Chapter 27

Out of Africa...

A Passage to India

 "I have before seen other countries, in the same manner,
give themselves to you when you are about to leave them…"

 Isak Dinesen
Out of Africa

 

Music:
Enya - "May It Be"
from The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack
composed & conducted by Howard Shore

 

It was good to get out of the city and into the country again.  This time, Melawend and I were riding along the dry plains that stretch from the Ngong Hills through to Mount Kilimanjaro to the southeast.  Part of my hurry in finding a passage to India was the coming of the rainy season – this was April 3 and the rains that would turn this brown bristly land green were to have started at the end of March.

From time to time, we were riding near the railway that linked Nairobi and points east with Mombasa on the coast.  It was built to serve foreign interests.  The export traders on the coast prospered on goods they gleaned from the hinterland including rhino horn and gum Arabic.  In the 19^th century, the West lust for ivory went orgasmic.

Europe set its sights on Africa.   In the 1880s, they divided it into European "spheres of interest", with Kenya going to Britain.   The British government initially gave authority and right of exploitation to a private company, the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA).  By 1887, the company men began moving inland along the coastal caravan routes.  The interior was warring, tribal territories, dominated by the wide-ranging armies of the Masai.   As mentioned, on the slopes of the Aberdares, were the Kikuyu, an agricultural people who impressed the whites with their industriousness.

But the IBEA did not find enough resources to rule and develop the country so, in 1895, the British Government took over responsibilities for the territories that were to become Kenya and Uganda.  They decided to build the railway that Melawend and I were now dogging to the coast.  Started in 1896 and finished in 1901, it ran from Mombassa to Lake Victoria.  It was built by 32,000 coolie laborers from Gujarat and the Punjab in India.  It was called the "Lunatic Line" and cost more than 5 million pounds to build, an enormous sum in those days.  So there was also enormous pressure to make the line pay for itself – to carry freight.  The inland tribes of Kenya were not involved in cash economies or crops so it was decided to bring in white settlers with promises of cheap land to farm or ranch along the line and feed the line. 

A steady influx of Europeans, mostly British, built up a modern agricultural economy (as Kenya had few resources).  But the expropriation of mainly Kikuyu land led to alienation and bitter feelings between whites and Africans, which erupted in the Mau Mau rebellion.   That culminated in independence in 1963.

The white community could say that it did lead Kenya to a more diverse and competitive economy than in most other African countries under colonial rule.  Growth was also attributable, in part, to a large community of traders, artisans and professional people from what are now India and Pakistan, who still contributed to Kenya's prosperity.

 

So far so good: no animals had charged out of the plain to make a meal of me.  But I was hungry.  About 50 miles out of Nairobi, I wheeled Melawend into the parking lot of a café and went inside.  Simple wooden chairs and tables stood between dirty white-painted walls.  The only light came in from small windows, making the place dim but restful.  It seemed a popular place for young locals.  They hardly took notice of me, though I was the only mzungu here.  I ordered a bowl of rice and two mendazies (fried Indian bread) from a young waiter who wore a striped T-shirt and blue shorts.  In a corner was a jukebox.  As I went to put in some coins, a guy in his late teens came over to me.

"J-O is good," he said.

Since I had no idea what any of the selections sounded like, I pushed the button for J-O (but I forgot to make note of the title).  The disc went down and the room began to vibrate with fantastic African music that featured a lot of shouting, talking and singing to a rhythmic beat that almost compelled you to move your body.  I noticed that some customers and the other waiters moved about with more spring in their step and some wagged their heads to the beat.  Some knew the lyrics and sang along.  I thanked my music advisor and sat down.  He stayed by the machine because every once and a while, the needle struck in a flaw in the record.  He would give the jukebox a backhanded bop to which even "the Fonz" might have given double thumbs up and said, "Heeeey!" 

(For those of you who don't know, and those of us old enough to remember, this was the ultra-cool, leather-jacketed Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli – played by Henry Winkler – in the 1974 to 1980 American TV series, Happy Days.  Check it out.  Haeeeey!)

About 10 miles further on, I stopped to take in the beauty of the other overflowing breast of Mother Africa – Mount Kilimanjaro.  You were pulled here almost as much by the name as by its renowned majesty.  At 19,344 feet (5,895 meters), you could go no higher in Africa and still have your feet on the ground.   The broad flat snow-capped summit was actually the peaks of three volcanoes, which were just three degrees south of the Equator.    It was perhaps 50 miles away from me, across a field of what looked like coffee plants, across brown grasslands and the forest beyond, across the border in Tanzania. I parked Melawend by the side of the road and stood on her seat to get the best possible view over the foreground.

I ached to be there.  Rob had climbed it.  (There were several routes including the popular Marangu Route that almost any reasonably healthy and fit person could climb, even without climbing experience – a person like me.)  But even from this road, it was humbling to behold.  Today, before the beginning of the rainy season, I was blessed to see the broad flat summit, thrusting up higher than the surrounding clouds.

When I had thought of Africa, I heard African drums (from old Hollywood movies), I envisioned awesome wildlife, and I remembered, almost echoing, the exotic name of "Kilimanjaro."  The local Chagga people called it Kilema Kyaro – "that which cannot be conquered" or "that which makes a journey impossible".  Now after actually seeing it, I thought, If I climb only one more mountain in my life, let it be Kilimanjaro.

Photos - Melawend on the road entering Mombasa.  Mount Kilimanjaro - taken by standing on Melawend's seat - you see the flat snowy top of Kilimanjaro beyond the savanah, towering amid the clouds just to the right of center above the distant hill.

Like the permanence with which you carve your name into a rock, so had Hemingway left his indelible mark on Kilimanjaro.

"..as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Mount Kilimanjaro," wrote Hemingway in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro".

During his first safari on the Serengeti Plain, Hemingway had come down with a bad case of amoebic dysentery and had to be flown to Nairobi.  He went via Arusha, which was just west of Kilimanjaro.  This gave him a fantastic view of its squarish snow-capped peak, which was "unbelievably white in the afternoon." 

In "A.D. in Africa: A Tanganyika Letter" he said that he "became convinced that though an unbeliever I had been chosen as the one to bear our Lord Buddha when he should be born again on earth."

(I thought Hem's account of this experience was funny.  As I stood there on Melawend, gazing at white majesty of Kilimanjaro, I had no way of knowing that in another land of magnificent mountains, I would also do battle with dysentery and believe that I too had been so chosen...)

Hemingway was 34 years old when he was here on his first safari – so was I.  Though Hem had poor eyesight and had to wear glasses while shooting, no one disputed his bravery in a hunt.  Shortly after he returned home from the safari, he wrote this dialogue:

"Why are you always so pleased when you’re brave?" said Pauline, his second wife, who was with him at the time.

"I don't know," Ernest said.  "I'm just always pleased."

"It's cute," said Pauline.  "But it's sort of silly."

"Look," said Ernest said, "The things that please me are very simple things.  Most of them have to do with natural reflexes and co-ordination... Now shooting and all the things that are made up of so many things to do and think at once all surrounding one central necessity please me."

(Photo: Hemingway with kudu and oryx trophies, Kujungu Camp, Tanganyika, Feb. 1934.  THIS PHOTO MAY NOT BE DOWNLOADED.  It is used here with the permission of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library - Ernest Hemingway.)

Hemingway's stories often dealt with the complexities of relationships between men and women and how men sometimes perceived that their women were also their destroyers. In "Snows of Kilimanjaro", Harry, who is dying of gangrene, initially blames his wealthy wife Helen for his decline as a writer, then blames her wealth.

"…this good rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent," says Harry. 

In the next breath, however, Harry admits he destroyed his own talent for not using it.  He had been made too comfortable and lethargic by her wealth, he thought. 

But perhaps to underscore a lack of communication on the part of Helen (though more likely on Harry's part as well) these were the last words between them:

"You know the only thing I've never lost is curiosity," he said to her.

"You've never lost anything.   You're the most complete man I've ever known."

"Christ," he said.   "How little a woman knows.  What is that?  Your intuition?"

In "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (another story set within an African hunting safari; a story that Hemingway considered one of his best), Francis, a wealthy American, panics when a lion he has wounded charges and the white hunter has to kill it.  Francis' wife sees this cowardice.  It happens twice.  He looses the respect of both the hunter and his wife.  Francis holds on to the confidence that his wife won't leave him because of his wealth and her fading beauty, but, unrepentant, his wife sleeps with the hunter.  Francis finally overcomes his fear by facing and shooting down a raging, wounded buffalo. This gives Francis courage and the happiest moment of his life.   The hunter sees this change in Francis.

"Beggar had probably been afraid all his life." (The hunter is thinking to himself.)  … "But over now. … Main thing a man had.  Made him into a man.  Women knew it too.  No bloody fear."

But the buffalo is not dead.   It charges.  Francis faces it and fires fearlessly, but it still comes.  It is almost upon him as he prepares to fire once more.  His wife also shoots, but she hits Francis in the head.  Accident or not, Francis is destroyed by his woman.

But it was also true that Hemingway himself expected his woman to "tag along and like it." 

As I understood him, Hemingway was considered "a man's man".  I sense that there is a slight suggestion in that expression of a man being a respected, independent man, a single man – a man that can stand on his own without a woman.  That was probably true of Hemingway, yet the man was virtually never without a woman throughout his adult life.  From the age of 22, until he killed himself at 62, Hemingway had been married – four times.

Here is a breakdown:

1921  He married Hadley Richardson.

1927    He divorced Hadley Richardson and married Pauline Pfeiffer, a writer for Vogue.

1940    He divorced Pauline Pfeiffer and married Martha Gelhorn, a writer.

1944    He divorced Martha Gelhorn and married Mary Welsh, a correspondent for Time magazine.

1961    He blew his own head off by tripping both triggers of a double-barrel shotgun, while still married to Mary.

 

It seemed that Hemingway at least wanted, if not also needed, a woman in his life.  I thought that what quite often helped to make a man a man was a woman.  I felt that the love of a woman helped to balance a man out.   And vice versa.  If he was "all-man", the right woman could bring out his gentler side; if he was a bit weak, she could liberate his courage and manliness.  Either way, her love would help to strengthen his resolve in most any situation.  And vice versa.  

But was I also putting too many expectations on Her, and not enough on myself?  My reasoning said no because I believed that love and marriage, particularly in this age, was like a gable roof – where one side leaned equally on the other.  It was a complimentary balance of weakness and strengths, a mutual giving and taking.  I wanted and needed Her, but I wanted to be leaned on too.

 

(NOTE:  In 1953, Hemingway came to still-colonial Nairobi on the second of his two African safaris.  In 1999, Scribner's published a Hemingway novel based on this safari.  The book, titled True at First Light, was released to coincide with Hemingway's 100th birthday in July of 1999.   Edited down by half by his son Patrick, who was also on that safari for a time, it is drawn from the 850-page manuscript that Hemingway started shortly after he returned to his home in Cuba.  In 1963, Mary Hemingway, Hem's fourth and last wife, placed the bulk of Hemingway's papers, including this manuscript, with the Kennedy Library.)

 

As I lost myself in staring at Kilimanjaro, I almost fell off Melawend.  It was time to move on. 

The miles had been slipping by and I had not seen any wild animals.   (But this was also true of many wilder areas of North America – and then you would see a large animal such as a deer or bear cross the road, sometimes resulting in devasting accidents, so often fatal for the animal.)  Then, about 70 miles before Voi, I spotted a small troop of yellow baboons that was sitting in the sun-baked grass and thorn trees by the other side of the road.  I stopped to photograph them.  As my camera clicked, they glared at me with their black faces.  I knew that they were strong and aggressive animals.

"…the baboons are destructive beasts and the Natives detest them."  Isak Dinesen had written this in Out of Africa.  

One of the big males glared at me and started to come my way.  A big truck came along between us and gave me the cover I needed to get on Melawend and get the hell out of there. 

It had turned out to be a perfect day to travel: about 80 pleasant degrees, little wind and almost no traffic.  I stopped again just long enough to get out the tape recorder.   I did not want to stop and write down my observations every time I saw something, nor leave them to memory.  I could ride with one hand and hold my cassette recorder with the other to keeps some notes along the way. (I do not recommend doing this.)  As I rode, I talked about Hemingway and Kilimanjaro and about the time at the café with the African Fonzie.  To my left, I noted that I had been traveling parallel to a long escarpment, the face of the Yatta Plateau, several miles to the north.  It ran roughly parallel to the road as far east as I could see. I said aloud to the microphone:

"The terrain has been mostly scrub since Makindu."

I did risk one more stop because I beheld a hideous sight.  It was fat and stuck up out of the ground about 30 feet high, and looked like an erect penis that had hideous roots jutting out of it, especially from the head.  This was a baobab tree.  It was bare of leaves and its citron-like fruit, called monkey bread, which was supposed to be good for cool drinks.  To about 10 feet up from the ground, the bark had been stripped away, likely by elephants.  This gave me reason to believe I might not be alone for long here in this hilly area near Voi.

As Melawend and I continued on, I noted that the soil was a bright rust color.  The pavement was of a secondary grade and it seemed to vibrate when a car passed.  

I saw the gate for Tsavo National Park, where Mary the elephant was now living.  I thought, what the hell, I might as well try to go in.

"You cannot bring dis scootah into the park," said the gatekeeper, a rounded African with a graying moustache and an official brown cap.  "It is not allowed.  The animals, they may chase you and kill you."

I did not argue.

Finally, I saw a sign as Melawend and I rode up a gentle grade of grassy hills toward a ridge with a few tall palms sweeping the sky.  Beneath a Coat of Arms, it read: "Welcome to Mombasa."  Stores, houses and more palm trees appeared. 

I was glad that I had a copy of the International Youth Hostel Handbook.  It told me of the Kanamai Holiday and Youth Centre on the coast at Kikambala, about 15 miles (25 km) north of Mombasa.   As we rolled through outskirts of Mombassa I found a sign for Kanamai Camping.  The sun was already getting low when Melawend and I rolled through the mainland part of the city and over the Makupa Causeway, onto the five-square-mile coral island that bore the town of Old Mombasa.  There was no time to go exploring.  We clipped through the northwest corner of the city, got off the island via the New Nyali Bridge and headed north along the coast.

On the way, Melawend and I passed powdery buildings of the Bamburi cement factory – the largest of its kind in Africa.  The main material used was coral limestone, which was under much of Kenya's coastal plain, up to four miles inland.  Huge amounts had been quarried over the past 30 years and left an extensive depression.  The unsightly scar was considered by experts as too saline to rehabilitate.  That is, until Swiss agronomist Rene Haller managed to plant trees here.  Within 20 years, there was a timber-producing forest.  There were also meadows and a wildlife park.  In the quarry area, there were fish, a crocodile farm and an experimental banana plantation.

Just beyond Majengo Village, I saw a simple sign for Kanamai with an arrow that pointed down a sandy road.  About two miles in, we came upon thatch-roofed buildings in a forest of palm trees that extended right to a white sand beach.  As Melawend and I pulled up to the reception office a girl was coming out.   Her name was Linda and she was from Ottawa.   She had been in Lamu for four weeks, learning Swahili.  She loved meeting Kenyans.  She was off to the home of a local family to have dinner with them.

I asked the girl at the desk if I could set up my tent on the beach. 

"No problem," she said.

It was full night when I began setting up the Eureka! "Wind River" tent for the first time.   Fortunately, there was light from a meeting house nearby.  There was another tent, which also looked new, already set up on the beach so I put the Wind River about thirty feet away.  The air was balmy, there was a gentle breeze off the Indian Ocean and you could hear waves lap gently at the shore.  In the light, you could just see the white edges of the waves as they swept up over the sand.

The owner of the tent showed up around 10 p.m.  I was sitting outside my tent and I said "Hi," and introduced myself.  Her name was Lisa and she was a junior accountant from California.  From the meeting house light, I could see that she wore jeans and a loose short-sleeved top.  She had long thick light-colored hair that waved gently in the breeze.  Her face was fine-featured and she had full lips that formed a warm smile.  She liked to study different cultures and wild animals and for some time had a great interest in Kenya.   She also liked to take photographs.     We sat by a log up from the edge of the beach.  She listened with rapt attention to tales of my photo safaris around North America and about this journey.   Then she poured out her desires to see the world and try new things.

Conversation was easy and I did not want it to end.  We talked until midnight.  Sometimes we would shine my flashlight on Fiddler crabs that were walking sideways along the beach.  It was such a mild evening that we got up and walked slowly along the beach, being careful not to step on the crabs. 

Lisa was single but she was trying to get over her fiancé because he had cheated on her.  They had problems.  She wanted children; he didn't.  He liked his football and baseball games; she had suppressed her desire to travel.  He would often be drunk and abusive.  He had been a fairly heavy drinker before they met.  But when he was sober, she said, he could always make her laugh.   She liked to read but seldom got the time.   Because she agreed that they could get season baseball tickets, he had agreed to come to Kenya with her and another couple.  But then he confessed his infidelity.  This was last winter. 

"I should have seen the writing on the wall," she said.

It was the old story.  The woman falls in love with the man because she thinks she can change him for the better.  He gets what he wants out of her and hopes she will never change.

She was wounded but she was also a survivor.  And because the other couple was more her friends than his, she had decided to come to Kenya with them anyway.   But just a week before they left, she had met a very nice guy who seemed to enjoy exactly the same things that she had kept to herself for long time.  Yet he had also seemed a bit domineering, she said.  She didn't know what to do about him.  And now she had wanted to get off by herself for a while.

We got back to talking about cultures, wildlife, photography, conservation and travel, and she brightened up.  It was wonderful to see her release her enthusiasms and desires.  It did me good too.

The breeze was a bit stronger now.   Every once in a while we would hear the rustling thwack as a dead palm branch would fall and hit the ground or a dull thud as a coconut fell to the sand.

I walked her back to her tent and said good night.

"Thanks Tom," she said.  "This has been the most peaceful evening I've had in a long time."

"I feel the same," I said.

When I awoke the next morning, Lisa was already up and was sitting outside her tent. 

"Good morning, Tom," she said.  "Would you like some cereal?"

It was a beautiful sunny day and I could see how pretty this place was.  The grounds were of the same white sand as the beach except that most of the brown dried-up droppings from the palm trees had been cleaned away.  It gave the feeling that this forest was carpeted in white velvet.   The meeting house was all floor-to-roof round-top windows with white-painted supports between them. The roof was thatch.  There was a long low cafeteria and dining hall nearby that had a concrete patio and faced the beach.  The wide beach, the ocean so gentle today under a glorious bright sky... I thought, I could live here!

And I could also see how pretty Lisa was.  I imagined that dressed and made up for the office, she turned a lot of heads.  But here, roughing it in Kenya, I saw a natural and unpretentious beauty about her.  After we finished our cereal, Lisa and I looked at each other's photos.  She carried about 20 five-by-sevens in a small album.  I had one similar plus several eight-by-twelve's that were mounted to mat board.   While my fortes were scenics, travel and mood shots, hers were people and animals (close-ups that were taken mostly at zoos).  Several of her photos were of older relatives.  She had a fine way of capturing light so that it brought out the detail time-etched details in elderly skin.

"You really have a talent, Lisa," I said.

"Oh, thanks," she said.  "You know, I love accounting," she said.  "I love it when I can take a difficult account and get things to balance out.  It really makes my day.  But I sometimes wonder if I've chosen the right career."

We talked until about 9:00 a.m., when a different girl came out from the reception office.

"You can't camp here," she said.  "It is not allowed."  She did not wait for a response but returned to the office.

We began to pack up.   I got my tent down first.  Lisa left hers and came over.

"I've got to leave around 10:00," she said.  "It's already arranged for me to go on day trip with my friends and some people we met in Nairobi who have rented a jeep.  I'd ask you to come but there's barely going to be room for me."

"I was planning to stay here and do some writing," I said.  "Thanks anyway."

"So you will be here tonight?" she said.

"Yeah, I think I'll take one of the dorm rooms," I said.

The place was almost deserted.

"Hold on a minute, Tom, I'll be right back."

Lisa walked to the reception office and came back a few minutes later.

"It's okay to camp on the beach," she said.  "Since you've already got your tent down, why don't we share mine tonight?   It will save packing up two tents tomorrow."

About this time, teachers began to arrive at the meeting house for a convention.  With them was Linda, the girl from Ottawa who had come out of the reception office when I first arrived.  She sat nearby on the beach with some of the teachers. She had a guitar and she floated on the breeze some beautiful ballads and a few sweet Swahili songs.  She had the gentle, soothing voice of a folk singer.  Sometimes the teachers would join in, but mostly she sang alone to an appreciative audience.  Soon, she went off with a small group of the teachers.

Lisa's friends showed up shortly after that and she was gone.  Though my head was filling up with possibilities with Lisa, I tried to keep a clear perspective. 

She's on the rebound and is already attracted to someone else.  You're on the rebound – don't get involved.

About a mile out from shore, you saw heavier seas breaking gently over a reef.  With the palm trees and the white sands, you might have thought you were on an island in the South Pacific.  I put on my sneakers and wandered out into the shallow water and soon I was walking on coral.   In amongst the coral, there were many black urchins and delicate green plants anchored in the sand between the corals so that you had to be careful where you stepped.  I stumbled a few times trying to avoid hurting anything down there, not always successfully.   It was such an exquisite and fragile world over which I was clumsily trespassing. 

Further out, dark-skinned men were standing on the seaward edge of the reef, fishing.

The water was so warm and the weather so perfect that I lost track of time as I wandered out to the high part of the reef and around again through the shallows.  It was breezy and the sun shone down.  By mid-afternoon, my skin began to ache with sunburn.  I went back to shore and did my writing in the shade of the palm trees.

Lisa returned around 10:30 p.m.  I had retired early to listen to the inspirational music I had recorded back in Ridgeway.  I awoke as she came in and sat down quietly beside me.  I remained still and silent.  The outdoor light of the meeting house shone through the translucent walls of the tent, bathing Lisa in a yellow glow.  With her back to me, she quickly slipped off her jeans, her top and her bra.  She slipped into a baggy T-shirt, lifted the cover and lay down on her side with her back to me.

"Hi," I said.  "Did you have a good time?"

"Sorry to wake you, Tom," she said. "Yeah, it was fun."

I hesitated, not knowing what to do or what I was truly feeling.  But I slid in next to her and spooned her body with mine.  To my pleasant surprise, she wriggled in closer to me, took my arm in her hand and wrapped it over the top of her arms across her breasts.  I gently stoked the back of her hand and then her face for several minutes and she drew her back tightly against my chest.  This felt wonderful!  So spiritually relaxing!  So different than it had been with Audrey.  I did not want to miss any of it by falling back to sleep. 

But it also bothered me.  I tried to comprehend if the joy I felt in our closeness came from Lisa or in larger measure from the pain of more than a year's loneliness.  Was I just feeling sorry for myself?   Had this closeness opened the wound of an honest sorrow in me that had a depth I had not realized?  So in getting this joy, was I "using" Lisa?

"The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." This was Kahlil Gibran in his book, The Prophet.

"You 're lonely, aren't you Tom," she said.

How did she know?   I didn't know what I had done so wrong in my life, or to whom, that I should have been lonely for so long.  There had been few gaps in my life where there had been no touching, no intimacy.  One of those gaps had lasted for more than two years.  I was really getting tired of being alone so much.

I did not say anything.  I kept stroking her hand.

By the way she responded, I sensed that she had been lonely too.  Did she need and want me as much as I did her?  Gradually I drew my hand down, then under her top.

"Not here, Tom.   I'm afraid someone might see us."

I eased my hand out and hugged her.

"Will you be staying in Mombasa long?" she said.

"Probably a couple days," I said.  I've got to try to talk with a ship's captain."

"Maybe we could share a room in town tomorrow night," she said.

 

The next morning after another breakfast by the ocean, Lisa's friends showed up and took her away on another day trip.  We had agreed to meet in a cheap hotel I had read about in Lonely Planet's Africa on a Shoestring – the Cosy Guest House.

Mombasa was a name I associated with exotic places.  It had to go way back to old movies about Africa when characters said they were going to meet in Mombasa.  And it was true.  The city and the whole coral coast of Kenya had had a pretty exotic history.

Arab traders founded Mombasa in the 8th century.  It was visited in the 1330s by Ibn Batuta (an Arab who was one of the world's all-time greatest travelers).  In 1498, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gamma came here.  The Portuguese took over in 1528.  The Turks drove them out 50 years later but the Portuguese retook it and built Fort Jesus.  It stayed Portuguese for a century before colonists were starved out by a siege force of Omani Arabs.  For next three generations, it was occupied as an outpost of Islam, and eventually came under the sultans of Oman and Zanzibar.  Christianity was reintroduced in 1845 by two Protestant priests from Germany.  At same time, there was a one-man, preemptive British presence in Captain Owen.  He was ordered off after a few months but the British were back in force in 1873 under Sir Bartle Frere and put down the slave trade through a treaty with Zanzibar.  Freretown, a settlement for freed slaves, was set up across from the old harbor in Mombassa. 

The British used gun-boat diplomacy.  They wheeled and dealed with the Zanzibar Sultan who was persuaded, in 1888, to cede the Kenya Coast to the Protectorate of Her Britannic Majesty.  For a time, Mombasa was the capital of the British East Africa Protectorate.  The British stayed on, turned it into a resort, and built the railway that would change the course of Kenyan history.  They also deepened the harbour of Kilindini.  It became part of the newly independent Kenya in 1963.  Now Mombasa had a population of nearly half a million, while it hosted about a quarter of a million tourists a year.

Two creeks, Tudor and Kilindini ("deep water") flanked the island, which provided its natural harbors.  Kilindini, on the southwest side of the island, was now a modern deepwater harbor (the largest in East Africa) and had docks, shipyards, and sugar and petroleum refineries. Mombasa was the largest port on the northeast coast of Africa.  Out of this port, they shipped tea, coffee, pyrethrum, potash and concrete.  And it was via this port that I hoped to go out of Africa.

With the uninhibited atmosphere of its strip clubs and sailors' bars, and casino, Mombasa was a favorite port of call.  I thought, Surely I will find my ship here.

 

As Melawend and I motored through the city and onto the dual carriageway that was Moi Avenue, I saw what was the traveler's cliché for Mombasa – two pairs of huge metal tusks.  They were made of white-painted sections of steel that formed crossed arches over the two double-lanes of the street.  They had been built to commemorate Queen Elizabeth's first visit in 1952 (It was a bit ironic that she became Queen of England earlier that year when her father died while she was visiting Kenya.  Nine years later, Britain would surrender its colonial grip on the country.)  I played the tourist by taking a photo of Melawend parked at the base of the tusks in the cultivated median, across from the office of Air France and a Wimpy (fast food) outlet.

Photo - for size reference, you can just see the orange-covered load on Melawend as she is parked by the center median of the road.

I found Cosy Guest House on Haile Selassie Avenue, a busy main thoroughfare of painted, weathered hotels, shops and office buildings.  Cosy Guest House occupied most of a five-story concrete building that had been painted cream and white with rusty red solid-sided balconies.  Signs with the hotel name were displayed haphazardly on a couple balconies, over the entrance and the entrance archway itself, which was flanked by Coca Cola logos.  A few of the balconies were blackened, as if by fire.  At the dark simple registration desk near the entry, I hesitantly signed in for two guests and was given room 9.  I was allowed to park Melawend inside a storage area near the reception desk.  

Now that I was settled, I wondered: Will Lisa really show up?

The room had plain painted walls, a mirror and table, a ceiling fan and two single beds.  I went out and stood on the balcony as the sun sank toward the skyline.  I looked up and down the wide street.  At the end of the street, to the northwest, I saw the railway station that marked the eastern terminus of the railway that had opened up East Africa.   Across the street, young Kenyan men hung out in doorways. 

Late in the afternoon, I looked directly below me and was surprised to see a lovely-looking dark-skinned lady smiling up at me.  Her lips were full and glistening red.  She wore her long black hair up and I could see the glint of long gold earrings.  She wore a crimson satiny dress that had a low neckline.  From my vantage point, I could not help but notice that she had large breasts and that she was fingering her neckline to reveal even more of them.  She had high cheekbones and seductive eyes.  Her look was unmistakable, but as if to drive the point home to a naďve foreigner like me, she motioned with a finger for me to come down.  When I did not respond, she used her finger and her eyes to ask if I wanted her to come up.

Men were still hanging out across the street.  They were looking at me too and I could see by the white of their teeth that they were smiling at what was going on.  I looked at the girl and shook my head.  She shrugged and walked away.

There had been a few moments in my life when loneliness had such a grip on me that I considered using the services of a prostitute.  After all, you paid to have your hair cut in order that you would feel better about how you looked.  So, if you were at the sharpest edge of loneliness, and there was no one else around who wanted to make love with you freely, why not pay a girl, a professional, to sooth your aching spirit and give you undemanding physical pleasure?   It was an illusion that you paid for, but I thought it might serve as a brace to help get me through the lowest of times.  I thought that this was one of the main reasons that prostitution was the world's oldest profession.  But my moral upbringing would always shake me out of it and say, Wait for love. 

Still, I had nothing against prostitutes.  In some ways they actually seemed to provide a vital service.  I wondered how many suicides, murders and rapes had been avoided because a skilled prostitute had eased an enraged or troubled soul.  (Of course, in so doing, they also set themselves up as potential targets for violence.)    Perhaps, in their way, they had even saved or revived some marriages.  So, in the long run, I thought society might actually be better off for having them around.  And if that was the case, why not legitimize them, educate them, help keep them healthy, get them off the streets and into respectable, albeit discreet, establishments. 

But what did I really know about prostitution?

I knew that it was a fact of life here in Mombasa and that to some extent, it was monitored.  The girls were given regular blood tests and had health cards they had to get stamped.  Still, I learned later, that many of them had tested positive for AIDS.  And I had heard that Mombasa was a favourite port of call for US Navy vessels.  

AIDS was on the rise Africa.    But it seemed much of Africa was in denial.  Only about 5,000 cases had been reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) by 11 African governments, but some experts would estimate that over 50,000 Africans had already died due to AIDS.   In Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, the first known sample of AIDS-infected blood was taken in 1959.  It was estimated (in 1987) that 7% of the city's three million people were carrying the AIDS virus. The World Health Organization (WHO) had recently predicted that AIDS in Africa will have claimed 5 million lives by the year 2,000. 

(At this writing in October 1998, that estimate has already been exceeded.  An estimate by UNAIDS and WHO for the end of 1997 said that 20.8 million adults and children in the Sub-Saharan Africa were living with the HIV/AIDS virus, and that the disease had created 7.8 million orphans.  Globally, there were 30.6 million adults and children living with the HIV/AIDS virus – including 5.8 million new infections in 1997 alone – while the total deaths from HIV/AIDS had reached 11.7 million.  A July 1998 report said that 83 percent deaths from HIV/AIDS world-wide came from Sub-Saharan Africa. )

Virtually anywhere I had been in Kenya, there were posters advocating safe sex, including the safest sex – no sex.

Lisa showed up about a half an hour later.  She had been hiking with her friends.  We sat on the balcony.  We talked more of our travels as we munched on cookies and drank bottled water.  We talked with the ease of people who have known each other well for a long time.  She looked at me softly and then she got up.

"I need to take a shower," she said. 

She left to use the common bathroom and returned about fifteen minutes later.  Her hair was damp and tousled.    I excused myself to also take a shower.  When I returned, I saw that she had pushed the single beds together.  And she was lying under a sheet she had spread across them.

"I'm tired," she said.   "Do you want to come to bed?"

I nodded.  I stripped down to my briefs and slid in next to her.  We lay on our sides facing each other, not saying anything.   We just looked into each other's eyes.  Her lips parted and her eyes seemed to be searching mine for some mutuality of need and desire and trust.

"Tom, I know that I haven't been with anyone who had AIDS," she said.

It was a statement that was also a question.  It might have been careless, but somehow I felt certain this was true about Lisa. 

(At this point, in 1987, AIDS was still considered to be a disease that was confined mostly to homosexuals and drug addicts.)

"I know that I'm okay too," I said.

We relaxed and her look softened once more.  At the same moment, we moved toward each other and kissed softly.  We put our arms around each other and drew our bodies together.  We kissed and as we did, we ran our hands gently over each other.   We did this for some time.  She murmured how happy she was that I was so gentle with her.   We started slowly to slip off each other's remaining clothes.  Then she startled me.

"To heck with it, I'm going to enjoy this!" she said.

She suddenly stood upright on her knees, whipped off her T-shirt and went at me with a passion I had seldom known, limbs and hands and mouth moving every which way.  I joined in and let go of any inhibitions.  With sighs, laughter and happy tears, we carried each other through a night that seemed to cleanse away each other's unspoken pain.

In the morning, I awoke feeling relaxed.  Lisa lay asleep in my arms for a time and then her eyelids started to open.  She gave me a lovely sleepy smile.  She aroused me and drew me in once more.  Then we cuddled.  I wanted to stay like this through the day and into the night.  It felt so good, so right to wake with such feelings. 

"I really want to be married again," I said.  It just came out like that.  And I hugged her.

"Have you got anyone in mind?" she said.

"No, not yet."  I said, just as spontaneously.  "What about you?"

"I'm not sure what I want," she said.  "I feel like I've been running away from my life.  But I feel better now about going home to sort things out there.  I know I can do it."

I knew this would be our only time together.  The moralist in me felt guilty for having made love with someone with whom I was not in love.  I thought, How am I going to explain this to my future wife?  For now, I felt at peace with myself.  Lisa seemed to feel the same way.  I sensed that there had been a great deal of mutual compassion in our passion.  We were stronger in the places where things in our lives had wounded us.  We were two lonely, sensitive people who had taken a chance and braced each other.  But that was it.

"Maybe we'll see each other again in California," she said. 

But she said it in that light non-committal way, like a euphemistic goodbye.  We just lay together until it was time for her to go.  Her friends would be coming by to take her back to Nairobi.  We dressed and began to pack up, not saying much to each other.   It was awkward having shared not only intimacy and passion with someone, but also an act of kindness of the most personal kind.  It was hard to let go of that despite knowing you had to.

We heard a honking from the street.   There was a rush to finish up, a quick hug and a kiss goodbye.  There brief moment of intense eye contact, then she left.  I looked from and balcony as she got in the Jeep.  As they drove off, she looked back and waved.  And she was gone. 

I thought, I'll never see her again.

 

It was time to press on.  I went to the yacht club as Mike had suggested.  I went up to the bar where three men were drinking.  One had misty blue eyes and short graying hair and in his spotless attire, looked like the owner of a yacht.  The one in the middle looked, in profile, like Hemingway in his late fifties with a white beard and unkempt hair brushed forward. 

The third man was British.  He had blue eyes, steaks of gray in his combed-back hair and he wore the dark pants, white shirt and cap of an officer-seaman.  He smiled when I came in and nodded in greeting.  I introduced myself and he told me he was the captain of a ship that ran Europe to Singapore and the Far East.  I asked him if he knew if there was a potential ship in port and if it might be possible to get a passage as a workway. 

"As a matter of fact, a ship out of Bombay has just come in," he said.  If it had been an old one, there might have been a chance for a passenger cabin.   New ones don't have them.  Maybe if you had seaman's papers, but I think you're out of luck.   There are no workway passages anymore."   He cocked his head sideways.  "Josh here was the harbourmaster in Dar Es Salam.  He'd tell you the same thing."

Josh just shook his head, no, and continued to nurse his beer.

The man who looked like the owner of a yacht was not encouraging either.

"Son, I have a Master's ticket and I would still have to get the permission of the ship's owners."

A lean young man sitting alone at a table spoke out.

"There's no way," was all he said.

I went over The Missions to Seaman on Mogadishu Road.  There was no one at the chaplain's office so I left copies of articles about my journey and a note mentioning the need for onward passage and that I would be back.

Already I felt this was going to be a repeat of Halifax.  Discouraged, I retreated to Kanamai.  On the way back, the visor on my helmet broke off.   Back at the center, I had to take a dorm room, M8, because the warden was here and he said that camping was not allowed on the beach.  I went out to the beach and sat by the log where Lisa and I had talked.  I felt utterly alone.  I caught up with my journals and retired to my bed.  But it was stifling in the room that night. 

I wandered over to the beach and went over to the long cafeteria / dining hall.  In front of it was a raised concrete patio that ran the length of the hall and faced the sea.  On it there were only some long brown palm branches.  It was mild out but the breeze would rise and fall, giving you a chill.  I lay down on the patio up against the wall below the first row if windows and placed a palm branch over me to cut the breeze. 

Ah, that's better. 

There was an outdoor light that was on and my bed was hard but the air and the atmosphere was much more pleasing than the sticky heat of the dorm.  I slept restlessly.   Around 2:30 a.m. a night watchman came onto the patio.   He was in his early twenties, I imagined.  He looked around carefully and stood for a few moments about fifteen feet from me.  I kept still.  He looked right at me, or rather at the palm branch.  He left and I relaxed.

I awoke to raindrops falling on my face.  The night sky was filled with ominous clouds.  There was a strong cool wind.  I threw back the branch and ran for the dorm, reaching my door as the clouds burst.  It rained hard for an hour.  The road would surely be washed out, I thought.  So I stayed for the day and wrote in my journal, read from By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, and thought for a long time about the road ahead.

(Winds determine the seasons here.  The northeasterly kaskazi blows from October to March.  This is the warmer of the two monsoon seasons.  The hottest time is January and February.  I was here in early April, when the southeasterly kusi blows with a rainfall peak in May until July.  It is the stronger of the two winds, the colder and the less comfortable - but like the climate, it stays mostly benign.)

The next day was overcast but I rode Melawend to Mombasa and went back to The Missions to Seamen.  This was an Anglican organization that looked after the spiritual, moral and physical welfare of seafarers of all races and beliefs.  The chaplains worked full time, visiting ships and making themselves available to discuss a seafarer's problems.  At the Missions to Seaman's Club, seafarers could call home, get a meal, worship, talk with a chaplain, watch TV, play pool, and so on.  It was a charitable organization that helped to support itself through accommodation and shop charges.  Its symbol was a flying angel.  And its theme was taken from the Book of Revelations:

"Then I saw an angel flying in mid-heaven with an eternal Gospel to proclaim to those on earth, to ever nation and tribe, language and people…".

I met the chaplain, Reverend Colin Noyce, a kind and quiet-spoken man who told me about The Mission.  As for as any help with onward passage, he said that they use to be able to cable ships in order to help seamen hitch a ride, but no more.  One of his assistants did get a ride on a ship to Spain "not too long ago", but that had been a special favour.  He said I should talk with a Mr. Andrick of Dodwell Shipping next door.

I met Mr. Andrick in his large tropical-style office.  He was friendly and said that the agency that would be handling the ship from Bombay would be The Shipping Corporation of India, and he gave me the address.  I went over the corporation's offices and met the General Manager, a slight-built Indian about forty years old.  He always smiled as he spoke.

"It is quite impossible," he said.  "You see, there are not any extra cabins on the ships and they do not take passengers."

I asked if I could have a pass to go and see the captain.

"No," he said, smiling.

I went back to The Missions to Seamen and had French fries and a Coke in the club.  There were three rough-looking seamen having beers at a table and they spoke in German.   I stuck a note for Reverend Noyce on his door before I returned to Kanamai.

Kanamai became a haven for me, a place to remind me that when in my life I had been refused, here I had been regained.   I wangled permission to set up my tent on the beach and spent the evening admiring the ocean and the shore and the gently darkening sky.  I missed Lisa's touch, but I felt peace of spirit.  I did not even think of what lay ahead tomorrow – my last shot at a passage to India by ship.

After a beautiful sunrise at Kanamai, I bid it adieu and made for the gate at the Port of Mombassa, "the most modern port in Africa".  I showed my portfolio to a policeman and a Customs official and they were sufficiently impressed to let me in.

"You will have to leave your scootah by the gate here," the Customs man said.

I walked beside several ships at berth and beside huge cranes that were on wheels which ran along tracks.  The ships were being loaded with lumber and bags of cement.   Between the cranes and the long steel-clad warehouse were huge stacks of burlap bags that were piled against the buildings.  There were dirty skids, men driving trucks, and bare-backed men in shorts hoisting heavy white bags into railway cars.

The image of these men with their glistening skin and bent backs made me feel this could have been the scene out of colonial Africa – or America – the daily work routine of slaves.  And it seemed to illustrate a White attitude toward Blacks: of keeping them uneducated, powerless and without land; to give them strong backs and keep their minds weak. 

Behind their backs: "What they don't know won't hurt us."

At the far end of the harbour, I found the freighter, Imyish Mandin, out of Bombay.  Steps rose from the pavement to the deck of the ship – I just walked up like I worked on it. 

"What do you want?" a guard said at the top of the stairs.

"The captain," I said.

"He left for town five minutes ago," he said.

The Second Mate came by.

"I'd like to see the Chief Officer," I said. 

(What did I know about rank?)

I was shown to his office.  He seemed young, about thirty-five.  He was chubby, had green-gray eyes and he was friendly.  Right away, he offered me a seat and a drink of orange pop.   He was quite interested in my odyssey.  Others came in and I became the center of rapt attention. I thought, Hey, this looks hopeful!

"We hope you can come with us," said the Second Mate.  "But first we must go and see the captain and send a telex to the head office in Bombay."

"Where is the captain," I said.

"He is at the shipping office in town.  We will take you there," he said.

We were driving back to the gate where I got on Melawend and they caught a bus.  I followed.  Sure enough, there was Smiley, the General Manager."

"As I told him earlier…" he said to my supportive comrades.

"What about sending a telex," I said.

"Yes, let us send a telex," said one of the guys from the ship.

"No," he said.  He was no longer smiling.  "It will be a waste of time.  They will not allow it."

And that was the end of it, almost.   The captain was not there but my supporters described him for me.  They wished me well and left.  I sat in a large waiting room and the captain showed up about fifteen minutes later.  He was 50ish, round, with gray hair and a grandfatherly face.   He listened patiently.

"I am afraid they don't allow passengers," he said simply.

I thanked him and left.  But I was stubborn and this let me be mad. 

Damn it!  If only he would have let me send a telex, let me talk with them at headquarters… 

I had tunnel vision.  I saw it only the way I wanted to see it, not from their position.

For the third time since I first came to Mombasa, I retreated to the Pan Coffee House just to the left at the end of Haile Sellasie Avenue and had French fries and a Coke.  It put me in mind of good old Maximes of Aswan.  This time I felt defeated.  But with that came a sense of relief – I would not have to plead with anyone here any more.   I got gas for Melawend and at around 11:00 a.m., we high-tailed it back to Nairobi.

With a newfound ease of familiarity, the long run back up across the plains to Nairobi was a pleasant journey.  I stopped long enough to photograph a herd of cows that were being led two small native boys who were wearing shorts and T-shirts.  As I passed through villages, there were lots of waves and shouts of "Jambo!" from men, women and children.  I wish I had the time to stay and meet you, I thought.  There were no wild animals this time, only the gentle sun on the low green-spotted hills, coming down as the afternoon wore on.  I had no fear of riding out here. 

I spoke to Melawend in my best Billy Crystal imitation.

"My dear, the way you're running is mah-vellous, simply mah-vellous."

The miles passed quickly.  Though I dreaded what people back at the Nairobi Youth Hostel might say when they saw me yet again, I thought I might even see Lisa there.  But I had one major worry. 

How in hell am I going to get out of Africa?

It was bound to happen somewhere.   About five miles out of Nairobi, Melawend ran out of gas.  I walked her about a mile to a gas station and made it to the hostel by nightfall.  I was welcomed back almost like a celebrity by Festus Kathuo, a warden, and by David Mwaniky the senior warden.  The hostel was crowded but I settled in quickly.  With bread and butter, I ate the can of corned beef that I had bought with Audrey in St. Catherine at Mount Sinai. 

Lisa was not here.

I wrestled with possibilities and got busy.  I went back to the High Commission and posted a note advertising that I was looking for work.  Cycle Importers on Monrovia Street donated a new visor for a signed article and a handshake, but they had no ideas where I might get a paying job.  I asked around for work.

At this time, an American girl named Julie came to the hostel.  She had a dusty just-out-of-the-bush look with her dirty blond hair and no make-up.  But she had bright eyes and fine features, and a nice figure.  You could see a pretty girl under a tom-boy appearance – vaguely like Princess Diana might have looked after a rugged time in Africa.  Julie had just finished a long stint with the Peace Corps in Zaire where she worked with people in villages on irrigation and fish-stocking work.

We spoke for hours.  It had been a long time since she spoken at length with anyone in English.  (As Zaire use to be a colony of Belgium – the Belgian Congo – the official language was still French).  Her eyes flared a little when she spoke.  She almost burst with conversation. 

She joined me for a peanut butter sandwich in the Common Room.  She spoke of her 125cc trail bike.  She told me of having had a radio but lousy reception; of getting books from Kinsasha, the capital, 100 miles away and reading by kerosene lamp.  She had worked in two villages whose population totaled about 4,000 people.  She said she was treated royally, "like a Pope" as she represented the modern outside world.  They loved to talk with her and that is how she spent most of her spare time because there was no TV.  But visiting their kin in the city was a world apart.  There was little talk because a TV would be on for four hours straight. 

She would encourage her people to challenge her instructions and ideas – to use their own creativity.  But she also sensed their reservation, having suffered long ago under Belgian domination, when most of the fruits of their labors were taken away, when hands were cut off for not meeting cotton quotas.  She worked with them in making fish ponds and irrigation projects, using crude home-made implements.  Ponds were dug by hoe.  Bamboo and exhaust pipes were used for irrigation pipes.  The people were always willing to work long, hard hours, even men in their sixties.

I was becoming fond of Julie.   She was an unpretentious girl.  She had grit and spirit.  She was a giving person, an undemanding person.  Her voice seemed a bit hoarse, which may have come from so much talk here and there.  But there was a soft genuine femininity under her roughened exterior. 

There was also an undercurrent in Julie.  She was a hard worker with a strong will, but I could tell she was hurting inside.  This was when she told me about a relationship she had had with a Zairian man, a "good friend".  She talked about the attitudes of African men toward women.  Men had carte blanche to fool around, she said, and their women had to put up with it.  Men treated women as their "possession".  There would be no romance and little affection.  Any shown was mainly for the "conquest".  Once they had the girl, they took her for granted.  Julie said all this with hurt and loneliness in her eyes, her face and in her protective body language.

"You feel alone, like that," she said.  "You need a closeness." 

We would talk often.  She treated me to a Tusker beer at the Fairview Hotel and we once shared breakfast at the Thorn Tree café.  And she loved the late afternoon ride on Melawend around the outskirts of the city, and heading back into the city under a beautiful sunset sky. 

One day, her friend from Zaire had come to town and she went off to meet him.  From then on she seemed distant and depressed and seemed to avoid any more outings with me (not unkindly).  When the day came that she went to Lamu, shortly before I was to leave Africa, we were standing in front of the hostel together as she was headed for the bus stop.  I reached out to take her hand but we fell into a hug.  She held so tightly that it seemed more like a plea for help.  And then she kissed me.

"Are you going to be alright," I said.

"Sure," she said.  As she turned to go, she said: "I'm glad to have met you."

(After I got back from the odyssey, I called Julie at her home in the States.  She seemed happy to talk with me.  But she had one hell of a burden – while in Africa, she had contracted AIDS.  She had given birth to a beautiful little boy, she said.  She was going back to Africa.  She was hoping to go to university in Africa, and to be with the boy's father, as a family.  She seemed to be almost on the verge of crying.  But she did not let it out.  She said that she just did not know what her future held.  She was more concerned about her son's future.)

At the High Commission, I got the feeling Andras was getting tired of dealing with me.  Poor Andras, he was truly always busy: "There's a UN meeting today…"  "They're painting the offices here…" 

I got no responses to my notices or queries for work. The only options I seemed to have left was the repeated suggestion that I try to reach someone of high authority at the Kenya Ministry of Transportation and Communication – the government body that controlled Kenya Airways.  It seemed like a hell of a long shot.  Well, I bugged Andras one last time – just for a name of some to contact at the ministry.  He looked it up in his phonebook and gave me his name and address over the phone.

"Don't call," he said.   "Just go there and see if he will agree to meet with you for five minutes."

"What do you think my chances are?" I said.

"Poor."

I had tried the Time-Life News Service to see it they would be interested in a story.  I met Ann Turner, a 50sh woman with a lean, hard news-woman look.  She waved me over when I entered her office, which was noisy and active with workmen in the process of remodeling it.  She was interested in my journey and suggested I meet with the bureau chief – he would be in tomorrow.  She typed up a memo for him and attached it to a copy of The Standard article. 

As for Kenya Airways, I thought, What the hell, the worst they can say is no.  And besides, I can give them some value for the sake of an otherwise empty seat. – so I went over to the Ministry offices on Ngong Road. 

Mr. Wambura was the Ministry's Permanent Secretary and his secretary took my blue-folder portfolio into his office.   She emerged a minute later and said he would see me.  I felt a little awkward, as there were three distinguished gentlemen who were also waiting to see him, on much more important business, I imagined. 

I was surprised that he seemed so young.  He was tall and trim and wore glasses and was attired in a business suit, sans jacket, and his sleeves were rolled up.  His office was large, clean and impressive. 

"Your journey is most impressive, Mr. Smith," he said.  "And I hope you will take good impressions and the peaceful wishes of Kenya with you to other countries.    Right now, I think you should see Mr. Leo Odero." 

(Mr. Odero was the General Manager and Executive Chairman of Kenya Airways.)

He picked up his phone and made a call.

"This is Wambura," he said, apparently to Mr. Odero.  "I'm sending Mr. Tom Smith over to see you.  He needs a flight to Bombay for himself and his motorbike.  See what you can do for him."  There was a brief pause.  "That will be fine."

He turned to me.

"Mr. Odero will see you at three."

I was stunned.  I rose, thanked him and we shook hands.  In just a few minutes, Mr. Wambura changed the course of my odyssey.

Since I had several hours before my appointment with Mr. Odero, I decided to visit the Soviet Embassy.  From some point along the way, possibly from Hong Kong, I wanted to fly to Moscow and take the Trans-Siberian Railway to Beijing, go down to Shanghai and cross over to Japan.  I wanted to see if there would be any problems in bringing Melawend into the country.  I found the Embassy on Lenana Road, in a wooded area on near the Grosvenor Hotel and not far from the youth hostel.  A Kenyan guard let me in but I had to leave Melawend parked outside.

I thought I would meet one or two stoical people here who would be indifferent to my odyssey.  The receptionist was a short full-figured girl with a pretty face and those iridescent Russian eyes.  She was a perky thirty-something girl and her name was Tina.

"You are the famous world traveller!" she said.  (She had seen the article in The Standard.)   "Welcome to the Soviet Embassy!"

She called in a Mr. Taurosov (my phonetic spelling), who was about 75-years-old, lean, of average height and had a slightly frail look.  We talked mainly of Kenya and of Joseph Adamson who had written books about Africa.  About my odyssey, he said he did not see any problem in bringing my scooter to Moscow.  We talked in a friendly manner for about fifteen minutes.

Before I left, Tina came over and in a warm, bubbly way, asked me to autograph a photocopy of The Standard article.  She was so happy to get it.  She gave me a box of scene cards of Kiev and Leningrad and an Intourist guide book.  She also gave me a cup of coffee and some tasty biscuits that were from Moscow.  When I got up to leave, she threw her arms around me and kissed me on the lips!  

Haeeeey! 

I had parked Melawend alone on the side of Lenana Road.  When we got to its end Ralph Bunche Road, a blue compact car pulled me over.  Three burly Kenyans in dark suits squeezed out of the car and came over.   Two seemed to keep watch as the biggest one identified himself and his companions as federal policemen. As identification, he showed me a Police bus pass. 

"You leave your scootah here and come downtown with us," he said.

I said I could not leave Melawend here, so he took my passport and I followed them.  The escorted me to the 24^th floor of Nyayo House where I was asked to leave my daypack in a corner.  I was taken to a room that was only seven feet square.  There were seven men and three women in the room, all black Africans, sitting, standing, waiting.   There was a coffee table and four chairs.   Two men looked out the barred windows.  I thought, Barred windows – at 24 stories?  This made me nervous.

About ten minutes later, I was called out.  A trim, short, well-dressed man, who was a year younger than I, took me to his office.  He took down all manner of details about me: my name, profession, address (in Nairobi and in Canada), former employers, job duties, schools attended, marital status…  He asked me why I had gone to the Soviet Embassy, who I saw and what the results were.  He jotted all this down on two legal-size letterhead pages.

"You are not in trouble," he said.  "You are not under arrest.  We pick up anyone who visits an East Block embassy"

He got up and walked me to the door with his hand on my shoulder and thanked me for co-operating.

"Because you have been interviewed, you will not be picked up again," he said.  "You are free to go back to the Soviet Embassy anytime you wish."

 

Beside a building near Nyayo House, I saw disheveled old man sleeping on the sidewalk, up against a windowless concrete wall.  He was covered with a tattered blanket and had a bundle of clothes wrapped in a dirty shirt for a pillow.   I had seen scenes like this in Canada. 

(The UN had designated 1987 as the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless.  According to UN estimates, more than one billion people – about 1/4 of the world's population were inadequately housed, and 100 million had no shelter at all.  There was a UN conference on homelessness scheduled for this month in Nairobi.  In my own country, there an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 were homeless people.  In the U.S., there were between two and three million of them.

Who were the homeless?  They were drifters, alcoholics, drug addicts, bag ladies, battered women and broken men.   They increasingly included disillusioned young people, psychiatric outpatients, single mothers, the unemployed and the poorly paid and others who were shut out of city housing by the steep costs.

I whined to myself a few times for not having a home any more, but I was being absurd.   I had family to go back to, and if I worked hard, I would have a home again, too.

 

After having fries and a Coke at Hoggers, Melawend and I rolled back to the offices of Kenya Airways to see the General Manager.  This time Mr. Odero welcomed me into his office with his arms spread wide. 

"Welcome, Mr. Smith!" he said.

There were two men sitting in chairs by his desk.  He introduced Dr. Sierra who was the Manager of Public Relations and Mr.Hawa, the Manager of Advertising.   They were already talking about me.  Mr. Hawa said he would orchestrate it all.  I would meet Mr. Odero again at a press conference for photos and…  I was suddenly a VIP!  

Good Heavens!

Mr. Hawa took me to his office and commanded the attention of Nita Bhullar and Isaac Kithyaku, both sales promotion officers.  He gave them instructions to set up the press conference and to arrange for publicity items, etc, etc.   He was firm and authoritative but he praised my journey and shook my hand when I left with Isaac.  Isaac was a slim young man who took down details about me and had me sign a Trade Exchange Agreement – as to what I would do for Kenya Airways.  Afterward he came out and marveled at Melawend.  Then Melawend and I rode away as the sky burst.  It poured on the way back to the hostel, but my heart was dancing. And I was singing in the rain, literally!

Back at the hostel, I talked with Peter Garnett, a 50ish former physicist from London.  He had a gaunt tanned face and brown hair combed back and a salt and pepper beard.   He looked like he belonged in the wilds of Africa rather than in a laboratory.  He had chucked that career for one as a freelance wildlife photographer.  He sold his images only through a stock agency in London.  He lived on the cheap, but he was doing what he wanted to do.

There would be a few more meetings with Isaac and Nita, but there was no conference, only a few publicity stills taken at Kenya Airways offices.  I was photographed while sitting on Melawend and accepting the tickets (which were blanks; I would get the real ones from Nita in town later).  It was while I was getting my picture taken, sitting on Melawend and being handed a ticket, that I posed a bit awkwardly in handshake with the Kenya Airways official – using my left hand.  Bad move.

"Is that how you shake hands?" he said.

He might have been Muslim for having noticed.  I apologized and assumed a pose that let me accept the ticket with my left hand while shaking hands with the right.

The next several days were a whirlwind of activity.  Gone were the pressures and the time needed to secure onward passage.  It seemed Africa now beckoned to me.  I got on Melawend and made my way to Lake Naivasha, in the Nakuru District, passing beautiful hilly farmland now greener with the rains. 

We passed by the awesome spectacle of Longonot Crater, a young dormant volcano that lay in the Rift Valley close to the farms at the edge of the Aberdares. It was the largest of the Rift Valley volcanoes.  The "Gregorian Rift", which ran the whole length of the valley in Kenya, was studded with volcanoes.   They were created by the massive eruptions that had formed the Valley.  Longonot's sides now had deep V-shaped valleys and ridges with impenetrable forest around the area of the crater giving it a lush green aspect. A national park surrounded the volcano.

Denys Fitch-Hatton and Karen Blixen had flown over the Longonot Crater in his "Moth machine".  In Out of Africa, Karen wrote: "When you have flown over the Rift Valley and the volcanoes of Suswa and Longonot, you have travelled far and have been to the lands on the other side of the moon."

Melawend and I rolled down the wall of the Rift Valley to the floor along the road that would lead us to Lake Naivasha.  It was one of the two fresh water lakes in the Rift Valley.  Apparently, in the 1890s, the lake had been not much more than a small puddle. With no outlet, it was guessed that it was formed by massive underground seepage. The lake, which was 6,200 feet (1,890 meters) above sea level, now covered about 60 square miles (170 sq km).  My first view of it was from a roadside fence that was far from the shore – a reminder of the days before 1961 when farmers and ranchers grazed their cattle far beyond the present shore. 

The road to Lake Naivasha, was hell on Melawend.  In places, it was made of broken-up pieces of tarmac, in others there were rocky ruts filled with bulldust as fine as Portland cement.  Melawend battered her way through.  We made it to the YMCA and rode down twin wheel tracks in the grass, passing a cluster of small white-washed huts.  The tracks gave way to virgin grass with small thorny bushes in a flat approach to the lake.  I got to within 100 feet of the water and stopped.  In the distance, I saw huge black and white birds – the Sacred Ibis.

Lake Naivasha was supposed to have a large hippo population that spent the greater part of their time floating in the lake close to shore, but I did not see any hippos.  The lake was also a birder's haven, an ornithologist dream, with over 400 species to observe.  It was said that Naivasha was home to more species of birds than the whole of the British Isles.  Crescent Island, located on the lake's eastern side, was a private game sanctuary.  The island was only about two square kilometers and was actually the rim of a volcanic crater.

South of Lake Naivasha was Hell's Gate National Park.  There was supposed to be abundant wildlife, even a few big cats.  I had wanted to go to Hell's Gate to see the rock pinnacle of Fischer's Tower – upthrusted shafts of rock that were once the core of a volcano.  This area was mainly for hikers, and worthwhile if you had the time.   But I missed the road that led to it. 

(I later learned that the intersection of this road was right across from the YMCA!)

 

Back at the hostel, things really became crowded and noisy as an overland group out of London, bound for South Africa, was preparing to leave.  Most of the forty passengers were young Australians.  Most were guys but there were about six girls including two that had gray hair.  They were loading up two of those huge MAN army trucks that were covered with olive green and white tarps designed like zebra skins.

I walked around and observed the preparations.  From inside the lead truck, which carried the travellers (the other carried their supplies) I heard a shrill sexy whistle.

Wheeeet- wheewww. Wheeeet- wheewww.

This was followed by, Chuckoo, chuckoo.

"That's my parrot," a man said from behind me.

(PHOTO: You can see the parrot on a stand near the front tire of the truck.  Near the parrot, a member of the tour group traveling in those huge rugged vehicles admires little Melawend.)

He was British, had graying Afro-style hair and wore a gray T-shirt and blue jeans and a gold earring in one ear.   He climbed up to the passenger door, reached in and withdrew a gray bird that had a bright red tail.  The man was the owner of the tour company that was providing this overland adventure, and was also one of its drivers.

"I got him in Zaire," he said.  "I'll be shipping him home to London."

He put it on a bamboo stand and then continued to supervise the loading of the trucks.  The bird, well, he might have been looking at the girl with thick brown hair who stood nearby with her right arm akimbo, her hand splayed over her right buttock. 

Wheeeet-whewewww.  Wheeeet-wheewww.   Chuckoo, chuckoo. 

He did this a few more times.

One member of the group had to stay behind.  He was from New Zealand and he was in rough shape.  At first, he had contracted dysentery, then malaria.  He spent much of his time in my dorm room on a lower bunk, sleeping and sweating with fever.   But he remained in good spirit, and had hopes of rejoining the group after he recovered.

(I would later read that the malarial mosquito was the world's most dangerous creature.  Excluding war and accidents, it may have been directly or indirectly responsible for 50 percent of human deaths since the Stone Age. 1.2 million people died each year from malaria, the eighth most prevalent human disease.  It affected 270 million people worldwide and more than one million babies and children died from malaria each year in Africa alone.) 

If it was true that mosquitoes were drawn by exhaled carbon monoxide and by sweat – then nights in the crowded dorms with the windows open must have been like catnip to them. How many times had I woken with that shrill whining sound buzzing at my ears?  (The sound comes from the fast beating of the wings.)  And talk about slapping yourself silly!  Only one guy in our room had come prepared – he had brought along a mosquito net for his bunk.  At least those little buzzing bastards were not of the malarial variety.

To make matters worse for our malaria-ridden comrade, there was a guy from Japan sleeping in the bunk above him, kitty-corner to mine.  He snored like a pig grunts and from time to time someone in the room would volunteer to shake his bunk to stop his sleep-shattering snorts.

To get closer to Nairobians, I went to Palm Sunday and Easter services at All Saints Cathedral, a huge stone building, which, with its towers and parapets, looked more like a British castle.  I did not really mind going alone.  I arrived early.  On Palm Sunday, I was soon sidled by a family.  On Easter Sunday, an African girl about my age sat next to me.  The sermons were given respectively by The Reverend Horace Etemesi and The Most Reverend Manasses Kuria, Archbishop of Kenya.  They were generally benevolent, locally and internationally informative, and unpleading. 

The choir sang a lot of old favourites, wonderfully, including "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot".  But it was the beautiful rhythmic Swahili songs that moved me the most. One I enjoyed in particular was "Bwana Utuhurumie".  Many were sung to the sweet rhythms of African drums.  Unlike what you see in so many churches these days, the congregation was dressed in their Sunday best.  The girl next to me offered to share her hymnal with this lone mzungu.  With her black hand holding one side and my white one holding the other, I felt welcome.

Easter was also the time of the Kenya Marlboro Safari Rally, said to be the toughest motoring event in the world.  It was the biggest of its kind.  And it was noisy.  It began in 1953 when it was known as the Coronation Rally in honour of newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II.  As Kenya was still part of the Crown colony, the circuit took in parts of Uganda and Tanzania.  Problems in those countries forced the race to run completely within Kenya.  It now covered over 2,500 miles (4,000 km) of some extremely rough back roads through much of southern Kenya, beginning and ending in Nairobi. 

But with all the other goings-on in my agenda, the closest I got to the Rally was to hear the roar of cars as they raced through the city and to listen to a very excitable commentator on TV.

"You can hear the noise.   There comes another vehicle.  There comes another car.  And that's car Number One.  Car number one driven by (named)... Sure there's another car coming.  Oh there it comes!  Oh there it comes!   You won't believe it!  Car 4!  Car number 6, driven by (named) is trying to get by Car Number 7!..." 

His comments would be followed in Swahili by a rather subdued commentator. 

(The Rally was won by Hannu Mikkola of Finland, driver of an Audi Quattro – that car number 7.)

 

Lisa did show up at the hostel before I left, but we saw each other only briefly.  She and the couple she had come to Kenya with were busy packing up to leave the hostel for a trip into Uganda to see the Mountains of the Moon.  Nothing was said of what happened on the coast.  It was just too crowded for us to be alone, and there was no time to get away.  We hugged.  As she walked away from me for the last time, she bumped into the frame of an open window from looking back at me, not forward where she was going.   The last I saw of her face where her cheeks a tad of red from embarrassment, and that warm smile.

I spent some time reading Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa, which he had said was "absolutely true autobiography."  In it he described safari hunting, of killing rhino, greater Kudu, onyx, zebra and buffalo.  He had to take a dozen zebra skins back to the States because he had promised them to some friends.  He complained about the rhino he shot being so much smaller than Karl's and that he must, in his way, "balance" with a buffalo, or whatever.  

As Hemingway detailed in a well-written article, "Shootism versus Sport: The Second Tanganyika Letter", he made a fine argument for shooting an animal while on foot rather than from a vehicle.  The former was cowardly (as well as illegal, even then), the other was sportsmanship because when the hunter is more vulnerable and the lion on more equal terms.  True, it seemed, there was more danger for the hunter, but the same bullet would still leave the same gun and strike with the same results.  One way or another, I was glad the Kenyan government had outlawed hunting all together in 1977.

Despite all his bravado, I admired Hemingway because of his zest for living.  He knew how to enjoy life, his way.  When something interested him (usually something that demanded a lot of physicality such as boxing, bullfighting, fishing, hunting and war), he learned all he could about it and threw himself into it so he could understand it firsthand and write truly about it.  He was also a very complex individual often given to extremes of behavior.

Americans often had a bad reputation abroad for being rather obnoxious and self-centered.  This was much the case in the Common Room the night before Easter Sunday.   Most people in the room were watching TV, intensely focused on A.D., a story of the life of Jesus.  This particular group of six Americans sat at the round table in the middle of the room, laughing and talking as if they were alone.  Twice someone got up to turn up the volume on the TV.  They finally got the message and moved their conversation to the dining room.

It was after Julie left for Lamu that I met Pete in the Common Room and he showed me some pictures he had taken.  He had just come back from the coast and he was aglow. 

"Look, Tom, this is my Italian pastry,"

It was a photo of him sitting on sandy ground with his arms around a ravishingly beautiful girl.  She was from Genoa.  She had thick brown hair, a model's face and the perfectly tanned body of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model – less the swimsuit – she was wearing only a seductive smile.

Well, I had two girls who flattered me.  These were Ann and Hillary.  They knew Julie.   Ann had asked Julie to join us for drinks at the Fairview Hotel but Julie said, "Maybe later."  (She did not show up.)  We went over and had beers on a square metal table on the front lawn of the hotel.  Ann paid.

"I'm not use to having girls pay for me," I said.

"Oh, I can't believe that," Ann said.

This seemed a bit like what Audrey had suggested to me in the Sinai.  They asked about my journey and my family life.

"You look too young to have a twelve-year-old daughter," Ann said.

I thought, But I do have a twelve-year-old daughter, and a ten-year-old daughter.   I'm a father, though it would not seem like it. 

Then there was Tal, the easy-going Israeli who was planning to go to India.

"I hope that we shall meet again there," he said.

I would continue to make notes in the Common Room.  As I was doing so, I could not help but overhear the conversations of other travellers (partly because I wanted too!), including that of the California "Valley Girl" who was remembering old movies.

"I mean like I grew up with Godzilla," she says.    "He was like so bummed out, you know?"

Gag me with a spoon!  This Val is grody to the max!  Like, totally!   Did she just like step out of the Galleria?  I prayed silently: Oh God, like I mean get me out of here! 

Though not necessarily out of Africa… 

But that was now just wishful thinking.  If I'd had money, I would have stayed longer.  With my flight booked for the 25^th of April, my stay in Kenya would total 45 days, and in Africa as a whole, 116 days.  It was time to move on.

Something does not have to be completely gone before you realize what you have had.  With a passage to India assured for Melawend and me, the tension was gone.  I became less self-absorbed.  I suddenly realized what I would soon be leaving Africa.  And I had no idea when or if I would be able to come back.    

Before I could tear myself out of Africa, I had to go once more to that farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills.  My biggest regret in leaving was in not meeting more Kenyans.   So I came here to soak up some of the atmosphere of a white person who knew a few of them well, and who loved them and their country.   As home is truly where the heart is, I felt that Karen had left a great deal of her heart behind when she went back to Denmark for the last time – so much so, that she had to write it down.

In 1954, after Hemingway learned that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he said this in a telephone interview:

"I would have been happy – happier – today if the prize had gone to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen…"

Her eloquent, unsentimental story led to the making of Out of Africa – which won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1985.   And at first it did seem a bit overdone to play the movie soundtrack in the small gift shop at the house-cum-museum.  But I felt that Hollywood must be given more than golden awards and accolades for taking on incredible risks to bring to us such beautiful stories of life as was Karen's, and to make it as if we were there. 

Aside from the young girl attending the shop, I was alone at Karen's house.  So it was that the haunting strains of John Barry's Oscar-winning score drifted through the house, echoing and fading away like shared memories as you went deeper into it.   This feeling was accentuated by the emptiness of the house, as if much of the furniture was outside on the front lawn for sale.   Just before her final departure from Africa, Karen, always adaptable, had found a kind of peace to her home of empty rooms.

"…the house, in the course of those months, became das Ding an sich, noble like a skull, a cool and roomy place to dwell in, with an echo to it…there were no things in the rooms at all, and to my mind at the time they seemed, in this state, more fit to live in than they had been before."

To make this journey, I too had had "yard sales" and had parted with many treasured artifacts of my life, just to have the needed money.  My selling was somewhat painful, but it was by choice.  I could only imagine Karen's anguish, perhaps screaming under her composed, almost stoical Danish demeanor.  However, it did please Karen that Lady McMillian bought most of the Danish furniture that Karen had brought with her from Denmark.  The purchase was for the McMillian Memorial Library, which Lady McMillan was just completing in Nairobi in memory of her philanthropist husband. 

(I later learned that the collection was still at the Library, but locked in a small room for safety.  Pity.)

But there was some furniture here.   As I wandered through Karen's house I let my imagination guide my observations.  Several pieces were replicas that Universal had used in the film and then donated to the museum.  In the library, there was the gramophone, the books and the cuckoo clock that you saw in the movie.  Over the fireplace, built into an angled corner wall, you saw the fabric that hung down from the ceiling to the mantle, though a mirror that hung over middle of the fabric in Karen's time was gone.  However, returned to one of the bookshelves was the original porcelain turkey that Denys had given to Karen.

In a black and white photo of Karen that been taken with this room you saw it full of her things.  You saw Karen sitting on a settee by the fireplace, an open book in her hand.  There was a wooden armchair, needle-point pillows, and a squarish table that supported a family picture, a vase and a ceramic urn.  There was a small ornate clock and pieces of china on the mantle and pictures on the walls.  Karen was leaning forward and was dressed in a light blouse with baggy sleeves, and dark slacks over dark sheer stockings and shiny black shoes that rested on a leopard-skin rug.  All that was now gone, replaced, over the hardwood parquet floor before the fireplace, by a lion-skin rug whose glass eyes, set over dry gaping jaws, glared at you.

Most of the floors in the house were of the same hardwood parquet flooring.  I was glad that the rubber soles of my boots were soft enough on these floors so that I made little sound nor left my mark upon them.

In Bror's dark-paneled room, there was the Universal gunrack and the safe, and nothing else.   But in Denys' room, you saw a leopard-skin rug, a white armoire with an oval mirror, a side table and a trunk propped open with a pith helmet balanced on top and a dark leather case containing field glasses resting beside it – all the furniture in this room was original. 

I went into Karen's bedroom.   Before the front-facing window, you saw the Universal couch.  Kitty-corner to it was a thick upholstered chair with a woman's safari clothes draped over an arm and the back.  And there was the white Universal bed that had held Meryl Streep under Robert Redford. 

Replicas were nice, but pieces that had actually been touched by that someone's own hands gave you a feeling of being separated from them only by time.  So it was, against the same wall as the bed, that I ran my fingers lightly over the white dressing table Karen herself had used.  Had she looked in that small round mirror and seen not only her own reflection, but also that of Bror or Denys?   Was there some level of existence whereby a room, or more specifically a mirror, could retain the images and sounds of life that it had been exposed to?

When you've been exposed to someone through their writing, through movies about their lives or through some other medium, you get a feeling that you might actually know them, and they know you (which might partly explain why we feel a closeness to movie stars).  Being in Karen's home lent this kind of intimacy – as it she was a friend or a relative.  I also felt this way in the dining room when a light breeze came in the three long windows and waved the lacy curtains in and then out, just as you might imagine a spirit would move. 

From the windows, you looked west and saw, just as Karen had for seventeen years, "…the paved terrace, the lawn and the forest."  Beyond were the green plains and trees that reached to the foot of the Ngong Hills.  I walked outside over the rough rust-brown bricks of the terrace.   At a corner of the rear wall of the house, I sat on a thick stone bench behind the millstone table. 

"The millstone table in a way constituted the centre of the farm…" Karen had written.

The stone was from Bombay because the stone in Africa was not hard enough for grinding.  I ran my hands over its rough surface, noting the "brown spots" that were still on it.  It also had a little thick-leaf plant growing out of the hole in the center.  Karen had sat here in her dealings with the Natives.  And on one New Year, she and Denys had sat here looking at "the new moon and the planets of Venus and Jupiter, all close together…such a radiant sight that you could hardly believe it to be real…" 

Looking out over the yard to the forest, everything seemed so peaceful and quiet.  It was not always so.

"The atmosphere of the terrace was animated, electric, like the atmosphere of the Casinos in Europe."  Karen wrote.

But no more would there be as many as 2,000 happy Natives living it up in the yard with their Ngomas (big dances).

"The day-time Ngomas left their mark stamped upon the lawn in larger and smaller brown rings, as if the grass had here had been burnt away by fire, and these magic rings would only slowly disappear."

There were no rings stamped upon the lawn.  Those were just mental images of another time that was gone with Karen's final departure from Kenya.

She had set aside 1,000 acres of her farm for the Natives for their shambas.   Other colonialists had ostracized Karen because of her care and sensitivity for the displaced Natives.

"It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose Native land you take.  It is their past as well, their roots and their identity," she wrote.

By law, Kenyans could not buy any land.  I could not imagine that anyone would have to buy back their own land! – let alone being denied the right to do so!  Perhaps that was what actually defined, at least in part, a "Protectorate".

 Photo: Denys' room, left.   Karen's room, right.

Karen lost her farm in 1931, the same year that Jomo Kenyatta, a former herd-boy who would become independent Kenya's first president, began a 15-year odyssey in the western world.  By 1934, the Africans were better organized than ever to confront the colonial government.  They pushed for the return of the "alienated" highlands.  They were articulate and forceful in presenting their views to the "Carter Commissions", a commission of inquiry on the disposition of land in Kenya.  But it was to no avail: all African claims to the "White Highlands" were disallowed. 

Expropriation of their land (the best of which – in the highlands around Mount Kenya – went to white settlers), strict laws and harsh enforcement against nationals led to anti-government groups being formed.  It culminated in the arrests of 82 nationals, including Jomo Kenyatta, and the bloody Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950's when white settlers and pro-government nationals were attacked.  Gradually, moves were made toward African presence in government, and then toward Kenyan independence.  Jomo Kenyatta was released in 1961, took over as leader of his previous party and dealt with a rival nationalist party.  After two years of haggling at Lancaster House in London, the Colonial Office finally got the two parties to agree on a date for the end of Colonial rule – Dec 31, 1963.)

 

Law, too, dispossessed Karen.   She had quiet moments of despair, out of the view of everyone, save one.

"…I was driven out of my house by the fear of losing it."

And so, under the watchful eye of her faithful servant Farah who had been concerned about leopards coming near the house at night, Karen would wander in the dark.

 "…I knew that I did no good whatever by going round on the roads of the farm at night, and still I went, like a ghost that is just said to walk, without any definition as to why or where to."

When defeat came, and she felt she had no choice but resign to it, her burden was lifted.  In much the same way, my success in securing onward passage had done this for me.  In our own ways, we were freed to feel the pull of the land we were leaving, as we each had before.

In the chapter "Farewell to the Farm", she wrote:

"I have before seen other countries, in the same manner, give themselves to you when you are about to leave them."

(Karen returned to Rungstedlund to live with her mother and begin her literary career as Isak Dinesen.  She suffered constant ill health but she remained very active and traveled a great deal.  She made a lecture tour of the US in 1959.  She died at the age of 77 on the 7^th of September 1962, a little more than a year before Kenya won its freedom from colonial rule.)

I went around the south side of the house to the wrap-around verandah and could only imagine all the comings and goings of so long ago.  Now it was time for me to leave Karen's home, and to leave Africa.  I gazed out one last time upon those blue-green Ngong Hills.

PHOTO - shows the rear of the house.   Tom on Karen's veranda, looking upon the Ngong Hills she loved.

Sure enough, something of Kenya did give itself to me even before I left Karen's home.  As I was strapping the daypack onto Melawend, in the shade of a big tree by the driveway, a distinguished looking man came up to me.  This was the Honourable Stanley Nyagah, M.P. for Embo North Constituency, on the south-east slopes of Mount Kenya.  He was there with some children, his grandchildren I imagined.  He was curious about such a strange-looking scooter, but he was more impressed by the nature of my journey.  He wanted me to come to visit him and tour his constituency.  I mentioned the flight with Kenya Airlines and he said he was connected with the KA.   He suggested that he could see about re-booking my flight for a later time so I could come to Embo.  I was torn.  At last, an invitation from a high-ranking Kenyan who would show me something of the real Kenya.  But I was nervous about loosing the flight.  I thought, What if Kenya Airways changes its mind?

(In retrospect, this was silly.  I was unnecessarily paranoid.  As it turned out, Mr. Nyagah was connected with KA: I later saw a letter from him on the desk of Mr. Wambura's secretary.   I also learned later that he was the uncle of Nita Bhullar, the Sales Promotion Officer I was working with in Nairobi.  As in Scotland, I had blown a wonderful chance to share the culture of a country.)  

I didn't sleep much the night before I left, what with the snoring Japanese guy and the mosquitoes (I did get two of those insidious bastards though).  I'd had to pay some baksheesh to some of the guys at the airport to handle Melawend nicely and that took the last of my Kenyan money.  But that wasn't so bad.  I left them with smiles on their faces, except for the guy who walked me out to the road that led to the airport.  He was sad, in a good-natured way, that I had no shillings left for him.  He was satisfied that this was so when I pulled my empty pockets inside out.

 

Now I was waiting at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Terminal 2.  I felt a heavy sadness in leaving Kenya, leaving so much unseen, so much undone.  I watched as children ran through the baggage weigh-ins, and people of many races – Kenyans, Indians, Arabs, Europeans, and North Americans – came and went or waited.  Indian children beside me were squabbling while one, a little girl, was trying to sleep.  A few rifle-carrying Kenyan soldiers in red berets and camouflage uniforms walked by.  A white guy walked through the terminal, pushing a multi-speed bicycle loaded with packs and panniers.  Calls came over the loudspeakers for flights to places now familiar to me: Cairo, Brussels, Paris, London… 

Earlier in the day, I had stood in the open fifth-level breezeway that led to the Simba Restaurant.  There was a great view of the savannah grasslands and the hills beyond – a good final look at Kenya.

So wrote William Holden: "In the vast savannahs of Africa there is a dimension of space and time that is an echo of our own beginnings and which reminds us that we were not born initially to live in the concrete jungle."

It was in that area that I first rode through this magnificent country.  And I wrote down that I hoped to bring Her here, have a meal and take in this view.

Now, in the busy departure lounge, I looked back on what I had seen of Africa – Egypt, Sudan and Kenya – three very different countries on such a vast and beguiling continent.  I had seen and felt and learned so much here.  I had been filled with dread when I was approaching Africa on the Espresso Egitto.   Now, I was filled with so much love for it, I vowed that I would return to Africa someday.

 

The little Indian girl beside me was wearing a frilly white dress that went down to her ankles.  She wore tiny earrings and there was a white bow in her hair.  A little boy woke her up and they left with their parents.     Seeing so many people from India here made me apprehensive. I knew India would be vastly different from anything I had yet experienced.  I thought of those "teeming masses".  India that was less than one-third the size of Canada but it had 32 times its population (about 800 million people).  I was leaving the "green city in the sun" for a huge city where I expected to deal with crowds, poverty and chaos.  I became afraid for Melawend.

But India had also been one of Jimmy Bedford's favorite places.  He had made many friends there.  His book, Around the World on a Nickle, had been published in India.   I began to think that I might end up feeling the same about India as I now felt about Kenya.  Besides, I would have to limit my stay in India and Nepal to four weeks.

(Now I can to say to my then-self, "Oh, how nice your ignorance of the future is!") 

It was the hot season in India but the monsoons would be coming soon – I would bake or drown.  Either way, I felt that I would have to move quickly, again.  But I also began to look forward to it – not the heat or the rains or the crowds – but to meeting people one-on-one, getting Cycle for Life underway in New Delhi, and seeing some of the mysteries of India and the beauty of Nepal.  I looked further ahead and was anxious to get on to Kuala Lumpur where a Malaysian girl named Patricia was waiting for me; to Singapore, where her brother lived; and to Hong Kong for which I had been given several photographic contacts.  And maybe the Soviet Union… The road ahead held the hope of lots of opportunities.

 

I relaxed.  Jomo Kenyatta Airport was busy now, but it was also very comfortable and modern.  Airports were strange places.  In a way they existed as entities unto themselves, a place of transition between here and there.  Inside, you were in neither place.  I began to feel that I was no longer in Kenya, but I was also not in India.   I knew only that I was anxious now to move on.

Then the call came for my flight, but the boarding gate had been changed from 6 to 4.  A tall Australian guy who I had been talking with made a mad dash for the new gate.   He had told me that he wanted a rear seat because few people chose to sit at the back of an aircraft.  He would be able stretch out.  Because I had already picked a specific window seat – 17a – I went with the slower flow of passengers into the Kenya Airways spotless new Airbus, one of the most advanced airliners of the day. 

In my wind-faded jeans, worn Levi's shirt, and carrying my bulging daypack, I looked like any other shoe-string traveller.  But inside I felt like a V.I.P.  I was boarding this flight with an authorization in my pocket that had been signed by the Executive Chairman of the airline himself.  Most of the passengers were Indian: families, students and business people.  Well, my seat was over the wing, but no matter.  As soon as we were airborne, the short middle-aged businessman who sat on the isle of my row went to the back of the cabin.  I too now had now had three seats to myself.  After the rounded smiling stewardess had served us juice, I curled up and slept soundly, too tired to even think about where I was going.

 

I was glad to have had a nutritious, filling breakfast onboard the next morning.  Going through Customs in Bombay was probably going to be a nightmare, I thought, and I was glad to I was going to do it on a full stomach.  As the Airbus dipped below the clouds, you could see, near the airport, acres of corrugated tin roofs, woven mat walls, old boards, anything that could be scrounged and slapped together for shelter, all bunched together in a sprawling mass of hovels.  Lower still and you saw thousands of people here and there, all around, in city and squalor, and we were heading down into it. I had never before seen such a spectacle of poverty.

I knew that I had to leave the security of this aircraft soon and already I longed for Melawend.  One last look out the window before the Airbus landed and I thought, Tom, you're not in Kansas anymore.

Dear reader:

Next... ride with Melawend and me as we enter the mystical land of India. 

Learn just as V.S. Naipaul did that "To be in Bombay is to be exhausted."   Yet it is where Melawend and I found one of the most rousing welcomes anywhere as 100 arms pointed the way to New Delhi... Enjoy a full day amid the majesty of the Taj Mahal and bucolic charms of the Yamuna River... Share with us the chaotic and the quiet wonders of New Delhi where we also face the "karma" of a collision..  Share a peace talk with New Delhi's welcoming mayor, and a blistering run though the "blast furnace" of Madhya Pradesh...  Share with me escapades in the fascinating holy city of Varanasi and a boat ride amid the pious in the waters of the Ganga Ma...

Further on... Stay with us on the sublime but hastened ride up into the majestic Kingdom of Nepal - the place where the ravages of disease and a 42-day bureaucratic nightmare force a coming to grips with one's own life...

What do you think or feel about the story so far?  If you have enjoyed it, please tell your family, friends, colleagues, etc.  If you have any questions or comments, send me an e-mail.

All the best to you in your continuing odyssey through LIFE!

Tom

THOMAS MARTIN SMITH
"The Scooter Crusader"

 

 

 

 

 

 

PART VI

A Passage Through India

 

Chapter 28

BOMBAY:
Britannia, Bureaucracy, and Beggars

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