Life in the Slow Lane

Although the overall project is about trains, I am going to allow myself to veer off the rails every now and then blogwise or we could all get bored. In Kenya, there are effectively only two regular rail services now (each going three times a week). In contrast, if you are in the cities, you spend a considerable portion of your life in traffic jams, going nowhere very slowly indeed, surrounded by a belching haze of choking black smoke. The catalytic converter and the low emissions zone haven’t made it out here. Then there is the fact that the traffic on the single lane road is often three abreast, with matatus (colourfully decorated, severely overloaded share taxis with passengers clinging to the open doors) weaving between wheezing lorries that would have been retired to a museum for vintage vehicle geeks to drool over several decades ago in the UK.

On either side of the road wide verges are lined by shops and stalls – a brightly painted Coke kiosk, an even brighter one advertising Omo washing powder, the Moping Kiosk (never discovered what it sold), the Noah Ark Curio Shop and the Small Joint bar and club, a gravestone shop (some of the samples already alarmingly engraved), a row of hellfire and brimstone Pentecostal churches with corrugated iron roofs and lime green walls. In front of them, the verges are crammed with things to buy – a full-sized metal giraffe, double-bed, a herd of elderly lawn mowers, and miles of luscious plants that bring a festive air to the proceedings and turn the road into a tropical garden.

The shopping opportunities are by no means confined to the side of the road however. With the traffic stalled, the sellers come to you. This is a list of what I got offered in one 300m, 20 min Nairobi jam. It is by no means definitive of what was on sale – just what I had time to write down: A framed original oil painting of Jesus with a lamb; a blow-up plastic alien; a selection of pirate DVDs (including The Taking of Pelham 123), a giant PVC map of the world; a collection of the flags of all nations; three different newspapers; apples and oranges; a Spiderman kite; a warning triangle and puncture repair kit; and a collection of animal fridge magnets. The man with a bucket of elderly roses on London’s South Circular has a lot to learn about how to entertain a gridlocked crowd. Carbon monoxide poisoning apart, Kenya wins hands down.

Death and Rebirth at Tsavo, Kenya

Nature is extraordinarily forgiving. After three years of drought, a few days of rain and even the road is sprouting in Tsavo. A forbiddingly grey landscape a short two days ago is now green, we see a decidedly nervous elephant matriarch protecting her baby from our monstrously large 4WD and a much more chilled giraffe couple teaching their twins to browse. There are young in the park and the cycle of life is turning nicely. Yet Tsavo’s name (which means slaughter in the Kikamba language) is forever linked with blood as red as its earth – both in the fight against poaching and for the survival of Kenya’s wildlife and for the legendary story of the Maneaters of Tsavo.

In her glorious book, West with the Night, early aviator Beryl Markham talks of spotting from the air for big game hunters and how the elephant herds soon learnt to huddle round and hide the giant tuskers from her plane when they heard the sound of her engine. Tsavo’s elephants were legendary and suffered more than their fair share, first from hunters and later from ivory poachers. Security is now ferocious here and the park is a cornerstone in the preservation of endangered species. At its heart is the Ngulia Rhino Sanctuary, a heavily protected inner sanctum for the black rhino. It is also to Tsavo that the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant orphanage in Nairobi brings its toddlers at the age of two, to start their reintroduction back to the wild. Yet poachers still prowl around the fringes of the park searching for a way through the heightened security.

The other story – of the Maneaters of Tsavo – belongs to history and the railway. A reign of terror began in 1898 as the railway builders reached the Tsavo river. There had been a long drought followed by a flood, bringing with it disease, during which many of the Indian workers died and were left, according to local African custom in an open cave. There they were found by two exceedingly hungry lions who went from corpses to live Indian ‘coolies’ and over the next eight months created havoc, despite the best efforts of railway boss, American engineer Colonel John Henry Patterson, and a great many hunters who latched on the story and rushed to the area to join the hunt. In all around 135 workers were taken before Col. Patterson eventually managed to shoot the killers, shipping their trophies over to the Chicago Field Museum, where they remain to this day. The Kenyans have asked for them back, enlisting the help of one Senator Barack Obama, and are hopeful that they may one day be displayed in the Railway Museum in Nairobi where they rightfully belong.

Kenya Time – on the Jambo Express DeLux

Nairobi to Mombasa by train

A hollow whistle, a sigh, clank, wheeze, creak, squeak, clack, squeak, clackety-clack and the train finally groans back into life. It is 4.43am on the blackest night imaginable somewhere in the middle of the African bush, between Nairobi and Mombasa. At about 10.30pm, less than 4hrs after leaving Nairobi and well under a third of the way into our extremely leisurely journey, we came to a total standstill behind a derailed freight train. The party mood on board is forgiving. A couple got off and went up to watch the activity at the crash site, getting locked off the train by their well-oiled cabin mates, ending up prowling the windows begging to be let back on. Most people are happy because it means we will be travelling through Tsavo National Park in daylight offering far better chances of spotting wildlife. It is hard to imagine the same reaction back in Britain where impatient commuters demand refunds if the trains are 10 minutes overdue.

I wish I could post this now, but of course, even my mobile dongle is way out of reach of any server. Instead, there is just the glow of the keyboard, the infinity of the African night sky, and clack of the train wheels to rock me to sleep for what little remains of the night in my first class sleeper on the Jambo Express Delux.

Update. It’s now 11.30am and we are in the middle of the Tsavo National Park, vast acreage of red dust and grey scrub with tiny glimmerings of vivid green shoots, the instant results of the first rains in nearly three years. Wildlife count so far – one large indeterminate bird, one dead zebra and three live ones, but I have hopes. The train captain has just been round to say we will make it to the Mombasa area by 4pm (we were due in at 8.30am) but when I say area, I don’t mean station – we are ending our journey at Mazeras on the outskirts of the city as, apparently “a second train has capsized, and this time it is more serious.” Two derailments in one night on one line is quite a track record.

Zambezi Express

For the last six months, my life has been one long chain of extraordinary coincidences. I applied for a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to write a book about the history of the railways in Africa because that is what I really wanted to do, knowing that Winnie had been captured by the Boers on an armoured train in South Africa, but not knowing at that stage that he had followed much of my intended journey himself, writing one of the definitive histories of the Desert Railway in Sudan.

As a side project in Kenya, I am doing some articles on a Kenyan soap opera, Makutano Junction (road not rail – that would be too neat), but the central character turns out to be called Winston.

I have talked to colleagues who turn out to have written books and articles on sections of my trip that they have offered to lend me (including bizarrely an article published in Mayfair). One friend told me that her great-grandfather helped build one of the railways and his notebooks are still in her attic.

When I saw the advertisement for Zambezi Express, a new musical coming into London, starring the Sibayayi dance troop from Bulawayo in Zimbabwe, the country where I grew up and based around a boy who leaves for the ‘big city’ on the train, I knew I had to have a ticket. That night at the Riverside Studios, watching a high energy performance that left the audience on its knees, I went with Mark, my very English partner, a passionate devotee of steam trains (he drives them as a hobby) and Kathy, one of my oldest friends from Zimbabwe, a woman I have known for 40 years. It felt circular – as though my new life and my old life had come together – Africa and England were merging. It was a joyous opening number for my steel safari.