Zanzibar

Every night in Zanzibar finished with a stunning display of yellows, oranges, pinks and reds swirling together around a brilliantly glowing orb, and spilling into the blue Indian Ocean. The sun seems larger in Africa, but Mara, a physics major at Gustavus, assures me it isn’t.

My mother and I went to Zanzibar with Cindy, a Fulbright scholar and biology professor, and Cindy’s daughter, Mara.  All of us needed some time to rest on the beach and by the pool.  For five glorious days, we soaked up the Zanzibar sun, played cards, read, and swam.  I thought Moshi got unbearably hot sometimes, but it is nothing compared to Zanzibar heat.  The air is so thick with humidity that you feel as if you are slowly walking through water.  Instead of being oppressive, the heat felt like you were in a giant sauna, sweating out all the stress, and feeling utterly relaxed.

We didn’t just lie around all day, or at least not everyday.  One day Mara, mom, and I went snorkeling and visited Prison Island.  The name of the island is a misnomer since the island was mainly used as a quarantine station for the sick and later as a resort for the elite. The main attraction of the island are the giant land tortoises.  We entered a lush area where these gargantuan creatures roams slowly and steadily, their age written in paint on their shells.  30. 55. 80. 185. The tortoises towered over young children.

When we entered the tortoise kingdom, we were given leafy food to feed them.  In America, this would have been closely supervised with the tortoises behind a barrier.  There were virtually no barriers and we were free to go up to one of the giants and watch them chomp the greenery.  When the tortoises saw you were carrying food, they wouldn’t rush to you, but let you come to them, and slowly they would rise up on their stubby legs and crane their legs to reach the food.  I fed a 150 year old tortoise who had cataracts in his eyes, and his legs shook as he tried to hoist himself out of a murky puddle.  He chomped horizontally and closed his blind eyes as green drool dribbled from the corners of his mouth.  I asked him what it was like to live in 1860.  He wasn’t much of a talker, perhaps his hearing was bad too.

All of a sudden, I heard a strange deep groaning sound, as if someone had poked an old man and he exclaimed in a sustained manner, “Oooowwwww.”  I looked up to see one of the 130 year tortoises on top of a 30 year old tortoise. Each push propelled them forward and the sound would come again.  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.  Children were mesmerized and asked their parents what they were doing.  “She’s giving him a piggy back ride,” the parents nervously explained, not willing to go into the when-a-boy-tortoise-loves-a-girl-tortoise talk.

Because we were also snorkeling that day, I left my camera at home, so I had no way of documenting the incident.  Perhaps it was better that way, although it would have been funny to record the reaction of the kids.  After all the tortoise excitement, we gathered onto our wooden boat that had both a motor and sails, to go to a reef close by.  The water was warm and we saw many fish.  The waves started getting rougher while we were out at sea, so a little boat took the children back to the beach so they could swim safely.

Have you ever tried to snorkel when there are huge waves?  You breath through a tube and if a wave topples into the tube, you end up with your lungs full of salt water.  That wasn’t the worst of my problems.  Because we were using rented equipment, nothing fit quite right, especially for someone has small as me.  I got huge blisters on my feet from the fins and I could only look under water for a minute because the mask filled with sea water.  Because I had to keep readjusting the mask, it got foggy and no amount of spit would clear it out.  When I got back on the boat, my feet were blistered, my lungs were burning, and my eyes were stinging and puffy.  That being said, I would have done it again in a heart beat.

There was one day we wandered around Stone Town and ate at the night market.  It’s a very touristy place, so when we would speak to vendors and other people in Swahili, they were taken aback.  It was nice to know that we knew just enough Swahili to get around, although I wish I were more fluent.  Zanzibar is very Islamic and the architecture reflected that style with beachy Bongo Flava mixed in.  Besides spices, Stone Town is known for it’s large wood-carved doors.  Doors can be so plain, but in Zanzibar, you can’t help but wonder what is behind the ornate gateways.

Shopping is all good and fun (especially when you have honed your haggling skills), but nothing was as lively as the night market.  The only comparison I can draw is the Ramandan celebrations at night near the Blue Mosque.  Mom thought it was kind of like the state fair.  People at the state fair don’t display fresh seafood like crab, shark, octopus, and various fish on a table and then actively pursue people to come to their table to try it.  Cindy said she thinks the food actually comes from the same place, and by the look of all the arranged food across all the tables, I would have to agree.  People were everywhere, sampling this, coaxing someone to try that.  Wazungu and Tanzanians alike.  I tried baby shark, and I have to say I quite like it.  And no, it does not taste like chicken.

There were so many people there that knew each other, and greeted each other warmly.  I was surprised by the number of people I ran into there: the music teacher at the school where I work in Moshi with his wonderful wife and his mother, I recognized another teacher from Arusha, and people from our hotel.  I saw a guy walking with a Twins baseball cap and I couldn’t resist the urge to tap him on the shoulder.  He said he was from MN originally, but how he does human rights work in Uganda.  There was one family we met that was originally from Tanzania, but now live in St. Paul. The world can definitely be a small place.

We had a little drama coming home.  When we arrived to the airport to head home, we realized that our passports were still in the hotel safe, so we had to rush back and get them before our plane left.  Crisis averted.  We had to change planes in Dar Salaam, but no one gave us any instructions on where to go, or whether we needed to get our luggage and recheck it.  We had 30 minutes before our next plane was supposed to leave.  We scrambled off the plane and made our way inside.  People were everywhere and there were no clear signs.  We asked dozens of people where to go and if we needed our luggage.  Some didn’t speak any English hardly and our Swahili wasn’t good enough, and some pointed us in the wrong direction just to get us out of the way.  Finally a woman told us not to worry about our luggage and to follow her to our gate.  She lead us through an “employees only” door, through a narrow hallway, past an employee break room where people were having their afternoon chai, and through another door that lead us near our gate.  I don’t know how we would have found it otherwise.  We got there right as they were calling final boarding.  Second crisis averted. As we were flying back to Moshi, we caught a glimpse of Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Meru poking through the clouds.  I couldn’t believe that in a few weeks time, I would be standing on top of that mountain, if all goes well.

We descended through the clouds to Kilimanjaro Airport.  All of us agreed we had a great time, but that we were glad to be back in cooler Moshi.  Then we ran into another snafu: mom’s luggage never made it back.  Somehow I got mine just fine, but her’s was gone.  We wrote a report and they said they would call if they found it.  Mom said that she would be okay with some of the stuff being lost, just clothes, medicine, and our keys.  Oh wait, our keys.  We got into a taxi to take us back to Moshi and we tried calling our trusty housekeeper Rebecca if she could open our house for us.  We couldn’t get a response.  When we got back home, we went to her house, but her friend said she was in Arusha.  Somehow, we got through to her and, to make a long story short, we got into our house at 11pm on New Year’s Eve.  Both of us weren’t feeling well, so we decided to have an early night and not go out.  At midnight, I was popping a pepto because my stomach felt queasy.  We spent most of the next few days in bed, sleeping or reading.  I had stomach issues, but mom had worse symptoms.  In the end, we took her to a clinic and found out she had food poisoning.  After getting the meds she needed, she’s been doing much better.  Oh, and we got her suitcase back.

I’ve figured out that any kind of travel in Tanzania, whether it be on a bus or on an airplane, is not without it’s excitement.  I’m glad for the time we had to explore Zanzibar and rest on the beach and by the pool.  I even got a tan, which I thought was virtually impossible for me to do.  In the next two weeks, I’m planning on training for our climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro.  I’ll keep you posted about how that goes!

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