The Ugandan Express Pardon

Yesterday we departed Nairobi at 1209 and rolled out to Eldoret. We had spent the morning touring Kibera, the slum famous for being the largest in Africa and for being, well a slum. For many it is a place of convenience as they come into town to work, Kibera offering a place of cheap accommodation. It’s a complex matrix of people living on top of people and is as sophisticated a community as anywhere on the planet.

We depart Eldoret oddly enough at 0910. We have an uncommon series of ‘10’ minutes starts and finishes, without any planning. The road out of Eldoret is busy but eventually clears and the road, compared with the road out of Nairobi, is quite reasonable. We track our way via the map to Malaba which comes up on us more quickly than we expect. I ring the person David has put us in touch with (Keith) and not a moment too soon as we are swarmed by fixers offering to take us across the border. Read more

Back to France

I am in Gare L’Est, a significant point in the novel I started writing ten years ago, Ironically it’s where I am to catch my train up to Verdun and was not a place I was planning on visiting. But here I am in a coffee shop lost in its cavernous halls, drinking crap coffee and eating dry pastries. France is a better place for all its migration though of course over the last twenty years its been a point of internal fraction. But the migrants have taken the menial jobs and so far the folk at the ticket counters have all been migrants with a grip of a few languages including English. I attempt the few words I know in French (funny how two years of bad High School French still help – despite those two years being 1973 and 4) and as is always the case in France the attempt is worth its weight in gold. I stood at the ticket counter at Charles De Gaulle and heard a north African ticket seller handle German and Russian. And all with gentle grace. The last time I was here I met two Russians on a bridge over the Seine. Another story for another time but there are no plans to meet  anyone with such exotic credentials this time around. I think I shall be grateful if I don’t hear any more Russian on this trip.

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16 Hours on an Indian Track

Dahl baht and rice looks pretty much the same at either end of the digestive tract. It’s delivered on a silver tray in some sort of order. Delivery at the other end is another matter altogether. At Saugauli Junction train station it seems to me that the vast majority of everyone’s Dahl baht is sprayed across the sleepers and tracks, baking away under the 35 degree heat, putrefying in the 90% humidity. The stench is overpowering but the thousands of Indians here, milling about, with some gathering in a cluster around us (we are objects of some curiosity) don’t seem to mind. Read more

Notes in a Sydney Train

Scrubbed timber has no smell. The burnt brake pads and the metal wheel flange create their own dust and heat and smell which lifts in the warm afternoon, hangs in the humid air and is pushed aside by the train as it sighs up to the platform. I watch the handful of people who angle towards the last carriage. They walk past the second to last to align with the trailing one as if there is something lucky by being there. Or not being somewhere else. Read more

Train from New York

We flee from New York at a clickety blur at the end of the day. We have done so for an hour now and the sun is just setting across an industrial landscape that  is old brick buildings (a few soft with refurbishment, the rest hard in broken abandonment), vacant weedgrown lots, rail-tracks, water towers and broken glass. Have I mentioned derelict cars and graffiti? The last tint of gold catches the towers of Philadelphia in the far distance, grey on the horizon against a grey sky threatening rain. Read more

You Have a Foggy Bottom

Any town that can straight faced call a Metro stop (and suburb) Foggy Bottom has to have something going for it. That the train line stop is underneath the George Washington University Hospital suggests someone in the planning department might have had a sense of humour as well. Indeed, this town has a lot going for it and my wandering out for a coffee last night and a quick downing of the books for a quick sneak into the Smithsonian Air and Space museum reminds me again how attractive and appealing this town is. Read more

Why Bother Visiting Country Towns?

Bruce Elder in the Sydney Morning Herald asks this question and asks for suggestions that might help small communities attract more visitors. What do you want to see when you visit these small places?

I Was an RSM in the Scottish Blagoons

On a train from Liverpool to London and a short while after leaving Lime Street we pull into a suburban station. Into the carriage climbed a wild eyed man in his late forties, mop of hair coiffed back onto his collar, rings in his ears, spare tire around his waist and shirt hanging out. Stumbling as if the train was in motion. With his missus. Looking for a seat. Which he never took but on which he propped his case. She took a seat and roused at the lively “Billy” who proceed to swear his way up and down the carriage as he made conversation. Nothing violent at all – more in the vein o f another Scottish comedian called Billy. They fuelled themselves up with more vodka and proceeded to keep us entertained for a large portion of the trip. When they discovered they had missed their stop they simply laughed.

In fact the couple were a perpetual laugh machine. He had the dry wit of a Glaswegian and the swearing to match. Not in an offensive way (most of the time) but she was alternating between scolding him for swearing and bursting into giggles. Which only encouraged him some more. He refused to sit down and paraded up and down the aisle provoking and prodding with his wit to get responses from us. Her giggles only fuelled him on. Both of these folk were in their late forties but were giving the inner child free rein. Despite this she was concerned at one point that they might get kicked off ‘again”. It tempered his madness very little. Turns out he was a truck driver who drove all over Europe but had lost his license due to drink driving. Was a little over three weeks from having it reinstated. He was going to have to work very hard to be sober in time to pick it up.

There are numerous highlights from that trip which are almost impossible to translate onto the page. One gem went thus: in a moment of complete seriousness he informed us he was a former Regimental Sergeant Major of the Scottish Blagoons. Hissed out three or four times as he very earnestly strained to get his drunken tongue around the words. But the “you had to be there moment” was the moment Billy’s heart stopped when one of the women sitting opposite us informed him she was a vicar. The tone of the trip changed, the swearing vanished (though it was still noisy) and Billy set about convincing her he was not a bad person. Somehow atoning for all the madness that had gone on before – especially given he had just been telling her he could bring any woman to the best orgasm she ever had (in the background his missus was decrying his claims, amidst much giggling). Later, as we disembarked we complimented the vicar on how well she handled Billy. She fessed up to being a prison chaplain, so Billy was no challenge at all.

Space Age Train in a Paddock

Today I had a slightly weird experience. I am not too sure what to make of it. I departed early in the morning on a diesel powered passenger train out of Bern after a F5 slice of pizza for breakfast (it was better than the F25 can of XXXX beer I found last night – that can had been out of Queensland for at least a decade!!). We had a beautiful, clear day and the rumbling train took us through classic postcard scenery of Switzerland, tracing a train preferred route though valleys and across plains with snowcapped mountain backdrops. As the valleys narrowed we were pushed more and more into farmer’s yards and each “clickety click” took us in and out of small farms, and chalets, and firs, and poultry and goats, sheep and cattle. And all very green. I think an indication of ones “Australianness” is how much you notice green fields. I see them everywhere.