A costly trip
Pat Yale
Pat spent several years selling holidays before abandoning sensible careerdom to mix teaching with extensive travel in Europe, Asia, and Central and South America. On one occasion she spent eight months travelling alone across Africa. Now a full-time writer, Pat has worked on Lonely Planet’s Ireland, Turkey, Britain and London guides. She has lived in London, Cambridge, Cirencester and Bristol, and currently resides in Turkey.
I could tell that something was wrong even before I opened my eyes. The ominous silence surrounding me was broken by a rhythmic swishing sound. For a moment I had no idea where I was. After all, in four months on the road there had been so many different beds.
I snapped open my eyes and hastily closed them again. What they had taken in was just too embarrassing: there I was, lying in solitary splendour on the floor of Nairobi Central Station with no other passengers in sight, just a lone sweeper with his twig broom working his way around the hall and studiously ignoring this single white female spread-eagled on her sleeping bag, her backpack for a pillow.
I glanced at my watch. Six o’clock. Just four hours earlier the scene had been very different when I’d crawled off the night train from Western Kenya with what looked like half of Nairobi. Then, apparently, no-one had had a home to go to. I’d watched my fellow passengers confidently unrolling blankets on the floor and preparing to bed down for the night, and hadn’t thought twice about joining them. With mugging a known hazard of visiting Nairobi, arriving post-midnight without a bed to call my own was inviting trouble. How much more sensible to join this embryo squatter city and wait until daylight to brave the streets.
Now, it seemed, I’d slept through the cacophony of a massed departure. It was beyond credulity. Surely nobody could sleep that deeply.
I jumped up and gathered my belongings, averting my eyes from the sweeper. Memories flooded back. Nakuru in the Rift Valley. The flamingos goose-stepping along the shores of the lake. But there had been a hefty price to pay for that glorious sight: a cell-like hotel room where mosquitoes hummed incessantly, defying me to lower my eyelids lest they descend at once and bite. No sleep then, and not much on the rackety old train to Nairobi either.
I stood up, ready to heft my backpack onto my shoulders and exit casually with the air of one who habitually crashes out alone on station floors. But lo and behold a blister had sprouted on my upper arm, a bulging, sulphurous thing just where the strap of my pack should have fitted. I stared at it in disbelief. I knew it hadn’t been there yesterday, so where could it have sprung from? Even with two sleepless nights behind me, surely I couldn’t have been so comatose as to not feel a passer-by dropping their cigarette end on me?
To put my backpack on properly now would be to risk a messy accident. I cast a sly glance at the sweeper but he had better things to worry about than my antics. I slung my pack over one shoulder and slunk out of the station in search of the Iqbal Hotel.
‘Yes, yes, we have a room.’ The receptionist at the Iqbal was all smiles. ‘Come this way please.’
Up went the backpack over one shoulder again as I set off in pursuit. Up the stairs we went and along a corridor. It was still early, and quite dark once we moved away from the pool of light in the hall.
The receptionist veered to the right. I hurried after him, but in the dim light I failed to see the three steps separating us. Seconds later I was sprawling on the floor once again as the sixteen kilos of my backpack swung down and round to land with a thud on my right wrist.
There followed a fleeting second of false hope. I’d once made the mistake of slamming my finger in an old-fashioned train door. Removing it gingerly, I’d anticipated an instantaneous belt of pain. For a brief instant none came, as the message relayed itself from finger to brain and back again. Then, wham, just as the finger had burst into furious, agonised throbbing, so now my wrist started to shriek with pain.
I picked myself up quickly, gulping back tears. The receptionist rushed to help. ‘Are you all right? Let me take your bag,’ he said with delightfully mistimed gallantry.
‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ I mumbled, like a high-street shopper tripped by a loose paving stone who gathers up the broken eggs and spilt milk whilst simultaneously trying to pull together her shattered dignity and repel those rushing to offer assistance.
Safely in my room, I slumped on the bed, gasping in agony and biting back tears. Pain tore at my wrist and ripped up my arm. The room swam in and out of focus. Never mind, I comforted myself deliriously. Broken bones don’t hurt. You must have sprained it.
Where I, a veteran of a St John’s Ambulance Brigade first aid unit, had acquired this crazy notion remains a mystery. I closed my eyes and a miraculous gift for sleeping whenever and wherever permitted merciful oblivion to wash over me again.
Half an hour later the receptionist was tapping at the door, full of human concern for his fallen guest. Dredged back from sleep, I registered the dismal fact that the pain hadn’t abated one iota.
‘I’m fine,’ I yelled through the door. A chemist, a chemist, I thought. What I need is an elastic bandage.
Outside, Nairobi was waking up to a new day. Street peddlers were staking out their plots, hawking woven baskets with thick leather straps and a selection of ebony giraffes and heads with elongated earlobes. There was a handy pharmacy nearby. For a few shillings I bought a bandage and wound it tightly round my wrist. The pain eased off and so, at once, did any nagging concern about its source.
In mid-May the heat and humidity of Nairobi was intense; my arm sweated wretchedly beneath its casing. It was hard enough to generate the energy to move away from a fan, even without the dull ache that followed me around. Now I could barely bring myself to move from my bed. The furthest I ventured was to the blissful cool of the British Council library, where even the distraction of the throbbing couldn’t prevent my eyes homing in on Rob Papini. Rob was big, tall and clad in baggy white Sudanese trousers perfect for the soggy heat. He wore his glasses suspended on string round his neck like an aged aunt and barely looked up from his book to catch this wreck of a traveller, grubby, dejected and afraid to move her arm, eyeing him surreptitiously over her copy of the Guardian.
On day three I pulled myself together to explore the covered market and admire the piles of tropical fruit interspersed with yet more ebony giraffes and outsize earlobes. It was late in the day before I made it back to the Iqbal and there, in the café, sat Rob, staring into space over a cup of brick-red tea.
On autopilot I steered my way to his table and sat down. He eyed me warily but lust had washed away my inhibitions. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pick up a cup or wield a knife. Nor was it easy to fancy myself a femme fatale with one arm swaddled like a mummy. We shared a bottle of wine which set woozy romantic fantasies racing round my brain. Rob had mastered the Jarvis Cocker trick of managing to look both nerdily old-fashioned and coolly trendy at the same time. Staring into his alluringly myopic eyes had the soothing effect that two days of bed rest had so singularly failed to produce. Thus it was that I forgot to use my left hand when picking up a glass to toast our trip. The gasp of pain provoked by this simple mistake was enough to bring me crashing back to earth.
‘Are you sure it’s just sprained?’ Rob ventured. ‘Maybe it’s broken.’
Gloomily I unwrapped the wrist. Thick weals of purple glowered up at me.
‘Ahhh,’ was all I could think of to say.
The next morning I decided to do what I should have done on day one and seek expert opinion. A bus trundling along the high street had ‘Kenyatta Hospital’ on the front, so I hopped aboard.
The hospital was set in rolling grassland on a hillside on the outskirts of town. Casualty was as jammed to overflowing as on any Saturday night at home and I joined a miserable line-up of cuts, bruises and broken bones. A nurse in crisp white uniform took down my name; it was all comfortingly familiar. Only one detail jolted me into remembering just how many thousands of miles away from the National Health Service I actually was: two hefty men stood by the door armed with batons to ward off would-be queue-jumpers.
An Indian doctor inspected my wrist, tut-tutted at the weals, X-rayed it and confirmed what by now was blindingly obvious – I’d fractured it in the fall. Off I went to the plaster-cast department to be moulded into rigidity. The doctor grinned at me. ‘Come back in three weeks,’ he laughed. ‘Keep your arm steady. Don’t do anything like this,’ and he wiggled his own arm up and down in the air in imitation of some weird sexual perversion or the more mundane battering likely to be endured by a traveller on one of Kenya’s back roads.
Waiting for the bus back to town with my right arm strapped across my chest, I met a diminutive, fine-framed young man with his left arm strapped across his chest and a lugubrious expression plastered onto his face. ‘I’m a jockey for the Kenya Jockey Club,’ he answered my dutiful query. ‘My horse threw me.’
‘Will it be all right?’ I asked, knowing even less about jockeying than I did about broken bones.
‘I don’t know.’ His expression grew yet more cloudy. ‘If it isn’t, I won’t be able to work again.’
I’d been worrying that my plans to visit the paradise island of Lamu would have to be put on ice in accordance with the doctor’s injunction. But Jani’s plight was real, mine mere play acting. I mumbled the sort of pointless pleasantries such situations seem to demand: it’ll be all right, I’m sure you’ll be riding again in weeks – these from a woman who had self-diagnosed her own broken wrist as a sprain.
We rattled back to town, holding our defective limbs as stiffly still as we could while keeping a wary eye out for pickpockets. ‘Let’s go for lunch,’ I suggested, and we headed for a café which would suit his normal budget and my skinflint backpacker’s one.
Kenya’s national dish is a big football of cassava topped off with a smattering of sauce, perhaps with a mouthful or two of meat. Difficult enough to carve with two good arms, this delicacy became a slippery eel of impossibility with just one. Between us, however, Jani and I had two useable limbs and between us we struggled through the meal while he told me about life as a jockey. In a town where most men struggled to find work that paid anything at all, Jani earned an excellent wage. No wonder he looked so wretched at the prospect of having it snatched away by a fall.
There’s not much a right-handed person can do to entertain herself in a strange country when the arm on which she depends has been rendered useless. It wasn’t just the difficulty of washing, dressing and hauling myself in and out of buses. Try as I might to expel such thoughts from my mind, fear of attack dogged my footsteps. One by one, able-bodied travellers would return to the Iqbal with tales of woe. How could my plastered arm not mark me out as an easy victim? I fretted, even though the cast would make an excellent weapon with which to bash anyone foolish enough to grab me.
Rob and I moved into a room together, and spent long hours smoking dubious substances and comparing notes on our past lives. He had spent the previous year teaching in Sudan and was toying with conversion to Islam. ‘When I get back to England,’ he told me earnestly, ‘I think I’ll tell my girlfriend we can’t resume our sexual relationship.’
‘But what if she wants to?’ I asked gloomily, beating back the urge to ask, ‘And what if I want to sleep with you now?’
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Rob replied and lapsed into stoned silence.
Our cosy, exclusive bubble of intimacy was soon burst when a middle-aged Indian moved into the vacant third bed. He lay there sweating and moaning. ‘Malaria,’ said Rob. ‘Plague,’ said the friend who occasionally turned up to minister to him.
‘Is plague infectious?’ I asked Rob.
‘No idea,’ he shrugged and we smoked another joint.
Eventually I could no longer bear Nairobi and the frustration of being so close to someone so blind to my feelings. The train to Mombasa sounded smooth-running enough to satisfy even the fiercest of doctors. One evening I waved a sad goodbye to Rob and took the train to the coast, treating myself to second class and the luxury of a soft, velvety couchette. Evening raced into night with a glorious sunburst of orange and red, and in the morning the lumbering figures of elephants trundled past in slow motion as we transited the Tsavo National Park.
But the muggers, it seemed, had followed me to Mombasa. ‘Don’t walk on this beach,’ people would say. ‘Don’t walk on that one.’
Desperate now, I bused north to Malindi, smaller, quieter and seemingly safe. But the beach hang-outs crawled with ex-pats with a fine line in negativity. ‘Where did you get your arm set?’ they would ask, before rattling off a list of private hospitals whose existence I hadn’t even considered. When I demurred and told them I’d gone to the Kenyatta, their faces would twist alarmingly. ‘Oh dear, you shouldn’t have gone there,’ they would intone. ‘Of course it won’t be set properly. You’ll have to have it broken and reset when you go back.’
In the evening the crabs came to a circular café on the beach, waving their pincers and scuttling sideways to evade the feet that kicked them. I felt for them and for myself, hating the ex-pats for their knee-jerk cruelty and racism. Alone on the beach, I peered up at the sky and picked out the Southern Cross, a symbol of how far I was from home. Phil Collins played on the jukebox, a tear-jerking song of loneliness and longing. A wave of homesickness sloshed over me. I retreated to my thatched hut and wept for the loss of Rob.
Two weeks had passed since my fall. The plaster continued to itch and sweat but the pain had ebbed to an occasional twinge. I craved for Lamu as only a hardened backpacker cooped up in a package-holidaymakers’ enclave can crave for escape. On the map it didn’t look so far from Malindi, but the road’s confident black line gradually petered out into a line of dots, which could only mean dirt track with bumps. The travellers’ grapevine ran hot with rumours of Somali attacks on the buses.
My nice Indian doctor would have had a heart attack had he glimpsed the vehicle into which I finally carried my wrist. Battered and broken, it looked as if it had just arrived from a war zone. ‘Filthy’ would have been a generous way to describe its interior. Mud streaked the floor and windows, and the seats were secured to the luggage-rack with pieces of string.
The one saving grace was that so many people finally boarded the bus that it was hard to move at all, let alone jolt up and down. I sat surrounded by women in gaily coloured kangas, their babies fastened to their backs with matching wraps, and by men in tattered relics of once-smart shirts and trousers. No-one talked much. It was enough to hold on and endure.
The road was reasonable as far north as Garsen, whereupon it crumbled abruptly into sticky red mud. We emptied out of the bus for lunch in a dismal frontier settlement where there were clues, had I known how to read them, as to what was happening elsewhere in Africa. Scattered amongst the sturdy, stubby Kenyan men were tall, willowy Somali cattle herders whose long tartan skirts left their upper bodies exposed. To observe the lack of flesh on their chests was bad enough, but to see the wasted bodies of their treasured cattle was to weep: the skin had fallen away so completely that their ribcages stood out like bars. But they were the lucky ones. By the roadside lay the carcasses of those who could stumble no further. It was 1984 and famine was marching its way across the Sahel.
By the time we reached Lamu my body was almost as rigid as my arm. I peeled myself off the seat, checked for further broken limbs, and marched off to discover the sweetest little hotel in Africa, its mosquito net suspended over the bed like a bridal veil.
Lamu was everything I’d dreamed it would be. Here were not just the beaches of fine coral sand, the limpid blue sea and wavering coconut palms of Malindi, but gorgeous old stone houses with carved wooden doorways, the northern flowering of the Swahili architecture that blossomed so brightly in Zanzibar’s Stone Town. There were no cars on the island, and the dhow-builders still passed their days knocking up shark-finned boats that tacked their way up and down the coast. The high-rise hotels of Malindi, with their pampered, Kenyan-hating clientele, were blotted out as if they’d never existed.
Of course, still touting my plaster, I could only gaze at the waves with the same thwarted yearning as I’d gazed at Rob in Nairobi. But just as the air had dried out as the bus headed north, so the rivulets of sweat had at last stopped rolling from under my cast. Nor did I need to worry about wielding my arm in self-defence any more. All was right with my world. And then I walked along the promenade and saw Rob emerging from a hotel.
We adjourned to a café and tucked into those travellers’ staples: milkshakes and banana pancakes. Maybe I’d known he was coming after me and maybe I hadn’t. He looked just as outlandish here in his Sudanese clothes, just as desirable, just as remote and unattainable. We picked up where we’d left off at the Iqbal, talking into the small hours, reading, smoking, close, close, close – yet never quite close enough for me.
I could have stayed on Lamu for ever had there been a hospital. We toyed with hacking my arm free of its casing with a Swiss army knife but the words of those wretched Malindi ex-pats had planted their poisonous seeds. I planned a career as a writer. How would that pan out if my all-important right wrist really had been badly set? There was little alternative but to return to Nairobi.
A storm came suddenly in great bursts of thunder and lightning, raining coconuts onto the beach, drenching the sands and bleaching the landscape. I boarded the bus back to Nairobi with a heavy heart, for Rob was heading south for Zanzibar and Zimbabwe. Our paths might never cross again. I prayed that he would commit himself to a rendezvous, but we were British and reserved, and kissed good-bye like a pair of elderly cousins. ‘See you,’ I said miserably, and that was that.
The threat from the Somali raiders had increased, and soldiers with machine guns occupied the back seat of the bus to ensure our safety. This bus was no cleaner or newer than the last, but at least it was relatively empty. After two hours I turned to look at the guards. They were sleeping with their heads resting on each other’s shoulders like babies.
The rain had worked terrible tricks on the road surface, churning it to the consistency of a motorcycle circuit after a hard day’s scrambling. The bus slithered and slipped, bounced over ridges, dipped down into muddy puddles. Then suddenly, without warning, it skidded across the road and came to rest with its back wheels wedged in a ditch. The crunch jolted the soldiers awake and they shot to their feet, snatching up their guns and looking around wildly. With long-suffering sighs, the passengers stumbled to their feet and headed for the exit.
We stood in silence, inspecting the damage. If the bus had looked forlorn before, now it looked beyond hope of deliverance. The soldiers arrayed themselves at each end, guns pointed down the road to repel any raider hoping to cash in on our misfortune. The driver produced a rope and tied it to the front bumper. The men lined up and tugged. The bus heaved momentarily forwards, then groaned and slipped back even further into the ditch. Another rope was produced and tied to its rear end. Now the passengers were divided into two groups. I, of course, could do nothing but cheer helplessly from the sideline as the tug-of-war teams hauled on their ropes.
Slipping and sliding in the gruesome mud, the men could barely stand up, let alone exert enough muscle power to move the bus. But, egged on by the soldiers with hearty yells, they tried and tried again until at last their efforts were rewarded. The bus surged forward, paused as if considering a retreat, and then leapt back onto the road. A great roar of relief was raised. The soldiers slapped each other on the back and lowered their guns. Congratulating each other with the false heartiness of those who were more frightened than they’d cared to let on, the passengers clambered back into the bus and slumped down into their seats. Five minutes later I eyed the back seat. Our guards were fast asleep once again.
Back at the Kenyatta, my Indian doctor had lost none of his good cheer. ‘You’re fine,’ he assured me. ‘Nothing to worry about. Just go and get this plaster removed.’
I shuffled down the corridor and into a room where a small boy was having the plaster sliced off his leg with a circular saw. He was stoical about the buzzing, and totally unfazed as bits of cast flew around him. I, on the other hand, averted my eyes when it was my turn. The nurse roared with laughter at this proof of the cowardice of the muzungus.
By now I’d been in Kenya for six weeks and it was long past time to move on. Also staying at the Iqbal was Helen, a New Zealander who had forfeited her passport to a mugger. We decided to join forces and head for Zanzibar, where I tried not to bank on rediscovering Rob. Now that the cast had been removed, my arm was striped white and brown, but for the first time in weeks I was squeaky clean and almost human. Perhaps now, I dreamed, he would see me as I saw him: as a consummate object of desire.
Before leaving, I took Jani out for one last football of cassava. His wrist was also out of plaster and we laughed over the idiocy of the ex-pats. My writing arm was fine. He, too, was confident of being back in the saddle soon.
On Zanzibar I found Rob again, sure enough, but it was no different. We were friends, good friends, and nothing more. He wrote me one final letter from Zimbabwe: ‘I’ll be home in July. Looking forward to seeing you. We’ll have so much to talk about.’
I never heard from him again.