Mombasa Road Retravelled

by KJ Griffin

  Chapter 12

  It's five a.m. The alarm clock is snarling at me, there's a loud knock on the door, and I am wondering why I always insist on hitting the Mombasa road so damn early in the morning. Even Little Stevie is still comatose and snoring in the bed next to me, which means it must be seriously bloody early.

  Years back this ride always filled me with a special buzz - the thrill of seeing in the dawn somewhere over the acacia-lined Athi plains, at the moment when the first shards of sunlight puncture the grey gloom enshrouding this classic savannah country with golden shafts.

  But the passions of youth are ever-harder to regenerate these days, and it's more from a sense of duty to things past than the thrill of anticipation about what lies ahead that I drag myself from the Norfolk's starched sheets and open the door to the liveried porter, who stands with a deep, baritone Jambo Bwana! and a steaming jug of Kenya coffee, accompanied by fruit and hot rolls.

  Little Stevie rises quickly from the bed, impatiently waiting for me to pour him coffee and juice and cut his mango and pineapple into cubes of perfect symmetry and proportion (not even the five-star Norfolk can accomplish this feat to satisfaction).

  He searches the sports channels in the hope of finding highlights from last night's Champions League games and before long hits the jackpot on an Asian channel.

  'That was close last night, wasn't it son?' I say slurping my coffee.

  Suddenly I realize there's an unexpected double entendre in what I've just said, but I can bet on Little Stevie to think football, not little Janet.

  '1-0 the right way is still the right way, Dad,' he replies, regurgitating one of my stalest old maxims.

  And that brings back memories of Kiwi John's animated phone call at full time last night. He held up his mobile so I could hear the pandemonium breaking out all over Annie Oakley's just after the final whistle, when a very hesitant Old Lady had hung on to the narrowest of victories over Olympique Lyonnais, a victory which half of Kenya seemed to have a share in thanks to me and Little Stevie. Only Julius Chege sounded anything less than ecstatic. He had a CNN camera crew in tow, half of Kenya in raptures with the Juventus win, but the main act had vanished into the night.

  We eat and drink quickly. It seems that Little Stevie is back to normal this morning and this safari routine is evidently popular with him. We have to disappoint two porters by insisting on carrying our own rucksacks to the secure car park (liveried porters carrying battered rucksacks for two bikers in leathers would be a little too bizarre even for Kenya) but I give them each a large enough, unearned tip and that more than compensates for their disappointment.

  While I'm settling the bill at reception we find Stevie's running partner, Farah, waiting for us like a neglected greyhound we thought was just for Christmas and not for life. Little Stevie asks tentatively about the chance of a run but without much conviction, so he doesn't grumble when I give Farah enough money for the bus fare to Mombasa and say we'll see him there.

  By five-thirty I'm kick-starting the Africa Twin into life for a pre-dawn dash into the murk of the Mombasa road. This is heavy nostalgia. On any number of occasions twenty-something years back my brother Steve was kicking the same kick-starter on the same bike at the same hour for the same ride. And sometime not long after that, my dear little brother had been killed and it would have been me taking my turn on this machine.

  Now it's cold, dark and dangerous as we speed along Uhuru Highway towards the Mombasa road. At first there aren't many vehicles about, just as you would expect at this hour, and most of those that are on the road are lorries or matatu minibuses, but curiously, and seemingly from nowhere, the traffic starts to thicken. We can't see the lorries' clouds of diesel smoke in the dark, but I've got my own pollution-measuring device sitting right behind me, and he wriggles dangerously on the saddle every time we hit a dense patch diesel exhaust.

  Even after the Jomo Kenyatta Airport turn-off there's still more traffic than I had wished for, but I'm taking it easy in the gloom and overtake sparingly, and only then because that's safer than following the moron in front.

  In the good old days, the airport seemed to mark the edge of so-called civilization and once past it, you were almost immediately confronted by herds of zebra, limitless tracts of burnt grass stuffed with acacia trees and a sense of uplift. These days, it's all built up almost all the way to the faceless satellite town of Athi River, so I'm glad we're escaping all this section in the dark.

  After the double relief of last night's nail-biting win in Turin followed by Little Stevie's return to normality in the quiet and comfort of the Norfolk, I took my battered copy of the old Mombasa Road out of my backpack late last night and re-read the section describing one of the rides I made down here all those years ago:

  The road straightened and improved across the undulating Athi plains. This was probably the area where Stevie had been shot, according to the description Baragoi had given Brian. From the crests of some of the rises, sweeping vistas of savannah stretched out limitlessly. And yet the land was not anything like as virginal and empty as Brian had hoped to find. Roadside fences fished up shoals of litter, and the odd Coca Cola bottle proclaimed the advent of the world he loathed with secret confusion - the world of bond dealers, PCs, satellite television and McDonalds.

  Speeding across the open country Brian didn't know if he felt ecstasy, sadness, or happiness; it was good enough just to be feeling anything, watch the numbness in his soul fly off into the wind like a polluted cocoon. He was starting to feel again, feel the love of life and the anger at what was happening to the world around him. Back in London, he had forgotten all that. Punk rock was dead and the world was sipping bottles of imported designer lager on its grave. The System was firmly in control, and the last rebels had died out with Sid Vicious and Scargill's miners. Millenium man was a far tamer beast. Big Brother wasn't just watching you: he had fifty CCTV cameras trained on your every self-doubt and could airbrush your image into every terrorist plot the state had ever dreamt up.

  Did I ever feel all that? Maybe. And I know I'm in for a giant kick in the face when we pass the remains of Safari City Themeworld about a hundred miles on. But right now I just can't get too worked about all that. Moral outrage needs a Viagra pill to get going at my age!

  Little Stevie pats my shoulder twice and I follow the direction of his finger to my left. As the dawn's fingertips prise open the darkness on our left, right on cue you can just make out the sweep of a couple of giraffe necks, silhouetted against the grainy, grey sky.

  That's all the distraction it takes to make the bike lurch dangerously to one side, but the awkward wobble only makes us giggle, first Little Stevie, then me. The traffic has evaporated too and there's a feeling of elation that explodes tumultuously from somewhere deep inside as the first shower of golden sunlight now bursts forth with confident glory. I screw back the throttle. We're roaring through open country now.

  The road drops, the temperature rises, the bush thickens, and suddenly it's all just how it used to be. We flash through a couple of one-street trucker towns: Simba, Sultan Hamud, Emali. Long lines of goats and cattle patrol the edges of the crumbling highway, then at the top of a rise, Little Stevie's hand simply pummels into the small of my back and I'm forced to pull over:

  'Look, Dad! Kilimanjaro!'

  It's textbook safari stuff, but I can still feel a little of my son's awe as the numinous, snow-crested summit of Mawenzi smiles at us shyly like an exotic beauty who just stepped out of the shower and forgot to put a towel round her waist.

  'Mount Kilimanjaro, 19,340 feet. The tallest mountain in Africa,' Little Stevie mutters, and you've guessed it, he's not reading from a guidebook either!

  'Beautiful, isn't it?' I murmur, and I'm not just thinking of the mountain alone, but the vibe of the moment too.

  'Beautiful,' Little Stevie repeats, and we both sit silently for a few minutes, while the low drone of the engine's idle mirrors our inner content. Until, that is, Little Stevie d
rops another of his bombshells:

  'Yasmiin is beautiful too, Dad.'

  I need some time to chew this one over, so I cut the engine and dismount, removing my helmet and smoothing back my hair to bask in the warmth a drop in altitude has already brought. Little Stevie copies me precisely:

  'More beautiful than Janet?' I ask hesitantly, hoping the mention of poor Janet's name doesn't provoke a reaction. Little Stevie takes his time over my question, as if he's been comparing the form of two similar sides from different leagues, like Udinese against Bayer Leverkusen.

  'More beautiful than Janet, Dad,' he mutters finally.

  'More beautiful than Almas too?' I probe, as a coast-bound, early morning bus rushes past and toots triumphantly at us.

  'More beautiful than Almas too,' he answers resolutely.

  'Come on, let's hit the road,' I sigh, for I don't see where this talk can go and I'm loathe to put ideas about Yasmiin into Little Stevie's head.

  'But she likes you, Dad,' Little Stevie adds, as we're putting our helmets back on.

  This time I really am startled:

  'What makes you think that, son?'

  'I've seen her looking at you, Dad, when she doesn't think you're paying attention.'

  Now I'm doubly shocked:

  'Since when have you been able to work things like that out, Stevie?'

  He shrugs:

  'Don't know. Just do. I always watch, Dad, when you are talking to some people, women mostly, and I don't want you to like them too much. Not more than me.'

  'Jesus!' I sigh, kicking the bike awake. And that keeps me pondering for some miles ahead as the sun climbs higher and we move into increasingly warmer and drier country, where Akamba people pop out from behind thorn bushes to tout pots of honey in front of us, and where the dense bush screams with the pulsations of myriads of insects, who have all seemingly been given the day off and have nothing better to do than shout out their good fortune from every thorn brake and termite mound.

  And then the road widens into a derelict dual carriageway stretch of emaciated tarmac and I steel myself for what will shortly confront us when he hit the entrance to the now-defunct Safari City Themeworld, one of those grotesque, greed-fuelled schemes that fell straight off the shelf and smashed into a billion poisonous pieces on the concrete floor of African development, doing for the adjacent Amboseli National Park what the French, British and Yanks did for coral reefs on remote atolls in the Pacific back in the fifties and sixties, when everyone wanted a hydrogen bomb for Christmas.

  A pair of giant, replica elephant tusks crosses over the entrance to the turning on the right that was supposed to carry legions of forex-toting tourists to the entertainment complexes of Safari City. Fittingly, one of the plastic tusks is broken at the top and it sags limp and forlorn six feet above our heads. Tusks? If I remember correctly, this feature was originally supposed to be a giant set of lion's jaws.

  I pull over into the acres of space that was to have been a giant car park. Fortunately, the development syndicate ran out of money before it got to pouring tarmac over this little eyesore, so here natural grassland is re-invading. But it doesn't compensate for the giant gashes of red earth that fester like untreated sores all around. Stacks of concrete blocks and piles of gravel have been dumped and abandoned willy-nilly, while trees have been scythed down in every direction.

  'What happened here?' Little Stevie asks.

  We've left the bike now and I peel off my jacket and T-shirt to stride bare-chested towards the ruin of the old Hunter's Lodge service station and hotel. Little Stevie inevitably copies me.

  'It was a stupid, stupid idea that some greedy people with connections in government tried to pull off,' I sigh.

  'What idea?' Little Stevie persists.

  I re-read this section too last night in the original Mombasa Road in preparation for just this moment, so I sit down on a segment of dilapidated wall, overlooking the hippo pool that is now stagnant and devoid of hippos, pull the tattered old book from my rucksack and quote from source:

  To one side of the old service station, a large acreage of acacia thicket and long-grass was earmarked for clearance, destined for conversion into a giant car park. The Hunter's Lodge service station itself would be completely demolished, to be recreated along the lines of those multi-purpose megastations Munisi had admired along the highways of Europe and the States.

  The former Hunter's Lodge Hotel was to be bulldozed in favour of an impressive, three-storey casino complex: game machines downstairs for the riffraff; tables and executive suites adding a touch of class upstairs.

  Only the hippo pool would remain, expanded ten times to form a mini-waterworld, which diners in the luxury terrace restaurant could admire as they restored themselves following their exertions at the tables. The backs of the hippos in the pool Munisi had earmarked to accommodate advertising space. He would wrestle later with the problem of preventing the creatures from staying submerged underwater for so long, thereby wasting valuable commercial 'air' time.

  The Sanctuary gates were to be located immediately behind the Safari City Shopping Centre, a couple of hundred yards down the road to the south of the casino complex. Here, after frenzied spending sprees in the Safari Shopping Centre, day-trippers would be able to purchase tickets for the steam-train ride that would ferry them along the ten-kilometer journey to the fabulous Safari City.

  In the advanced stages of the project, Munisi had elaborate plans to bulldoze out sections of savannah and have the train pass through different theme worlds: a lost city; a desert oasis, replete with camels and raiding Bedouin attacking the train; a covered jungle section in the form of a huge hothouse; Masai manyattas with jumping moran; and finally, a splendid, covered moonscape with astronauts and inter-galactic combat.

  The gates of the railway entrance to Safari City Sanctuary would be a set of massive, plastic lion's jaws, giving the visitor the impression of being swallowed by raw nature, which, it was hoped, would still lurk somewhere in the vicinity. An electric fence would encompass the pentagonal city, so that the crowds could look out at the animals without having the inconvenience of watching their children swiped by passing lion, as the brats waited in line for Coca Cola, hamburgers and chips. But as all the real entertainment was largely inside the city anyway, it was hoped that the ugly electric monstrosity would go largely unnoticed.

  The city itself would rise three storeys high, each tier devoted to a different theme. The ground floor featured a boat ride around the pentagonal perimeter. This would include simulated rapids, whirlpools and caverns, out of which all manner of frightening robotic animals would yelp and dart. The culmination of the journey would deposit the awestruck traveller at a pebbled beach, sequestered at the foot of a mighty waterfall. From here the swarms of visitors would rush to waterslides and open-air swimming pools.

  Franchises for fast-food joints, sit-down restaurants and bars were set to dominate the first floor, cunningly exploiting the commercial potential of a trapped market of nature lovers. Up above, on the topmost tubular tier, another circular train ride would ferry the visitor around an open-air safari world, where the "Big Five," and other popular animals, brought to life in plastic duplicate, would frequent a stretch of Astroturf savannah more reliably than they were wont to do outside in the flesh. Disney characters, too, would populate the highest level, and there would also be plenty of opportunity for less easily satisfied families to shoot at all the animals they had just seen in virtual reality.

  On the crest of a gentle hill, three miles to the south of Safari City, lay the proposed site for the Safari City Resort Lodge, right on top of an unsuspecting Masai manyatta. The more exclusive jet setters, film stars and rock singers would be well catered for in this little citadel of luxury, looking westwards across flat, open bush all the way towards Amboseli, or southwards towards the scenic Chyulu Hills. A marble mini-amphitheatre and a high-stakes foreign currency casino were to be the principal bait for the lucrative market of wealthy
Asian businessmen, whose flagging erections, propped up by illicit aphrodisiacs, could be directed at a deluxe brothel annexe.

  I've ranted on too long. Little Stevie looks bored with my reading and starts to kick half a brick against the stone wall.

  'And they needed Uncle Steve's land here to put it all together,' I add as Little Stevie walks away.

  That brings him back:

  'Uncle Steve?' he asks.

  I nod:

  'That's right, Uncle Steve owned some land just a few miles down the track that passes through those tusks.'

  The death of my little brother remains something of a taboo subject with Little Stevie, and I can sense he doesn't want to hear anything that might contaminate his ears with the tale of his uncle's murder.

  So instead, we probe further inside the ruins of the former Hunter's Lodge and while we nose around I notice we have become surrounded by a quite a large gathering of locals. They are silent and their stares hurt, as they always do when they're coming from the eyes of the genuinely destitute.

  Their misery intrudes on the slow-burning righteous anger I've kept inside for all these years. But to be honest, now that I'm finally back here, I don't feel anything like as angry as I should. Who can really care so much any more? Such devastation passes for a just a normal day's work to the logging companies of the Amazon or the Indonesian rainforests.

  The sunlight feels good on the bare skin of my back, so I sit here amid the rubble some more and just stare back at the eyes which are all trained on me. A few paces further off, Little Stevie resumes his brick kicking.

  Gradually, however, I begin to feel the shame of parading my toned and muscular bare torso amid a group of locals who are starting to grow pot bellies. There's no mention of Football Kenya down here in the thick thorn scrub of west Tsavo, and though I'm relieved to have a day off from being Cult Idol of Kenya, it looks like the football cash has been sorely missed. The UN needs a good guerilla war and mass migration before it delivers to such places: that perverse organisation doesn't do plain and simple homegrown misery.

  So it's up to me again. But this time I go direct without the football and just pull out some large notes from the zip pocket of my bike leathers and hand these out one by one to the silent starers.

  The first old lady is so startled at the appearance of a one thousand shilling note that at first she doesn't want to take it. A few seconds go by before she finally stretches out cupped hands and whispers 'asante sana,' real quiet, like she's counting and rationing the energy output of every syllable. As her eyes meet mine, I'm rewarded with such a beautiful smile in her gnarled and wrinkled face that I have to turn my watery eyes away and cast a glance at Little Stevie, who's performing checks on the bike.

  The others follow in turn and we go through the same ritual twenty times over. By the end of it all, I'm drained. These people deserve so much better, but down here in Akamba land, Father Christmas only comes once in a lifetime, if at all. The rest of the time, he and all his northern mates are turning up the heat on their patio heaters and filling up the sky with CO2, which drives the El Ni?o engine, hastening the conversion of this arid bush to ever more desolate semi-desert.

  I sit for some time on an old stone in the hot sun long after all the empty hands have received their cash. Eventually Little Stevie rejoins me, pulling out a new exercise book he has been cramming with recent football scores, and I listen to him mumble through a list of old Spanish Primera Liga games that sound like they were played while we were in Meru. It's a calmly reassuring moment snatched from a world in accelerating decline, so I savour its balm for a while longer before our tranquility is shattered by the onrush of a Mombasa-bound bus, which roars to a halt right in front of us, blaring its klaxon for good measure, as if it hadn't already made way too much noise.

  The door shoots open and a figure steps out, rushing straight towards me.

  I recognize the tattered Subaru Rally Team baseball cap and the neat-pressed jeans from a distance. Always smart and elegant, Fingers masquerades, as ever, as the sort of bloke your mum wishes your sister would bring home for tea. And behind him, shifty eyes scanning the five thousand I've just fed and a loud Boston Red Sox t-shirt across a large chest, Kevin looks stern and serious as ever.

  'Little Stevie!' he shouts, and sure enough, Little Stevie looks up from the bike and rushes over to grapple Kevin with the intricacies of his high-five routine. Sadly there's no market available on Betfair to back my boy in remembering all this convoluted fandango, because Little Stevie soon looks like he's got it better memorized than Kevin himself.

  Big Evans Majengwa watches the pair of them in delight and chortles loudly to himself, while his giant handshake squeezes the blood from the veins in my hand.

  By the time I recover from Big Evans Majengwa's hand-crush, I realize that more and more passengers are streaming from the Mombasa bus, most of them shouting Mr Brian! or Quiet Boy! our way. The bus driver resumes his maniacal horn tooting too and doesn't want to stop till I wave his way.

  'What's all this?' I ask Fingers, like I didn't already know.

  'All of them Football Kenya,' he grins. 'We are coming with you to Mombasa!'

  'To do what?'

  'To stay with you and Little Stevie! Now we have money for holidays, just like you wazungu!'

  There's a lot of laughter all round at that comment, and the general hilarity sparks Big Evans Majengwa off on an earsplitting thunderclap of his own.

  We all muck around for a while with a football that one of the passengers has brought from the bus, all that is except for Little Stevie, who's resenting the intrusion and has opened up a comfort book over where the bike is resting in the shade of an acacia tree. But soon we're all too hot for football and I wander over to Little Stevie and let him get the gear on and kick-start the bike.

  He's happy enough doing that to abandon his litany of this-time-last year's scores from the French Championnat. The crowd cheers when the meaty, 750 cc engine finally roars into life, at which point Kevin and Fingers draw me to one side under the cover of some thick thorn scrub.

  'More news about your coastal bibi, Mr Brian.'

  'Yasmiin?'

  They both nod.

  'Go on.'

  'She is the daughter of Sheikh Hamza Nassir of Lamu.'

  'So?'

  Kevin takes over, his shifty eyes seemingly probing for spies in the thorn bushes:

  'Two years ago, Mr Brian, Sheikh Nassir made all his people of Lamu town to protest against Pwani Oil when the oil company was buying too much land in Lamu. People were suffering too much. They lost their land, they lost their homes. People were left with nothing. Sheikh Nassir, he took their anger and he threw it in the face of Pwani Oil.'

  Now Fingers cuts back in:

  'There were big riots. The security company, Africa Secure, run by your good friends Mr Victor Hanson and Mr Gregory Aspinall-Watt, they called in the GSU. Together Africa Secure and those bloodthirsty GSU soldiers, they killed six people in Lamu town. Also Sheikh Nassir was arrested too.'

  'And?' I ask, looking anxiously to my right, where Little Stevie is now sitting on the saddle in helmet and leathers and is churning the throttle to loud cheers from the bus passengers.

  'The Sheikh died in prison,' Kevin whispers almost inaudibly above the rattle of the engine. 'People say Africa Secure made sure the Sheikh never came out of prison. They say they murdered him.'

  I am forced now by Little Stevie's antics to put my own helmet on and rejoin my son on the bike before he takes it for a spin on his own.

  Fingers and Kevin follow.

  'So that was Yasmiin's dad?' I ask.

  They nod.

  'Wow!' I murmur, more to myself than to them, 'Whatever are you up to, beautiful Yasmiin?'

  But there's no time to speculate just yet, or Little Stevie will be riding to Mombasa without me. So instead, I shake hands with Fingers and Kevin and tell them where to find us at the coast, but then again, they would soon have worked th
at out by themselves.

  The crowd cheers when I jump on the bike, and the contact of my bum with the saddle seems to inspire the bus driver to resume his inane horn tooting. But my mind's on something else: I know what I'll be mulling over on those long arid miles past Tsavo to Mombasa.

  It's one of my favourite stretches this between the old Hunter's Lodge and Voi. Despite the corrugations in the tarmac that hide the odd trench-like pothole, I'm able to keep the speed up fast enough to soften the sting in the burgeoning heat. From the crests of the steadily undulating road, immense vistas pan out sumptuously all around us, brimming with spiky baobabs, nosy baboons and distant hills, whose orange lips are lined with unlikely arrangements of giant, granite boulders. Then there's a succession of satisfied taps on my left shoulder when Little Stevie spots giraffe, zebra or antelope.

  We're connected now, Little Stevie and me, in that way we have that needs no words, and I force myself to take time out and just savour the ride with him for a while, before the bush thickens once again just before Voi and I let my mind turn towards Yasmiin.

  So now I know now why she almost spat the words 'He's not my boyfriend!' in my face when I quizzed her about Vic Hanson. Of course not. But why have you been waiting so long before sticking the knife between his ribs, Yasmiin?

  And then there are other thoughts, perhaps more disturbing. I can easily guess now what's in the packet that Yasmiin has asked me to bring up from Mombasa, and at least now it's very clear, Yasmiin, why you don't want to be caught with such an item at a police checkpoint.

  But if Vic's just a revenge story waiting to happen, where does that leave you and me, Yasmiin? Could I? Should I? Nearly twice your age and with the illness still inexorably eating at my guts? That was five to midnight sounding on my body clock when I collapsed in Meru and Little Stevie gave me his own version of the last rites chanted in last year's Europa League scores. There's still so much to do with Football Kenya and with Dismas. No, there can't be time for you too, sweet Yasmiin, even if you want me to find it.

  Those coast buses don't hang around, and even with the Africa Twin roaring at a meaty seventy mph over crumbling tarmac, there's an explosion of hooting, a flashing of lights in my mirrors and a cacophony of shouts out of the window as all our mates packed into the bus with Coast Telemokoluwe on its sides overtakes first us and then a pick-up truck, and all this right in the middle of a sharp incline.

  I give them a wave and a thumbs-up and guess the driver has some sort of sat nav connection with the Almighty himself that's telling him there's nothing just about to come speeding over the crest of the hill ahead of us and right into his front bumper.

  At Voi we fill up and slurp a quick coffee amid crowds of tourists in transit between game lodge and beach hotel.

  'Who do you support, mate?' one pudgy Brit in the full safari gear asks in an Essex accent, overhearing our intermittent football chat. Little Stevie cups his ears and turns vehemently away.

  'What's up with you, sunshine?' the man laughs. 'Not a Chelsea fan are you?'

  That would normally be the end, but this time Little Stevie turns unexpectedly to face the cheery Essex chappie:

  'You're fat and your breath smells!'

  The poor fellow is speechless and looks to me for confirmation, but all I can do is smirk and shrug my shoulders:

  'Sorry mate, but I guess he's right! Come on, Little Stevie, it's time to go.'

  It takes the poor bloke some time to recover, but I've already kicked the engine into life before I hear his stifled return of abuse.

  It's thick thorn bush this side of Tsavo. Nothing much to see on either side of the road, just impenetrable scrub for mile after mile. The screaming hum of insects and the cloying clasp of the heat-haze eventually become too great to bear and I am forced to give in to Little Stevie's sign-language moaning, done in taps on my knee. So we pull over and remove helmets.

  And isn't that so much better! With the wind straightening out our sweaty hair, we cruise through the old Taru desert, a wilderness of thinner and more emaciated dry thorn scrub. Long straight sections of tarmac tempt me to pull back the throttle ever harder, but I've got a very precious passenger riding helmetless behind me, so I must be careful.

  Before long we're caught in convoys of Combi vans that ferry tourists between the game lodges and the coastal hotels; Little Stevie's fat, halitose mate is probably inside one of them, mouthing bad-breathed insults our way.

  And soon, the landscape becomes suddenly lusher, while verdant hilltops are dotted by the first palm trees. The air grows even heavier too, and the surge in humidity seems to be the cue for the tarmac to deteriorate even further in measured proportion. At roadside towns policemen are manning checkpoints with sullen apathy. Congolese Lingala and soukous rhythms screech out from tinny radios, but despite the music, no one's dancing in the street.

  There's a dated, nonchalant charm to Mombasa town that I've always loved. The buildings sulk in chipped plaster and rain-grey whitewash. The pavements teem with commerce: hawkers of coloured cloth mingle with vendors of peanuts and papers. It is a measure of the city's cosmopolitan mix that hoardings for Tusker lager sit comfortably side by side with billboards proclaiming 'Allah is Great' and 'Read Koran.'

  But we're just passing through all this for now, heading south of Mombasa island to a quiet place I know of, which Kiwi John says has survived all the ethnic unrest that so devastated the coastal region in sporadic orgies of violence over the recent past.

  Little Stevie finds the short Likoni ferry crossing to the south coast a trial of heat and sweaty bodies. What's worse, the captain's intermittent shouting across a crackling tannoy has my son holding his hands over his ears for noise control. People start to stare at Little Stevie for that; they're good at staring in Kenya! At least nobody's recognised us, though. The anonymity is welcome, and I'm glad Fingers, Kevin and the crew haven't caught up with us just yet either.

  It's mid-afternoon by the time we reach the imaginatively named Sand Island bandas, which I had Luxmi call ahead and book for us before we left. I am exhausted from the day's ride and my shoulders are throbbing. Little Stevie is saddle-sore too and shifting irritably from buttock to buttock down the bumpy turn off from the main road. But at the end of the dirt track, just as we fill our nostrils with the first welcome drafts of seasonal Kusi winds blowing in from the open ocean, I see that we're not alone.

  Anything but. The place is crawling with police!

  We pass a couple of the blue cars parked up alongside the main reception and then a black Mercedes Benz. It's the retinue of a government minister, and before I've switched off the engine, the minister himself emerges from the shade of the verandah.

  Always gawky to look at, Dismas has gone comically semi-bald in the twenty years since we last met. A glistening monk's halo has emerged centre-stage on his scalp, fringed at the circumference by thick tufts of wiry hair, which only serve to amplify in a surfeit of farce the awkwardness of his gap-toothed, thin and lanky frame.

  'Brian!' Dismas grins bashfully, walking hesitantly towards me and Little Stevie like I'm the big shot politico and he's the lowlife vagabond:

  'Brian! It's been a long, long time, bwana!'