Long Way Down

by Ewan McGregor

  I’d had the weirdest dream; I was at the bottom of a sand dune in bare feet, trying to get to the top where there was an airport terminal. But I’d lost my ticket and as I climbed I realised there were broken bottles sticking out of the sand. My bike was lost and I found a bicycle and was frantically trying to get to the top. Almost there, the pedals broke and I crashed backwards falling all the way to the bottom.

  Kasai’s village was quite large; a dirt road led from the tarmac beyond rows of houses to a square surrounded by what looked like communal buildings. There were donkeys wandering about, and cattle, of course.

  Within seconds of parking the bikes half the village turned up, and within minutes the other half joined them. Kasai was the eldest of five children. His mother had tea boiling in the back room of the two roomed house and we sat down on a wide bench covered in animal skins. Later I discovered it also served as the bed Kasai shared with his brothers and sisters. Out the back the garden was piled with firewood and a haystack for the animals; the land that stretched beyond was tilled by his father. He arrived soon afterwards, a proud-looking man of seventy-five; Kasai said it was old for an Ethiopian and to have a father that age was good luck. The kitchen was also outside – a roughly built shelter with pieces of tin for the roof, the walls the same pole construction as the house. It was about kneeling height and there was a charcoal burner for coffee and a large circular pot for making injera.

  Back inside the house was dark, both the door and window were open but children lined the wall leading out the front door. Another great crowd filled the window space. In the back room a series of pigeonholes like open cupboards had been fashioned from wattle and daub. Kasai’s brother showed me pots and pans and a basket of something. On the top shelf he pointed to a bottle. ‘Hair food,’ he said.

  I had to think about that. ‘Ah, shampoo.’

  They brought bread for us and we were waiting for the tea. It didn’t come, however, and we couldn’t work out why given that Kasai kept telling us how good it was and that tea and bread was what Ethiopians had for breakfast. Finally we realised they always served tea with sugar and clearly they didn’t have any.

  CHARLEY: It was my fault, I was sitting there and Kasai was sort of hovering. He spoke about buying sugar because it was so cheap and it took me ages to figure out they didn’t have any money. Cottoning on at last I gave him fifty birr and off he went to the shop.

  We’re not exaggerating when we say the whole village turned out. The square was heaving: men and women, boys in football shirts, girls with their hair pressed to their heads and fanning at the shoulders in the traditional way they wear it. There were hundreds of young kids surrounding the bikes and I was getting a little nervous: it wouldn’t take much for one to topple over and I had horrendous visions of a child being crushed.

  Breakfast over we said our goodbyes, shook hands with Kasai’s father before heading off. The younger children followed us across the square and halfway to the tarmac. No one threw any stones.

  We saw more baboons; nonchalantly they appeared on the mountain one side of us, ambled across the road and disappeared into the trees. Last night there had been hyenas in the hills. Kasai said they were all over this area but fortunately he didn’t tell us until this morning. It’s a good job too, because if we’d known last night every sound would have had us jumping. Hyenas are not to be messed with – a bite that helps rot their food and more jaw pressure per square inch than any other land mammal.

  We crossed a huge valley with mountains rising in the distance. We passed one town where we were sure we saw a dead guy. He lay awkwardly on the ground and he wasn’t moving. He had a rope tied round his neck and a whole group of men were gathered around him. Ewan thought it looked like some kind of lynching. We can’t be sure: we didn’t stop and only glimpsed it as we were riding by.

  By midday I was ragged; I’d noticed recently that with all the riding, by eleven or twelve I was exhausted. We really needed the few days we were taking at Addis Ababa. Little things were niggling again – something I’d say, something Ewan would say – it was just because we’d had no time out. Pulling over at a cafe we started chatting to a bloke who told us his name was Musay. He was an interpreter and spoke really good English. Ewan asked him why some of the children threw stones.

  He said they just thought it was fun; no one told them not to do it so they didn’t know any better. He told us it had been the same when he was a kid; he remembered lobbing a stone at a woman in a car and smashing her mirror. He thought it was great fun.

  EWAN: I was trying not to say the ‘tired’ word because it’s boring. But I was knackered and my concentration was slipping. We were on a much more gnarly stretch of road now, heading into the mountains and the town of Kembolcha. Tomorrow we were going to the market in Bati, where people came from Afar to sell animals. I was looking forward to it, but right now I was exhausted and there were geep all over the road. That’s what I christened them anyway – the sort of sheep/goat or goat/sheep animals we kept seeing. They wandered along as if they were permanently in the rain: heads down, jaw dragging, their fatty, liquidy tails just hanging. They had this habit of drifting across the road, finding their mates, then all of them would lie down together for a kip.

  The road was awful, blind hairpins with no run off and crazy drops down the mountain. Stones and gravel, dust, rock slides – the works.

  I came off again and I have to tell you it was really pissing me off. Going too fast, too confident, I don’t know, but the next thing I knew I was slammed on my side and I could feel a knock on the leg I broke back in March.

  My pride isn’t bomb proof and I could see with this trip it would take another battering. It’s a shame because I get sick of off-road riders coming up to me in restaurants, looking smug and telling me I fall off all the time. Maybe I do, I don’t know; maybe I’m just not very good at this. It’s true that at the moment I’m not getting any pleasure from riding in the dirt. But I reckon I’ve been riding for fifty days now, half of them off-road, and I imagine even the most ardent dirt bikers would fall off a few times if they rode solidly for twenty-five days.

  Anyway, this time the crash bars had bent and a bracket holding one of the lights was buckled. With Kembolcha finally ahead I started fantasising about the Vintage California I’d seen at the Moto Guzzi factory. What I wouldn’t give to be on one of those right now, in a pair of jeans and leather jacket, an open face helmet cruising some highway in America.

  20

  Lola

  EWAN: We were approaching the Kenyan border and the Africa most people are familiar with.

  Our last few days in Ethiopia had been pretty eventful. In Addis Ababa Charley and I had a big heart-to-heart about all the petty niggles that had gone on during the first part of the trip. With the tiredness created by the miles maybe we hadn’t been communicating but with three days R&R we cleared the air.

  Before we got to Addis we’d visited the market at Bati, a bustling town close to the Afar region and been absolutely mobbed. There were hundreds of little kids all over us as soon as we pulled up. They were chased off by bigger kids who were in turn chased off by even bigger kids with long sticks and no compunction about using them. Finally surrounded by some self-appointed bodyguards, Charley and I wandered among stalls selling everything from cloth to spice to live chickens and chewable roots with hallucinogenic properties. We saw tall, thin men with afro hair that had been lacquered until it looked wet. Women keeping the sun off with umbrellas sold millet and maize, donkeys, geep and camels. Legs tied together, the geep were tossed on top of buses to be transported. Across the way from the livestock, black-winged vultures sat watchfully in trees, waiting for the carcasses of the weakest to be tossed over the fence.

  South of Addis we stopped at Shashmene, the home of Rastafarianism. I’d been in Jamaica earlier in the year and wanted to find out more about the link. We met an old guy with long dreads and grey beard called Gladstone Robinson, and he told us he was the o
ldest settler in the town. He had a young wife and a six-year-old daughter. He didn’t look well, a little green around the gills, and he didn’t really answer my questions. I’m not sure I left any the wiser. He had a picture of the Emperor Haile Selassie on his wall and said that Rastas believed him to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and hence they worshipped him as their saviour.

  No sooner had we left than he collapsed. We heard his wife start wailing and, grabbing the medical bag, Dai and Jim rushed in. Dai felt for a pulse at his wrist but found none and the old guy was very cold. His wife told them he’d had serious diarrhoea over the past few days and had been very weak. Dai located a faint pulse in his neck. The oxygen level in his blood was very low and they got a mask on him. He was dehydrated and they gave him some rehydrate fluid and gradually he came to. He went to the toilet, though, fainted again and they had to resuscitate him.

  It was very scary for his wife, poor soul. All she could do was stand by and watch. The life returned to his eyes, however, and taking off the oxygen mask, he thanked Dai and Jim and told them he was ready to run a race.

  Beyond the Kenya border we had armed guards with us – four soldiers appointed by the government. This was a dangerous area, with clan warfare, poaching and general banditry. ‘Shiftas’ operated here, and they liked to target anyone who looked like a tourist. They were particularly busy around the border and our fixer suggested we crack on to a lodge five hours drive away. Five hours: that meant seven or eight in reality. It would be well past dark before we got there. This was gravel road and the last thing I wanted to be doing was riding it in the darkness.

  We’d been travelling maybe forty-five minutes when Claudio’s suspension exploded. We couldn’t believe it; the shock absorber was new and had only just been fitted in Sudan. The seal went, spraying oil everywhere and reducing rideability to zilch. Fortunately we had spares we’d picked up in Addis, so grabbing tools Charley and I set about replacing it. We got the old one out and the new one fitted inside fifty minutes. Not bad for the side of a dirt road with shiftas looking on from the hills.

  And talking of shiftas it was getting late and there was no way we’d make the lodge before dark. The fixer knew a place, though he didn’t seem delighted about it – but we did have four Kalashnikovs to fall back on.

  We camped in the lee of a rocky outcrop, scattered with thorn brush. By now we were used to being told how dangerous Africa was and we’d come to the conclusion that 90 per cent of what was said was bullshit. But everyone we’d met on the road had told us this area was pretty dodgy. Funny as it was to see a soldier carrying a Kalashnikov, I was glad he was there. Charley and I got the tents up and were thinking about our stash of boil-in-the-bags when the fixer said he was cooking goat for dinner.

  Fair enough, we thought, we’ll join you for goat then: what time shall we say – half-past?

  I had a quick wash and got changed and wandered over to where the soldiers were making a fire. Then we heard it: ‘Baaa, baaa, baaa.’

  The goat was alive and in the back of the truck, not pre-packed in cellophane from some supermarket.

  I decided I would have to watch them slaughter it. I’d never seen an animal killed before but given I eat meat I didn’t think I should turn my back. They took it to a flat stone, held its mouth and quickly slit its throat. Less than a minute and it was gone; I didn’t enjoy the sight, but as I said I felt I ought to watch. It was skinned and butchered expertly, the innards tossed far into the bush so the hyenas would feast tonight. The meat itself was grilled over the fire and we ate it with pancakes. It was fine, I suppose: though I have to admit I didn’t really enjoy it, not after seeing it killed. And, I suppose, given that, I’d have to consider the whole meat eating thing.

  CHARLEY: It’s hard to watch an animal being killed, but I grew up with livestock around all the time. It occurred to me that the almost gentle way our fixer took this little fellow’s life was far more humane than some slaughterhouse where dozens are killed in fear. It was quick and simple and it was African. Families bred their goats to slaughter them: it was the way of life out here and we were following a pattern passed down for generations. We arrived, put up the tents and killed the food we’d eat.

  The campsite was pretty spectacular, with birds and monkeys shrieking from among the rocks. I imagined the kind of silence that would descend if they were disturbed suddenly and it was comforting to have the soldiers with us. The food was good, beautifully butchered, and we wrapped the meat in pancakes and ate it as a goat sandwich.

  In the morning we were off early and heading south-west on decent gravel that shifted from grey to red depending on the amount of clay in the ground. Ewan did really well, riding with his elbows out, soft hands and leaning back as I’d told him. He’d had a hard time in Ethiopia and coped brilliantly, now I got the feeling things would click. Do this for long enough and that’s what happens. Your confidence is up and the whole experience becomes more enjoyable.

  This morning the road was wide red gravel; it blended into the landscape, which was low and stubby, lots of bushes and very few trees. This was the African prairie and it seemed to go on forever.

  We came to the Gabran people’s village of Turbi. We’d read about it, seen it on BBC news and our mood sobered considerably. A clutch of buildings surrounding a sun-baked yard, we parked the bikes in the shade of acacia and took off our helmets. Immediately we were mobbed by children of all ages in pale blue shirts and green shorts. This was the school where two years previously twenty-two children had been massacred. Their head teacher Gabriel came over and we shook hands, told him who we were and that we’d heard about the atrocity.

  He was in his forties, well spoken, and it was obvious he was the pillar around which the community had rebuilt itself. He told us he had no real idea why such things happened, but the disputes over land, pasture and water for animals went back generations.

  It had been six o’clock in the morning, the children in school, when men from the neighbouring Borona clan opened fire.

  ‘I saw men in uniform,’ Gabriel told us. ‘They just started shooting and they were still far away. I shouted to the children. Run. Run. Run.’ He shook his head. ‘The older ones, most of them were nine or ten, they understood the danger. But the young ones, they just stood there.’ He pointed to the square, the open ground between the buildings where the children were playing. ‘They were cut down, slaughtered; the young ones, the babies. Not with guns, with knives, machetes.’

  EWAN: It was horrific, incomprehensible. But I could imagine the scene; bullets flying, the older kids knowing what was happening, but the little totty ones just standing there in bewilderment. Moments later, they were hacked to pieces.

  ‘There was nothing we could do. They just died,’ Gabriel said. ‘They just died while we were watching.’

  I remembered the BBC news reports when it had happened. Incredibly distressing, yet the place seemed to have recovered: clearly this man held the community together. Over eighty people had been killed in total and many of the children were orphans: some of them lived in the school. Gabriel told us that he had a problem getting the money together to feed them but they didn’t want to be farmed out to relatives because they loved school so much. Right then I determined I’d find a way to make sure this man had the money to feed them. It was a promise I made to myself and I wouldn’t forget it when I got back to London.

  We spoke to a boy of about fourteen who’d been working when the gunmen burst in and started firing indiscriminately. Dropping behind the desk he hid for three terrifying hours.

  Another lad rolled up his trouser leg to reveal a hideous scar on his shin. Flesh was missing to the bone, the scarring white and puckered so that it looked as if the leg had exploded from within. In a way it had: this was the exit wound for a bullet that hit behind his knee. After he was downed one of the raiders speared him. We saw a tiny girl with machete scars on her forearms; she couldn’t have been more than three when it happened, her brother c
ut down right in front of her.

  Gabriel took us to the mass graves; eighty-two villagers dead and twenty-two of them children. The marauders stole cattle, goats and donkeys, leaving the survivors with nothing. The graves were marked with beds of dry reeds and on the beds were personal belongings of those who’d been slaughtered. A small wooden barrel, a tin mug painted with flowers. Little children killed with machetes; I found it very, very difficult.

  We headed towards the lodge now, the road pretty fucking gnarly. I’d been trying not to swear so much, for my dad mostly as he really hates swearing. Sorry, Dad: but this was a nightmare, the bikes so heavy it was like driving a bus on two wheels down a gravel track. It was awful, as if I was systematically trying to destroy my motorcycle: fucking washboard shit, shaking the bike to bits. My hands were numb, my feet. I couldn’t even look sideways for fear of hitting something and losing the front completely.

  ‘Charley,’ I said over the radio. ‘Let’s stop for a moment.’

  We took a breather so the blood could find its way back to our hands and feet. ‘Such incredible scenery.’ Charley waved a hand at the vista, ‘but you daren’t look at it in case something goes bang.’ He grinned. He was in his element. ‘Mind you I really like this kind of road, you have to concentrate so hard yet stay loose at the same time: it’s really challenging.’

  ‘Yeah, challenging, right. I like it about as much as I like sticking a needle in my eye.’ I looked up then, scanning the horizon where I could glimpse wildlife far in the distance.

  ‘Look over there, Charley. That’s either giraffe very far away or goats very near.’

  We came to the turning finally; the track that led to the Marsabit Lodge, and it was probably as bad as anything we’d ridden so far, bumpy as hell and thick with sand. I was all over the place.