Next time you go to Frego’s check out the new review, the one that says: “…The Mafioso Pasta was a fantastic Crustfree delight (however the chillies were even worse than the infamous crusted version). Seems like I got my just desserts.”

Rats! This retirement lark is for the birds…well financially at least. In every other respect it’s fabulous. The only challenge is in rewiring the brain to accept, without fear of retribution, that you can do anything you like whenever and wherever you want to. Money permitting.

As I said…money permitting.

I’ve been staring at the ass end of a not-too-hazardous project for some weeks now (oops! months) and gazing over it again as I went to bed last night, I seemed to see hazy dollar signs flickering in the half light of the solar illuminated garden stairway that I have now officially named “Financial Recovery Project #801”.

Step number 1: Site meeting with the Contractor, who also just so happens to be a student in my Quantum Physics e-learning module.

Stephen Whathisface (will remember when I see him!) is a wannbee autodidact, horticultualist in the making and aspirant solar energy consultant. The latter calling came into being after he set up a small cell phone battery charging business at home in one of Nairobi’s less formal settlements and left his younger brother in charge of charging - customers and batteries.

Younger bro’ connected the first client directly to the newly purchased solar panel, left on his bike to go to school and … the house burnt down.

And that’s how Stephen whathisface ended up on my alternative energy, solar, wind and magic e-learning course. It is also how he seemed the perfect chap to do the cement and foundation work while I design a twinkling solar powered bower to cap the garden stairway.

So, bag packed (same as was not stolen in the great mugging of last week), my last crisp dollars in hand, I jumped on a plane to Joburg, crashed in the airport terminal and was up at 4am to do the paperwork for my flight to Gaberone. A Pilatus PC12 (Oh my God! What a plane!) needed a ferry pilot to Botswana for the safari season and I needed to have a site meeting. Not that the stairs are in Botswana, rather it seemed like a good idea to meet the site somewhere else, preferably involving a freebee flight.

Off the ground by 10 to 6 local time and, but for being given the runaround by Joburg ATC, was firmly on the ground (literally, as I did a bit of an off runway landing…) at Khama International an hour and 25 minutes later.

Aldo Traveler Brincat gave me a ride from Khama straight to my site meeting with enough time to arrange a lunch redezvous at Gaberone’s most bland and clean Italian restaurant, the Frego Caffe.

A very absent breakfast and excess adrenalin from the landing turned me into the world’s fastest quantity surveyor and as soon as I had the following list in my hands, I borrowed some lethargic chap’s bicycle and headed off to Frego’s.

The charm of Frego’s is its owner cum chef cum entertainment. Walter P Mitterand swears he’s a thoroughbred Italian but his guise slips a little when he gets noticeably hot under the collar at the sight of anything in a burka. C’est la vie!

Being a tad early, I read the copious reviews stuck to the wall between faded photos of various grinning American presidents.

“You can get your Italian food fix at this indoor/outdoor café. Lunch and dinner is served. The “Mafioso” pizza was a fantastic thin crust delight (however the chillies were a bit too spicy for me). My coffee drinking friends liked the coffee, next time I will try dessert.”

I ended up ordering the Mafioso sans pizza base which caused some confusion for the waitress. My offer to direct the creation got me and camera into the kitchen.

Next time you go to Frego’s check out the new review, the one that says: “…The Mafioso Pasta was a fantastic Crustfree delight (however the chillies were even worse than the infamous crusted version). Seems like I got my just desserts.”

And, that is the happy tale of the Per-Peri Pilot, who with…the following….list in hand, is now back at home in Nairobi.

10 or 12 Concrete blox

ample cement

water to boot

Ballast stones and chippy things

bendy bendy flat bar - 10 metres

2 cheap solar torches

Assorted wire and fittings.

1 Peri-Peri Pilot

“High Flight”

 Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth 
 And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
 Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
 of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
 You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
 High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
 I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
 My eager craft through footless halls of air….

 Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
 I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
 Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
 And, while with silent lifting mind I have trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (9 June 1922 – 11 December 1941)

No Traffic No people…

In the last week, two energies in my life have collided. A dislike for inconsiderate drivers and an equal dislike for agressive people. In Kenya, the two seldom coincide as extra-vehicular folk are generally conservative and well mannered. On the road, however, via a brilliant technique of eyesight avoidance, Kenyan drivers simply squeeze or ease any protruding part of their vehicle into any impossible gap and in a rough and not always successful poker hand attempt to gain a perceived advantage in navigating the jam to work. Traffic Scientists tell us that the best way to cause a traffic blockage is for drivers to change lane in a way that alters the flow velocity of the vehicle mass. A traffic wave moves back along the highway, creating pile-ups long after the original trigger event has disappeared.

If it were not for BBC World service on FM 93.9 I would probably never drive in the traffic here, but occasionally it is necessary. So, with a smile over clenched teeth I swear under my breath, all the while wondering whether the missing drain cover on the freeway roundabout has been changed. This is a particularly interesting case as it is situated in the inside lane of the busiest roundabout in Nairobi exactly where your right tire passes in a crowded rush hour situation. The hole is lightly larger than a Toyota tire and the metal cover has been gone for 4 years.

If you go fast enough, you can sort of fly over the gap, provided everyone in the car leans to the left at precisely the right (or left) moment.

Which is why my thoughts went to flying…and motorcycles. Because two-wheelers live in the middle of the car lane, we tend to avoid the drain of death. Aeries, of course, avoid just about anything, including notably, cars and people. Unlike Nairobi traffic constables, Air Traffic Contollers are either awake and in control or jobless and litigated against.

So it was that, riding happily around the University roundabout yesterday, I nodded my customary greeting to the deathly drain, banked left into Waiyaki Way and, accelerating, pulled gently back on the handlebars. In my dreams, I do this often on public roads and generally soar off into the sky, dodging trees and lamposts. Even better, if I stand on my footepegs and lean forward (mostly due to rough roads) and obscure all sight of the bike I am transformed into a flying creature, a bird of paradise, Amelia Earhart and Lobsang Rampa all in one.

My body, mind and soul unify and I literally soar with joy.

The question is, why take all the risks of motorcycling in order to fly? Surely it is a much better idea to…well…actually…fly!

Most earth bound mortals consider flying aeroplanes to be pretty difficult but in fact….not so. I speak from experience, having done some 10 hours training in a light plane (seems like light years ago). It takes a lot fewer hours training to get a pilot license that a car driver’s certificate and with fewer close calls.

There was one rather perilous incident, I recall. In South Africa, trainee pilots are required to perform a manoevre known as a spin. You throttle down, point the nose up into the air and hang on till the plane literally falls out of the sky, nose down and spinning madly. All you can see is the ground below turning one way or the other. It’s important to know which way is what, as, to recover, you  kick the rudder (ass wiggler) in the opposite direction (none of the other controls work any more) and as soon as things stop circling, gently pull back on the yoke (steering wheel) and ease in the power as you get back to the level. The Americans don’t do this - I think they consider it too risky.

And risky it can be as I discovered the last time I willingly spun my plane. Everything went copybook except for reducing the throttle in the first place. Result - a wildly spinning plane, propelled downwards by a wildly spinning propellor. Luckily for me, a rather attractive and equally competent instructress, who was young enough to not want to plummet, grabbed the throttle, jerking it back, and saying, “hold on!”, pulled the plane out of a shuddering dive. I experienced my first brownout and learnt a vital lesson in aviation safety - never do anything until you have carefully gone through the checklist and never, never do anything just because someone else tells you to without being ready yourself.

The result of all this is that I simply cannot wait to be back in the air, fur-lined bomber jacket and clipon polaroids, a tachymetre wristy and tank full of gas, far, far away from the Nairobi traffic and bad guys bent on wrestling my girlfriend and stealing my 10 year US visa and noise cancelling earphones.

It’s an easy step from biking. Like pilots, us bikers grew up in a 3D world where it is normal to bank into corners and have an initimate relationship with our engines. When we **ck up, we plummet.

A month or two back I decided to air my wings a little and take a ride (mostly on the footpegs) to visit a fine and adventurous chap, Oscar Mann. Now Oscar has a legacy BMW boxer aircooled twin in his shed, but has not been in the saddle for a while. He is recovering from an aeroplane crash. Well, it was more of a plummet … but that is another story.

As free as a bird, feet firmly on the pegs, kidneys in my mouth, I wrestled my small Indian motorcycle across the edges of the Nairobi National Park free from traffic and humans…..well, so I thought. Watch the movie. I written enough!

When I was young all I wanted to do was to travel. I am now old and lucky. I travel a lot.
From the Chaos that we call the Jahm in Nairobi to the turnpikes of Michigan to the GPS lady of Alsace to the alleys of Stonetown, Zanzibar, I delight at every border crossing, sometime on the left and other times, the right, or in Kenya, the pavement.
At the end of every arduous journey should be a good person and a fine meal. In this case it was Prof Willie Michel.
And of course, Ida, for steering us along while I pointed the Canon.

My carpemomenta movie for today is about traffic and how it is chaotically (pun intended) intertwined with where we would like to one day retire.

For some time I have been extolling the virtues of Nairobi as being ‘so much safer than South Africa’. Well, this was put to the test last week. Ida and I decided, after taking one look at the stolid traffic, to rather walk to the museum or beyond where we could get a taxi past the interminable ‘jahm’ (Yes, it can take 3 hours to move 100 metres).

Known as ‘Africa’s Pride’, the new multi-lane Thika Highway terminates in a speedbump proleferated pseudo spaghetti junction build by ubiquitous Chinese engineers from ‘one of the world’s top 225 construction companies’. That means, btw, the 225th best, which probably accounts for the lack or light and fencing between the half completed construction and the septic river passing under the old bridge.

And that is where the ‘Hut of Duckness’ gang choose to hide, like worms of the night, dressed in oversized grey coats and hoodies and armed with an assortment of machetes and black painted baseball clubs.

Idiots! (That’s us).. as we came around the corner, Ida was just remarking to me how Kampala is known to be the safest city in Africa, when Looking Larry, the leader of the gang, popped up from the underworld with a line straight out of one of Luke Molver’s graphic novels: “Is there a problem?”

Clearly there was…I shouted to ida, “RUN!”…and proceded to run up the road, very aware that on my back was everything I travel with…3 passports, laptop, Nokia clever phone, money and most precious of all my noise cancelling earphones and 10 year US visa…(hard to get, trust me).

I was pursued by a grey-coated, well-spoken thuggy with a baseball bat. Ida got the full force of 3 machete wielding terminoids, which meant that she wasn’t going to RUN anywhere…especially snce her kneejerk response is to stay and fight. In South Africa, we watch Rubgy to learn how to pass the bag as fast as possible. Not Ida. She hung on for dear life.

So, there I am, 20 metres up the road with Arnold Swaggerstick waving his basey at my head and me doing the Michael Jackson to avoid him. At the same time, what I can see is Ida being dragged down into the dark depths of the bushy riverbed on her belly, kicking and fighting.

I weight the odds and do a pirouette around Blacky Baseball to insanely try to intervene in what appears to me to be an imminent rape.

Next moment they melt away, down back to the River Styxx. Turns out that the handle on the bag finally broke which explains the apparent abduction theory - she was having a monumental tug-of-war with the three machete brothers grim.

Just around the bend are two policemen harrassing a truck driver. I wave down a landrover with two gracious gentlemen from SA based Standard Charter Bank. They insist there is no use in asking the police for help - we must just go and report it. 

Two days later I joined a Karate class, given by a new senior employee at Internews. I don’t think that I will be fighting fit in the next few weeks but, it sure feels good! And…it is a necessary antidote to be with people who embody all the best values of humanity, easy to find at Internews, Nairobi.

The next day, Ida and I, supported by Kennedy and Willy from Internews scoured the river for the flotsam of the fight.

And we got a lot back…Ida’s precious documents, cards, mementos and Savanah Coffee card were left like a paper trail along the escape route….but her Nokia smartyphone, Adidas and $$s were gone.

Well….I do know where the phone ended up, thanks to some very clever cell phone tech. But first, I have to get my Karate skills up to scratch before Captain Vengeful strikes back. Meantime, I’ll dream about bags of snakes…

Oh, by the way, a friend from Johannesburg commented: “If it happened here, you would not be telling me about it”.

Democracy ain’t for the faint hearted or so we are reminded in a week of political and social brinkmanship. As tempers flare in Washington and the death count rises in Syria, I have to ask….Isn’t it time we realized how truly valuable each life is. In this crazy little film I discover how Kenyans in running shoes teach the world to tango. 

A few years ago, the Karura forest in Nairobi was not a safe place to wander. Now thanks to the efforts of a wide range of people from expat UN types to Corporate Kenya to those Kenyans who just want to preserve Africa at its finest, you and I and a dog named Boo can enjoy what was once the impenetrable refuge of Mau-Mau fighters.

Traffic or the ‘jahm’ in Nairobi is simply totally chaotic. Often when I fly from Kenya to Johannesburg, the flight takes only a little longer than the time spent driving by the person who dropped me at airport. There are however two ameliorating factors: road rage hardly exists in Kenya and BBC World Service is available on 93.9mHz. This means that you can sit back in the traffic, relax and parallel process local and international realities.

Today it’s all about the imminent conressional agreement around the seemingly imminent defaulting by the USA and… the ongoing political crisis in Syria.

Both are cases of supreme brinkmanship, however where apposing parties emerge ‘bruised’ in the US conflict, they lose their lives in the Syrian version.

As Government forces attack Hama in a deadly clash of wills, another 130 lives are claimed lost in the ensuing battle and it is ultimately here that the differences between the two ‘battles of wills’ on different sides of the world manifest.

Politics is a long drawn out poker game with brief tea breaks in between. But somewhere along the line the players agree not to kill each other and sometimes (as in the USA debt game) even join hands for some kind of mutual benefit.

When Obama was elected into office, for many this was the dawn of an era of ‘right action’, of new democratic values and processes. But, Democracy is all about voices for all and a midterm Obama administration has long since packed away the Monopoly board for a well-thumbed poker deck. What is at stake is a restless and fickle nation, many citizens of which are barely clinging to their dreams of a better society for all. When our personal income is affected, when our personal tax bill rises it is all so easy to forget the concept of universal fairness. We lose our compassion rather easily when we think we will go hungry, and in many cases this is not hunger for food,  but for a lifestyle which has become synonymous with the US dream…cheap fuel, constant aircon and being the dominant world power.

It is the addiction to cheap fuel that can be argued is the one of the biggest contributors to the global conflict between world views. The higher the demand for oil the less pressure there is on oil producing states to compromise on autocratic or radical ideologies. There is a proveable inverse relationship between the price of oil and the level of democratic progress in oil rich states. This feeds directly into the support and funding of radicalized religious movements which in turn triggers hyper-expensive US military interventions.

So, whether direct or indirect, the killings continue.

As I was relaxxxxing in our Toyota 4x4 in the jahm I tried to picture some of the 130 plus individual fellow human beings who were alive and well in Hama last Friday morning and now are dead. What about the sadness in the hearts of their loved ones, the escalation of hate their deaths will bring?

Every act of physical violence brings another life closer to the brink, another infinitely wonderful evolutionary creation closer to the long darkness. Yes, in the long night poker games we can justify and understand strategies of limited loss justifying short term death, but never, never can we as individual humans truly bridge this gap when the barrel of the tank is turning to face our own child, lover or friend.

On Saturday 30th July 2011, my partner, Ida, and I, were up and out at first light to join some thousand folk for the annual Karura Forest Cross Country Run in Nairobi. The Karura Forest once was a haven for crime and danger. Now it is a model for the kind of world we dreamt of when we bought that coffee mug emblazoned with ‘Obama for President’.

Ida went for the long haul and completed 16kms in 2 hours. Her bleeding knee from a trip and crash was more a badge of victory than a bloodied sacrifice. If only the world could be a big Karura for a while……..