Wild life

The ‘No’ republic Georgia In Gagra, where Stalin had his Black Sea dacha, a dog bit my producer Alex. Since the USSR’s collapse Gagra has been in Abkhazia, an illegal, separatist region of Georgia. Not the place to find rabies vaccine. We raced to Sochi in Russia, overtaking Putin’s armoured columns pulling back from their blitzkrieg against Georgia. Here in a hospital soaked with dried blood from pugilistic Muscovite holidaymakers, Alex had his jabs. Next, the taxi driver — a cantankerous Armenian — attempted to rob us. The only thing I will miss about Abkhazia is the landscape: mountains above, sea below. Part of the natural charm is its arrested development due to 16 years of war. The Abkhazians ethnically cleansed half the population.

Laikipia With a concussive ‘thunk’, another bird flies against our new farm house on the African plains. This happens a dozen times daily. They must be following flight paths established long before a human home went up. I designed our place to be solid. Construction used up 555 tonnes of sand, 1,476 bags of cement, 688 kilos of nails, 1,235 cedar poles, 16,500 running feet of timber, 1,833 wheelbarrow loads of rock ballast and 47 wheelbarrows (since it was all built by hand). An atom bomb could not destroy it. But Nature rudely ignores our claim over home. Tap! goes the bedroom window at dawn. Taptaptap! Pull back the curtains. It’s a male hornbill attacking its own reflection in the glass. ‘How charming,’ I say. Tappetytaptaptap!

‘Yaes!’ I’ll answer the phone in a falsetto Scottish accent. ‘Can ae help yay?’ If the voice is unfamiliar I lapse into Gaelic and slam down the receiver. This is my strategy for tackling a new wave of death threats being made against me. I have also taken to wearing funny hats, a stick-on moustache and a pirate’s eyepatch. Sometimes I will only leave the house in a burqa. The threats are real and I take them seriously, though I am only joking about the disguises. I wish I could become an accountant and live in Plymouth, but it’s too late now. I am a hack.

In the summer of 1986 I got a job as a busboy in Burger King on the Champs-Elysées. I was given a funny pair of trousers, which I was ordered to wear as part of the uniform. I refused, and so later the very same day the only employment with steady prospects I’ve ever had in my life was terminated. I took to busking on the Métro with my friend Lloyd. Even after that summer ended, I stuck to busking — and to be honest I have been doing it ever since. OK, so Van Morrison tunes got dropped in favour of freelance journalism. But it’s all the same thing. I became a war correspondent. I assumed people might take me seriously. It took a dozen conflicts, coup d’états, assassinations and sundry acts of God to conclude I was wrong.

Aidan Hartley on the Wild Life Nairobi I want to say Kenya is a victim of negative press. Shady characters called bloggers are nicknaming the President’s new Peace cabinet of ministers ‘Ali Baba and his 40 Thieves’. That is very cheeky. Everybody knows there are 42 ministers, 52 assistant ministers and 42 permanent secretaries. But ‘Ali Baba and his 136 Thieves’ isn’t so catchy. Typical imperialists and their comprador agents on the world wide web. Britain and the US should be careful. The Chinese can also be our friends. Unfortunately, we are not yet free. Even today our former colonial masters call the shots. That is why they forced our politicians into a peace accord to stop the recent bloodbath.

Laikipia Gabriel Barasa was a week dead and already trouble was brewing. I could tell that as I stood at his grave on the farmstead. In 1966, Kenya’s government allocated Gabriel 27 acres of land, subdivided from a farm previously owned by a colonial European. The Trans Nzoia soil was very fertile. Today Gabriel would have been regarded as well-off, but in those days land was still plentiful, Kenya’s population tiny. Gabriel had married five wives, each of whom built her own hut on the farm. He fathered 22 children. Over the years, to pay for school fees and various debts, he sold off 16 acres. His children got an education but there were no jobs to be had, especially after IMF austerity reforms led to mass lay-offs.

As we entered the old city, the heat shimmered off coral towers half reduced to rubble by cycles of war. We had just exited Mogadishu’s presidential palace after a morning’s filming. Gemaal was at the wheel and Duguf rode shotgun. Cameraman Jim and I were in the back chatting. Then came the bang. Except I recall no ‘bang’, only a shock wave. It sucked the air out of my lungs so hard that I tasted blood in my throat. Through our car’s rear window I saw black smoke and debris enveloping our escort vehicle 30 metres behind. ‘There’s wounded,’ said Jim. Gunfire erupted. Everybody abandoned the car. As Jim ran towards the blast site whatever he said was lost except for ‘...secondary attack!’ Total confusion.

Somalia I am in a refugee camp of 200,000 war victims on the outskirts of Mogadishu. The muezzin call to prayer drifts across a sea of plastic tents set among coconut palms and banana groves along the banks of the Shebelle River. Miles from here Ethiopian and Islamist insurgents are fighting in the streets and bombarding civilian districts with rockets and mortar fire. Yet it was almost a relief to fly into Somalia after Kenya, just to take a break from the horrific sight of my home country committing a kind of national suicide this last month. I found it hard to leave the family at home, but apart from that I felt a huge burden of depression lifting as we got away from Nairobi.

Nogales, Mexico After the purgatory of Arizona, I was so happy to cross the Mexico frontier I could have French-kissed the filthy streets. It was just like home in Africa. Meat tasted like meat and meals were eaten to a joyous soundtrack of buzzing bluebottles. Stray dogs basked in sunshine among wrecked cars as music cascaded down streets. Maidens had nice, healthy bottoms and men were encouraged to whistle their appreciation. We drank beers in Sonora’s desert air and Our Lady of Guadalupe stared down kindly on all her Catholic sinners. Oh happy, happy Mexico! Arizona, by contrast, was beyond dreadful. ‘We’re the skin-cancer capital of the world,’ they said to me proudly. I asked, can boredom or American TV give you cancer? Or hormone-injected chicken?

I had an epiphany at 5.30 a.m. the other day in a Shanghai club packed with gangsters, prostitutes and flat-bellied Thai transsexuals. I watched a little guy, in his forties like me, dancing with two women dressed as schoolgirls. Then he collapsed drunkenly to the floor. White-jacketed attendants appeared. Instead of ejecting the man, they gently restored him to his tarts and whisky at the bar. His needs were understood. ‘In Shanghai nobody that age had fun when they were young, before China reformed,’ said a friend showing me the city. ‘Now they have money, everybody’s trying to have a good time before they’re too old.’ I walked out of there deciding my mid-life crisis had begun.

Kenya I have hated flying since 1989, when I was in a Boeing 737 that crashed into an Ethiopian mountain, lost its wings and burst into flames. Surviving that one was followed by years of pre-check-in heavy drinking. As if that were not enough, I now suffer this wrenching guilt about all the carbon I emit on my frequent long-haul flights. And my recent journey home from Mongolia to Africa was a 48-hour nightmare. I felt like an astronaut. I departed Ulan Bator loaded with souvenirs: a horn and sinew bow with a 40-lb pull and six arrows, cashmere and camel hair, pebbles from the Gobi desert and a very large quantity of Genghis Khan vodka. The Mongolians, I discovered, consume 60 million bottles of vodka per month. Given that there are just 2.

Laikipia Our farmhouse is at the finishing stage and Wachira, the electrician from Large Power and Control, is advising me on aesthetics. ‘A spotlight in the garden is a beauteous thing to behold,’ he urges. I reply, ‘Fine, but can we talk about house lighting first?’ ‘Yes, but we must illuminate the garden path in a way to be admired.’ ‘No spotlight,’ I say firmly. After three years in tents and having spent a fortune we still have not moved into the house. Our Kenyan farm is a white elephant leaning on my chest. The way we have spent money causes me to have ghastly visions of wrist slashing, serious illness without insurance, falling towers and a runaway crack-cocaine addiction.

Kibera Court No. 2 Normally, I would bribe a traffic policeman, but very occasionally it feels good to hit back against the system. ‘Go ahead. Book me,’ I said. The copper, a huge creature with rolls of fat around his neck and piggy eyes, sighed as if to say, ‘You poor dope.’ ‘OK, I’m taking you in.’ All because I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. At the station, the officer demanded a large sum in cash bail. His curious mates turned up to see what other crimes they could nail me for. ‘Your name is JOHN HOLAG.’ ‘No, it isn’t.’ They took a book down from shelves piled with dusty ledgers and slowly flipped through the pages. ‘Ah, yes. You have mutilated your driving licence.’ ‘No, I haven’t.

Nairobi Tom Cholmondeley has done it again. The scion of Kenya’s Delameres has shot dead another black African trespasser on his Rift Valley farm. This is his second in a year. Kenya’s authorities, which gave up trying to pronounce his name and settled for ‘Tom Chom’, let him go first time. That won’t matter on this occasion as I reckon Tom may be sharing his cell for a long time with a very large fellow convict who will insist on calling him Tinkerbell. That’s if he stays alive. I don’t know how or why Tom Chom has to shoot people. I have managed to get through life in Kenya without shooting a single person. I don’t believe Cholmondeley is a psychopath.

Democratic Republic of Congo This week I joined United Nations forces in the Congo for an offensive against rebel militias. ‘We’re the only ones who want to fight,’ said the South African colonel, cussing the other blue helmet contingents. ‘They’re too scared to go forwards and I’m tired of it.’ Pakistanis bombarding the opposite hillside with mortars wanted to leave the dirty work to the Congolese government forces. ‘Good shot!’ exclaimed the Pakistani major each time a mud hut got blown to bits a mile off. An Indian helicopter gunship circled at altitude, too high to fire its rockets. ‘Nobody wants to die for the Congolese,’ an Indian told me later.

Nairobi The finest view of what Kenya’s corrupt political leaders have done to this beautiful nation may be observed from the summit of Africa’s largest rubbish dump, Nairobi’s Dandora dumpsite. A horde of children and women are sifting through the stinking trash, recovering scrap metal to be sold at twopence a kilo. They each make 30p a day. A squealing fat pig with a plastic bag stuck on its head runs in circles among the destitute. Dandora’s garbage spontaneously combusts each day after sunrise, igniting a square-mile fire that throws a column of poisonous smoke across central Nairobi. Slum residents die young. The state hospital has a ward for respiratory illnesses nicknamed the ‘Dandora ward’.