Weregoi Plains Three shots rang out in the night air. Rustlers had attacked my neighbour’s boma a few hundred metres from home. At the time, our children were watching a cartoon before bedtime. Thankfully, the bandits were only after the cattle. They got away with a couple of dozen steers. Cow theft is a noble
Indonesia In a Jakarta traffic jam it hits me. After decades of frenetic travel, I have learnt less of the world than I might have, had I simply stayed on a farm in Devon. After my family’s land was expropriated in Tanzania in the 1960s, we lived for some years at Hill Farm near the
Democratic Republic of Congo It is impossible to predict how a person will behave in a tight spot. I have been in Congo’s rain forest with my TV producer Ed Braman. He’s a television veteran, a brilliant mind. But he lives in Crouch End and has spent years in offices. I wondered what he’d be
Juba In the run-up to this week’s referendum on Southern Sudan’s future, I flew to Juba with a bottle of Bushmills. The whiskey was for Dan Eiffe. When Sudan’s southern Christian rebels were on the brink of defeat, it was Dan who turned the war around. He has saved countless thousands from hunger. And he
Laikipia A Christmas gift of perfume smelling of chocolate caused my wife Claire to burst into tears. ‘I have never received such a lazy present!’ she wailed. ‘Hang on,’ I reasoned, ‘it’s popular in Japan. That’s what the girl at the shop said.’ Claire growled, ‘Maybe among schoolgirls!’ Claire is wonderful at Christmas. She begins
Laikipia I have a mob of finished Boran steers ready for the holidays. The butchers are suddenly chasing me and that’s a fine feeling. A year ago, we were in the worst drought for 50 years, with invasions of armed herders and 2,000 cattle. We were left with not a blade of grass. Our cattle
Bangkok ‘Any Thai man who is not married is gay,’ said a Thai woman to me. ‘You could say that about many places,’ I observed. ‘Yes, but 80 per cent of Thai men are also effeminate,’ said a second Thai woman in the room. We were waiting to see a top politician. There were no
Rift Valley The patriarch Jacob Mukhamia Omanyo, grandfather of my friend Celestina, was born in 1888 in western Kenya. For 119 years he lived a healthy life, falling sick only once in 1964, after a spider bit him. He married five wives, the first in 1924, his last in 1975. At his death of typhoid
Kenya Our surfing gang — average age 50 — are out in the bay again, dodging sewage, bull sharks and even, earlier this season, a pirate’s corpse. The waves are terrible, that never improves. Yet our tight-knit gang persists in trying to stay fit enough to surf. There’s nothing else left to delay old age
Laikipia, Kenya My cousin Charlie Williams is a young Irish Guards captain about to deploy in Afghanistan. The other day he came to stay on our farm in Kenya’s highlands and I got a glimpse of what he’s about to go through in an exciting yet poignant way. Charlie brought the British Army along. In
South Africa Rarely is Jonathan Clayton, the Times man in Africa, far from the front lines — but this month when I stayed at his Johannesburg house the battlefield came home. My visits tend to cause distress to Christiane, Jonty’s German wife. Christiane hasn’t trusted me since I got her husband drunk at a Christmas
Tanzania Here’s this Chinese guy in the midday sun. Straw hat, faggy in his mouth, bright eyes, tanned face. I feel like crying. We’re in the middle of nowhere and he’s building this fantastic road through the Tanzanian bush. He’s fit, young, staring into the future, like one of those Mao-era posters. I give him
Rainy Season on the Cattle Stock Route From the side of the track, a Samburu youth waved me down. I stopped the vehicle. He was gorgeously dressed for market day: all feathers, beads, disks of aluminium, with ochre on his head and bare shoulders. He wore in his beaded belt a stabbing sword in a
Colombian jungle The first day I was in Bogota I saw a big yellow bus speeding by, full of old-aged pensioners dancing Salsa. I knew I was going to like Colombia. They say there’s a jungle plant here called burundanga. If somebody spikes your drink with burundanga you lose all free will. You hand over
Malindi, Kenya I’m at Malindi’s Driftwood beach bar, nursing a Tusker beer. I’m gazing at the Indian Ocean. The day was hot: 110 in the shade. Now at dusk, a cool zephyr rises from the sea. The moon climbs. Lateen dhow sails puff towards the fishing grounds. The bar fills with surfers and deep-sea anglers.
Before disembarking at Bulawayo airport I stuffed the book I was reading in the front-seat pocket. It was Peter Godwin’s fine When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. I did not want to be carrying anything that might identify me as a subversive — or a foreign correspondent. Mugabe’s Zanu-PF goons threatened two-year jail sentences for
Laikipia ‘That elephant is almost human,’ my wife Claire said. ‘That,’ I replied, ‘is the problem.’ I called him Stomper. Like people, elephants are sly and voracious. When I bought a farm I became set against elephants. I love big trees. Elephants are to Africa’s fine trees what gales are to England’s oaks. When a
Laikipia ‘Let us go in amongst the cattle and talk,’ said the Councillor Jeremiah. That means a serious matter is to be discussed. It was evening, and the cattle were already in the boma. We went in, and Jeremiah let me know we must prepare for cattle rustling at Christmas. After the worst drought in
Kiwayu Island, Kenya I came on a holiday to unwind and decompress but I have just been handed the bill and so I think I will have that heart attack after all. We are at Mike’s Camp on the desert island of Kiwayu north of Lamu, my favourite place in the world. This is where
Kuala Lumpur I dropped into Malaysia armed with F. Spencer Chapman’s anti-Japanese guerrilla war memoir The Jungle is Neutral and took his words to heart. ‘It is the attitude of mind that determines whether you go under or survive. There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ Chapman survived the jungle’s ‘green