Aidan Hartley

Swat, Pakistan The Swat valley’s apple orchards are in blossom even as the snow still lies thick on the mountains. It’s been the harshest winter in memory. I came here on the trail of my late friend Carlos Mavroleon, an extraordinary man who had many of his adventures in this part of the world. The ancients thought Swat was paradise. It must still have been lovely 30 years ago, when Carlos — just 17 at the time, on the run from Millfield and following the Magic Bus route East — descended the Malakand Pass to see the valley open out before him. Today, from the Grand Trunk Road turnoff to the town of Mingora, it’s unremitting concretised bazaars selling everything from false teeth to rocket launchers in choking dust.

Laikipia When I saw the Chief in his Land Cruiser filled with hangers-on bouncing towards me through the bush I knew he was after his Christmas fatted lamb. It is customary in this part of the world for ranchers to hand out barbeque-ready slaughter animals to our local officials as thank-you presents for the help they genuinely give us through the year. At the time of Uhuru, the Europeans and Africans used to sit down to consume such gifts together while discussing the issues of the day. Sadly, these days the government vehicles tend to tour farms to pick up sheep and goats that are scoffed at ceremonies to which we are not invited. ‘Hello, Chief,’ I said. ‘After a sheep, are you?’ ‘Yes,’ he said.

After work the farm labourers like to head for the football pitch. They go barefoot, or in their Bata takkies, and they play rough. The first ball I gave them was an imported silver Fifa-approved item of great expense and they impaled it on a nearby fever tree within days. After that I bought cheap balls in Nairobi. These still get punctured regularly on thorns. The giant of a goalkeeper is a man named Magoolgool — named, like many of his tribe, after a treasured bull — who specialises in thumping the ball with such force that it rockets into the stratosphere and bursts with a distant pop. I don’t play. It just causes embarrassment. Soccer is not my game.

Laikipia I watched tribal warriors invade private farms on Kenya’s Laikipia plateau this week, driving vast herds of cattle before them. The phalanxes of il moran looked magnificent in their ochre and beads, and my spine tingled at the sight of their spears flashing in the sun. When Nairobi’s government quite reasonably moved to evict them, saying this was not a ‘Zimbabwe-like situation’, they lit bushfires and left a trail of wanton vandalism.

Laikipia I don’t usually observe Lent, but this year it crept up on me. The penances just happened. I’m not even a good Christian. But, let me tell you, this is way, way beyond giving up the Mars Bars for a few weeks. First, the hair: the weekend after Ash Wednesday I went shooting pigeons in Suffolk with my friend Sam Kiley. At the time I had long locks (not through vanity, I promise, but rather neglect of what GQ magazine calls ‘grooming’). When I told Sam I was off to Afghanistan in April, he urged me to have a short back and sides. Otherwise, he said, if the Taliban kidnapped me they’d find me pretty and bugger me senseless. He doesn’t mince his words, old Sam. And he doesn’t have a hair on his head.

Chalbi desert I am in Kenya’s Chalbi desert, where temperatures soar to 140 degrees. Out here east of Koobi Fora, the Cradle of Mankind, black volcanic rocks tumble down to badlands of cracked salt — so blinding white that on the flight in I had the impression that we were floating over snowy tundra. At the northern shore of the Chalbi, where rock meets salt, is the oasis of Kalacha. When I was a boy, safaris here with my father were pretty tough affairs. We’d spend weeks on end rambling on either side of Lake Turkana while Dad talked about livestock with the nomads. There were no tents or mattresses; we slept wrapped in blankets on the ground next to the fire.

Laikipia My favourite Christmases are in Nairobi. This is how it goes. We gather in the suburbs, at my sister and brother-in-law’s hotel, which they close for the holiday. It has giraffe and warthog on rolling lawns under the shadow of the Ngong Hills. There are butlers, a genius chef, and it’s the only place that has enough bedrooms to fit all of us under one roof. As December progresses, friends and family disembark from British Airways with offerings of walnuts, cherry brandy, gravadlax and Stilton from the Harrods food halls. On Christmas Eve, the turkey turns up still alive, blinking, riding pillion on a bicycle pedalled by a man in car-tyre sandals.

Between antiquity and the 18th century, aside from a couple of Portuguese priests in Abyssinia, we have no record of Europeans venturing into the heart of Africa; incredible but true. Following in the priests’ footsteps came James Bruce, the Scottish laird who returned home to be ridiculed by Dr Johnson for his tales of Ethiopians hacking steaks from living cattle. Anthony Sattin picks up his narrative after that in 1788, when at last Sir Joseph Banks, veteran of Cook’s voyages and a beacon of Enlightenment science, brought together a circle of learned friends in a London tavern to found the African Association. Their challenge was daunting, yet simple. The Association would fill the empty spaces on Africa’s maps with towns, rivers and mountains.

When I return to Kenya, this is the true story I'm going to tell my muckers over a round of welcome home Tuskers.

Laikipia My mother's house on Kenya's coast in August is my favourite place to decompress. After a month in London and Edinburgh, it was such a relief to kick off my squeaky black shoes, discard my trousers and wear nothing but a kikoi wrap for a few days. This time my old friend Eric, who is over from China, joined me. We ate only fish and rice and drank a lot of ice-cold Tusker beer. We surfed on a reef break a mile out to sea where the waves were clean, big and blue. We went deep-sea fishing, tagged a sailfish, saw turtles mating and gasped when the great spangled flanks and fins of a whale shark surfaced alongside the boat.

Nairobi One evening in the Kenyan capital late last year, my friend Sean Culligan endured an experience that, in several instructive ways, can be compared and contrasted with that of the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin. Sean is a mild-mannered man who, after retiring from the British military, settled in East Africa. He works for a medical charity that is held in high esteem. For a pastime he likes target shooting. He has a licensed pistol. 'My military training tells me that if you have a gun, you should carry it,' Sean tells me. 'If you carry it, you should be prepared to use it.' The incident occurred on a Friday evening in Nairobi's suburbs, where Sean had arranged to pick up a doctor and colleague named Suzanne from her house. They were going on to a meeting downtown.

Mount Kenya, at altitude Among my many defects is the inability ever to be satisfied. We have two children and I want more. I have 29 cattle and I want a lot more. I live in the most beautiful part of Kenya and I covet other people’s big ranches. I walk into other people’s houses and I think, ‘Hmm, I’d like this. I wonder how much it costs?’ I want, I want, I want. And when it comes to big boys’ toys I’m like Toad in Wind in the Willows. My latest infatuation is a $2 million helicopter owned by Jim on the neighbouring private game reserve of Loisaba. Now, I’ve always loved choppers. I like Black Hawks, Hueys and especially Cobras and Apaches. But Jim’s machine is the ultimate in luxury.

Laikipia Claire came face to face with a leopard last night. She was walking between our office, a thatched mud hut at the bottom of the garden, and the house. It's a distance of only about 30 paces, but it can get dark out there. Instinct kicked in before she even glimpsed the predator and she froze. Then she saw it. He was purring in the way that leopards do, a noise like sawing, and then it jumped over the garden wall. When Claire called out I was in the house with the children watching The Sound of Music. Something about the tone of her voice made me load up the shotgun and head out, but by the time I went out the leopard had vanished. I escorted Claire back and gave her a glass of South African plonk to calm her down. 'That was scary,' she said. 'Nonsense,' I replied.

Malindi After five years in the writing, my book The Zanzibar Chest is coming out in July. Based on the advice of my friend Toby Young, whose New York memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People has been such a success, I realised I had to make every effort to promote it myself. Toby lives in Shepherd's Bush. I live on a ranch in Kenya's remote Laikipia plateau, where we don't even have a phone. I saw this was going to be difficult. 'Think of some news hooks,' Toby advised by email. But whereas he had stories of cocaine-snorting celebrities in Soho's fashionable clubs to generate newspaper publicity, I had none of that. My book deals partly with nasty African wars, from Ethiopia to Rwanda.

Laikipia Living in the Kenyan highlands during this war in Iraq I've felt like those Japanese soldiers who thought they were still supposed to be fighting when they were plucked out of Pacific island jungles in the 1970s. In the middle of Laikipia we live without TVs, telephones or newspapers. Visitors bring us news, but people up here are more interested in the prospects of rain than the latest from the Baghdad battlefront. We do have a radio, a special satellite one with an antenna, but halfway through Tony Blair's speech the other day, a vital cable got tangled around my chair leg and snapped when I yanked at it. Then we got stranded on the farm because the jerrycan of what somebody thought was petrol being poured into the Range Rover turned out to be river water.

In our bad old days there used to be the joke of the Nigerian and Kenyan ministers. The Kenyan visits Abuja, is impressed by the wealth of his counterpart and so asks how he does it. 'Look out that window,' says the Nigerian. The Kenyan sees a skyscraper rising out of the jungle. 'Ten per cent,' says the Nigerian. 'Aha,' smiles the Kenyan. The next month the Nigerian visits Nairobi and asks how his Kenyan friend is doing. 'Look out that window,' answers the Kenyan. The Nigerian sees nothing but an empty space full of rubbish. He looks quizzically at his African brother. 'A hundred per cent,' grins the Kenyan. But that's all in the past now, we're told. Kenya recently concluded the most significant elections in Africa's history.