lot of the CBD's architecture is Indian. 
They were brought to Kenya by the British as indentured labour to build the railway line from Mombasa to Kisumu, a port on Lake Victoria. Those who survived - many were starved or worked to death and/or eaten by lions while they built the line - remained in Kenya and thousands joined them.
There is a Sikh temple and a Samaj centre on Mosque Road in Kisumu.

Why go to India when this is all over Africa?

Our guesthouse was in the Houghton part of town, many of the houses had high walls, razor wire and electric fences. Kisumu was hard hit by the election violence in 2007 and Indian businesses were horribly targeted by looters. I wonder when the walls went up so high.

Jules and I spent most of Sunday at Hippo Point next to the sewage works; there was no smell. It seemed a popular weekend spot. Cars were washed in Lake Victoria and a herd of cows came down to drink and loitered for a while, shitting everywhere.

Nice thing about having our car again is that we have everything we need, everywhere we go. Our chairs came out and we sat under a cashew tree’s umbrella branches. Jules read the Sunday paper, sharing aloud with me the latest Uhuru Kenyatta outrages. We had lunch. We sat under the tree till it got dark and it was time to head to Haandi for another feast.

Been a while since we were on a lake and this one's huge

The  restaurant owner wanted us to stay another day and so did George at our guesthouse. But we couldn’t. Our Ugandan visas were expiring in our passports.

Our border crossing was made long and tedious by a Ugandan customs official who wasn’t sure what he was doing. Like most of the borders we crossed, this one had deep potholes filled with water, long queues of trucks blocking entrances and exits, and dingy, damp offices with piles of official forms on the floor. Kenya had no new, discernible security measures at its second border we crossed since the Westgate siege.

Uganda looks exactly like I expected. The soil darkened from orange to ochre, the foliage grew thicker and the people’s skin darkened. Since we left Nairobi we’ve been on, slightly above or below the equator and we're feeling it in the thick air and seeing it in the towering white clouds.

This looks like a place where seed will grow to plant in a matter of days and you need to mow the lawn at least twice a week. Some plants are familiar, but all much bigger than what you see at home. There are spectacular varieties of palm – ones with bright green trunks and exotic fans.

Plants look familiar ... but better

The villages and towns we passed as we entered the country had mostly brick houses and very little litter – which can sometimes indicate that people are too poor to generate much plastic waste. Many villages were drenched in the caramelly smell of roasted coffee beans. Plantations of sugar cane grew next to rows of psychedelic green tea bushes. All that was missing was a herd of milk cows.

Our first stop, Jinja, was a small town with some charms. It’s on Lake Victoria at the source of the Nile, which heads from here to the Mediterranean. 
The Nile we saw in Ethiopia was the Blue Nile. Jinja’s is the Victoria Nile. It meets up in the north of Uganda with the Albert Nile. They merge at the border of Sudan to become the White Nile. Ethiopia’s Blue Nile and Uganda’s White Nile spill into each other at Khartoum before continuing north as the Nile. But Burundi claims that it is the sole source of the Nile.

We camped under a jacaranda tree that shed the last of its purple on us in the garden of a nearly-empty backpackers in Jinja. There was DSTV: we watched India beat Australia in a chase that ended in the last over and South Africa’s improbable victory over Pakistan when they collapsed even more spectacularly.

I will never be able to explain why but three days in a row we waited for the morning cloud to lift before setting off to town. It was a 30 minute walk but it felt equal to climbing Kilimanjaro because of the heat and the humidity.

Main Road, Jinja

We asked for directions to a spot where we could be alongside the water. Jules and I climbed onto a shared motorbike taxi (no helmets) and headed to the spot where the locals went.
What greeted us was a place – also next to the sewage works – from which ferry and cargo boats departed.
Not a harbour, just a grey beach lined with wood and iron shacks where vendors sold drinks, fried fish and chapattis.
There was no place to walk along the lake. No beach.

The waterfront at Jinja

After three days in town we moved to a campsite on the banks of the Nile River – a thick green and brown slug moving slowly between high banks of soil and trees.
There were two fish eagles circling above our camp, their cries a surprising soft trill considering their hooked beaks and talon toes.

The cicadas screamed into the heat all afternoon. Sunset brought the promising rumble of thunderstorms but they all evaporated without shedding a drop.

Jules and I were proper little homemakers. I put up a washing line and filled it, Jules made lunch and supper. 
Eden Rock Resort had a huge, lush garden that we have to ourselves – and a pool! We spent all day next to and in it. 

There was one of these pool tables at Eden Rock

We made friends with Lyn, and American woman battling bureaucracy to adopt a 5-year-old Ugandan boy Kisalu. Also made friends with Jenny, an Australian woman who spends six months a year in the tiny village of Bujigali to teach women literacy skills.
She says she has to teach them English that relates to their lives. We encouraged her to teach them, "it's your turn to collect wood, you lazy bastard".

Daniel, our guide on our Nile sunset cruise in a leaky boat with one outboard motor argued with Julia that the majority of Ugandans did not speak English, they spoke Engrish. I agreed with him. 
For once, we put our foot down when the ripoff came. We were offered a two-hour cruise and were back where we started in less than an hour. We refused to get off the boat, so they had to ask the next batch of mzungus they collected if they didn't mind company. 
We enjoyed our second sunset cruise with the English mom, dad and daughter and their newly acquired Welsh husband and son-in-law. 

Cruising the Nile. No belly dancers in this version

We left the banks of the Nile with huge second thoughts. Shouldn't we stay?   Jenny and Lyn were such good company; its been a while since we had adults to talk to and a child to play with.
But we'd been in Jinja and its surrounds for almost a week. Our visas expire in a month and there are places to go, things to see.

We stopped on the way to Kampala at the Mabira Forest for a two-hour walk. The trees towered and blocked off the sun in places; still it was on the hot side of warm. The highway into Kampala cut through the forest, the thrum of truck engines reverberating off the huge trees.
The vegetation was lush green and fecund, butterflies slow danced in the thick air.

If this is the size of the leaf ...

These are the roots, imagine the size of the tree

Kampala was a shock to the system. It took nearly an hour to drive the last 10km into town and then another hour to travel 700m past a market and a taxi rank. We put up our tent in the dark. No-one can tell us what to visit in the city, besides the malls.
We walked to the Gaddafi mosque this afternoon, were underwhelmed. We took a motorbike taxi to the National Theatre, once again three on a bike, no helmets. We found an Indian restaurant packed with locals and spent the afternoon there, reading the local papers.
We took a motorbike taxi back to the backpackers where we were camping in what felt like the yard at the back under a tree that rained down small black seed that got into everything.
We're leaving Kampala tomorrow. We might skirt it again when we head north. We're heading for the middle of Lake Victoria, to the Sesse Islands.

Kampala's motorbike taxis are called boda-boda

A view of Kampala's suburbs

POLITE NOTICE: NO ALTERNATOR, NO MOVE

IN JULIA'S WORDS

A corner on our block in Nairobi

It’s a very cute thing about Kenyan public notices: they’re all headed “Polite Notice”, and probably would be if the message was “Take one step further and you’ll be beheaded, shrinking dick”. We’re getting very familiar with such polite notices here in Nairobi, stuck as we are up a pitted African road with a car without an alternator.

Our merry plan to conquer our necessary admin (getting Rehana’s meds, a dentist, a car service and new tyres) in Nairobi in less than a week fizzled to a halt, as did our alternator last Thursday. Boldly we had sought out two new tyres in the jammed heart of Nairobi, after a visit to a downtown dentist (Rehana’s teeth has turned orange thanks to her TB meds, she was looking too authentically Ethiopian for comfort). 

Of course, a mechanical issue came up at the tyre dealers when the dastardly device needed to release the spare tyre from beneath the car broke, and we had to go to another dealer in the kidneys of Nairobi to get it fixed. [I say “of course”, because it’s a fact that any given attempt to tick off all on any given list will generate a whole new list that was never originally considered. Like when you get someone in to clean your carpets and they manage to smash a garden lamp on the way in and leave magnificent scrape marks on your newly painted walls, fo’ zample.]

So off to the traffic-jammed industrial area we drove, to another branch of the tyre dealers. We gave the broken tool to a mechanic to fix and I decided to check the tyre pressure on our two, very handsome new BF Goodrich All-terrain carboots. This required a 10 metre drive to a pump. Simple as a pimple this seemed – but it turned out to be a bridge too far. Because, although the car started, it wouldn’t idle and cut out as soon as I took my foot off the gas.

The tyre people brought out their battery testing device and diagnosed a failing alternator.

It was hot and the week had been a mission, which is when such news tends to make the head fall and shoulders slump. Especially when it’s – A G A I N – the AAALTERNAAATOOORRRR! Because MAAAN have we D U U U U N the alternator. In fact, we’ve been under the threat of car power failures – or is that load shedding? – almost from the start of our trip.

Our own profound ignorance of everything about our battery system was definitely behind our stumbling appreciation of the limits of power storage when we just started out in Mabibi. Then in the second week of June in Ngara, northern Malawi, when our fridge declined to work, a dying battery was our conclusion.  A few days later in Mbeya, Tanzania, we seemed to resolve the problem by replacing the main battery.

We went on for about two months from there without any power failures, if a few brownouts, until that out-and-out failure on 16 August in the midst of the vast vistas of sandland called Sibiloi National Park, west-northern of Kenya. And then, the terrible limp we had in Mike’s batteries’ care all the way from there to Arba Minch, where Terror Lekota’s look-alike Mamush eventually found a stop-gap solution with an alternator (he called it the “dynamo”) that wasn’t exactly right but worked. Mostly. For the next 50 days.

So when our alternator once again ceased to be a dynamo in Nairobi, we were referred to a garage some blocks away from the tyre centre in the industrial area. We trudged off amidst the hot traffic’s growl to Alfa Motors. It looked credible enough; Mr Singh the Main Mechanic in Alfa’s workshop insisted we drive our halting car back to them, he’d take a look. 
We trudged back through the dust and fumes to where it had failed a few blocks away, and I gritted my teeth and worked the revs while taking any perhaps-gap in the unbroken clutter of traffic so that I wouldn’t have to stop and therefore stall. We only stalled once, and booked the BRC into Alfa Motors – 4x4 experts with a Toyota parts centre in the showroom. The portents looked good.

Who could ask for anything more than Mr Singh?

Right now, exactlyprecisely when we’re getting BRC back is not definite. Mr Singh confirms it needs a new alternator. But being 20 years old, a huge engine, and petrol, such alternators are not to be found behind every Acacia.
In fact, they’re almost nowhere in sub-Saharan Africa at all. Not at Toyota dealers in Kenya, Uganda, Botswana, Namibia, or Zambia, anyway. There was doubt that there was one in South Africa (and therefore we’d have to order one from Japan, and work out what to do with up to a month’s wait).
But Dear Prudence, the supersleuth from Outsurance who’s working on our claim (how smart was that to take out Out in Africa insurance?!?), hunted down what appears to be the alternator we need. It’s been a week of hit-and-miss getting it here, but as of Friday 19^th October, it’s apparently been with DHL.

My fondest hope, as I now tap, is that this absolutelyright alternator is winging its efficient way to Alfa Motors, Industrial area, Nairobi, Kenya. And, one hour after he receives it, Mr Singh efficiently slips it in to BRC’s failed middle as effortlessly as a fool on a banana. [This will have to be on Tuesday, Monday being Mahujaa – or Heroes – day, marking 50 years of Kenya’s independence from Britain]. 

BRC’s engine roars BRC-like back into life as if it is impatient to be on its way on its spanking handsome new carboots, and Mr Singh calls us to collect it urgently less it uses its bullbar for uses other than fending off bulls. It’s raring to be off, just like we are. 
Then we whisk past the shops and stock up, before rolling with fine music in our ears and the earth unfolding behind our windows towards Uganda. And only ever think of an alternator again as a very beautiful piece of machinery with its gleaming copper coil innards and shapely thick-metal casing.

Until then, Rehana and I are hunkering down at Angaza guesthouse. It’s the same guesthouse we stayed in the first time around in Nairobi, mainly because it’s cheapish and centralish. And because the innkeeper is Ruth, and she’s very groovy.

We don’t have a car, and we don’t care to partake of the jerk-‘n-rattle sardine-can busses and taxis which pass as public transport (sound familiar?), so our last few days have been enforced inertia. In some ways, it’s very ok.
Our Waiting Room in Angaza guesthouse has a TV with DSTV which includes cricket coverage from everywhere. Our bed is quite comfortable on which we loll as indolent bedbugs and stare at India v Australia in T20 and ODI, the Cobras and the Knights in the local SA competition, SA being humbled by Pakistan in a test in Abu Dhabi. The loo works, as does the shower, the weather is fine.

Many things are reminiscent of Joburg here. The Jacaranda’s purple framed by thunder-brooding and puff clouds that hardly move in the hot, blue-rich sky; the plumes of traffic pollution and obscene driving from decrepit taxis; slick private hospitals with urban health specialists in droves while at the nearby state hospital the ill lie down under trees to await their turn; pamphlets from Nigerian traditional healers slapped onto lamp and other roadside posts offering “Love Portions”, and magic to reclaim Lost Things and Solve Politics; restaurants (some also in the remaining malls) offer the range of safe tasties so loved at home, from Italian to Indian to a fat ‘ol steak); English is mostly understood.

Enough to make me adore Nairobi, or feel crippingly homesick? Ja well fine, NO.

IN REHANA'S WORDS

We are stuck. With our car out of commission all our plans have come to naught. We should be in Uganda, inhaling Lake Victoria’s soft air. Instead, we’re in Nairobi, sucking in foul clouds of black diesel fumes. Some days we’re quite resigned to our fate, on others we rail against its cruelty.

Its not the worst time to be in Nairobi. Its purple jacaranda canopy makes it as familiar as home. As do the car alarms and the hadeda calls in the greyness of dawn.

We’re at Angaza Guest House again (we stayed here when we were in Nairobi two months ago). Our room is en suite with a not smelly toilet and a clean shower but has an awful arch of exposed concrete where wiring was installed and paint not bought to finish the job.

Check out those thumbs: twiddle dee, stuck are we

We’re on holiday, lying in bed all day is completely justified. Our recent travails – my health and Big Red Car’s – were tough on both of us. Travelling is hard work; we have an unexpected break. No tent to erect, no meals to concoct. Our dirty washing is handed in to Ruth at reception and collected a day later, ironed and all.

We have a television with DSTV at a time when South Africa is playing a test series against Pakistan; India’s taking on Australia and the local 50-over contest has begun (for the uninitiated, that’s cricket). For Julia, there’s also the climax of the Currie Cup and loads of international rugby. We have several movie channels to surf.

On some days, particularly when India is firing on all cylinders and there’s a good indie movie to watch, I can sink into our wide, soft bed with a soporific smile. But we’ve discovered – a mere week after perfecting the DSTV remote clutch – that some days there can be nothing to watch on many channels.

I haven’t continued the routine of afternoon naps, but I sink into sleep quite early and emerge 10 to 14 hours later. Both of us have not lost our late-morning sleepability, I’m glad to report. We’re putting in the hours before we revert to our camping habits of up at sun heats canvas, which can sometimes be very early.

Our current address is very convenient. We’re on the cusp of the CBD, an easy walk downhill but a distance back home in the afternoon heat. The Yaya mall, a mere 2km or so away, offers all we might need, including the Saffron restaurant whose long menu is a joy to behold. 

The pavements on the way to the mall are hot and holey and blasted with a black fug of bus, taxi and car fumes. We’re offsetting our travel carbon footprint by swallowing a good portion of pollution daily, no need to plant a tree when we get home.

Swallowing smog 

Sometimes I forget that I am sick and I’m puzzled by my sudden weakness. I now recognise the symptoms of over-exertion, it took hold while we were walking through the Bale Forest and along the slopes of Mt Kenya.
A flutter arrives in my chest. I feel a hatch slamming down to seal my constricting throat. My shallow breaths quicken. Each inhalation is taken with a noisy gasp that disappears only when I establish a fresh rhythm of measured breaths.

I haven’t experienced that for a while, not once since our fortnight in Nairobi. Our daily constitutional to the mall and back is short enough and always punctuated by a rest while we have a meal or a drink at a restaurant. 

The Nairobi Hospital is our immediate neighbour, there's only a low fence separating it from Angaza. With so much free time on our hands, Jules and I spent most of a day there while I got examined from head to toe: blood tests, X-rays and more.
Strange bulgy lumps were travelling down my veins on one arm. Jules and I were both puzzled, then worried. So we took ourselves off to our neighbourhood private hospital and went to casualty. The young, superprofessional doctor was puzzled. He had no idea what was causing the lumps so he sent me to the lab for a battery of tests.
I have my X-rays and an eight-page report from the lab. There's nothing else wrong, I only have TB. The doctor, and I, think the lumps are caused by my veins still protesting the drips that tore into them two months ago.
There’s no need for any fretting, everything’s fine and getting better.

Best neighbour for a sickie

We couldn’t have chosen a better place than Nairobi for a breakdown. We’re quite comfortable in a middle class part of town and our car is at a Toyota specialist. Best of all, we’ve got a policy with Outsurance that covers mechanical breakdowns. 

Why am I not enjoying a time out in bed when that was guaranteed to make me happy in Joburg? Why do I often catch Julia literally twiddling her thumbs in the twitchiest way possible?

We are both itching to be on our way. Our Ugandan visas, hard-won from a very stroppy woman months ago in Pretoria, are expiring in our passports. Nairobi’s lovely enough but we’ve had enough. We’ve seen all we can within walking distance and metered taxi rides are extortionate.

We spent most of a day at the art museum

We are both blessed and cursed with mostly-reliable broadband. When we’re not staring at the television we’re glued to the smaller screen of our laptops. We’ve been reading newspapers every day – online and in print – and we’re appalled at how badly they’re written and how poorly conceived many stories are. 

The Westgate mall coverage is close to pathetic. The politicians either talk drivel or are evasive and the reporters are getting nowhere close to the truth. Reading Kenya’s columnists make South Africa’s worst appear erudite and intellectual. Their attempts to take positions on the International Criminal Court’s prosecution of President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto are a garbled mess.

For an hour or two we were gripped by the race row at City Press newspaper, but then we were horrified. I can’t see how the relationship between editor and staff is going to be rebuilt and I still fail to see the charms of letting it all hang out on Twitter. 

Kenya’s celebrating its 50^th year of independence today, and is completely tangled in race politics. People attempt to defend voting for politicians indicted on charges of crimes against humanity on the grounds that they had to support “their” men. 
They point out that this year they didn’t hack their neighbours to death with machetes on the way home from the polls, why does the ICC want to dwell on the past? Most Kenyans tell us what tribe they were born into within minutes of meeting them, and what makes them superior to others. They all only vote for "their" politicians. Almost makes our politics seem mature.

The feathers and the beads are charming. The Samburu and Turkana raiding each other with AK47s to amass livestock for lobola is frightening and deathly. The Maasai expecting a lion to be killed before manhood is attained is dangerous and will damage Kenya's high-end tourism industry. Mzungu pay a lot of money to see lion. The fact that people of different tribes seldom contemplate intermarriage in this day and age is pathetic.

It is time to move on. After 50 years of politicians favouring only their tribal communities, Kenya needs to work towards a post-racial future (as Ferial Haffajee would coyly name it). And we need to move west.
I'm on holiday, dammit! I shouldn't be reading the news. Look how irritated I am! I've been reading the news every day for 21 days straight and I'm frazzled. It's time to go stare at a lake.