The Beach, The Boat, The Beginning

After arriving back in Stone Town that evening, July 31, I had dinner at the street market next to the Beit El-Ajaib (House of Wonders--i.e., Zanzibar Museum), a huge and lovely old building with supposedly one of the world's largest carved wooden doors. Vendors lined the street at the market, all displaying a very similar array of fish kebabs, calamari, dangly tentacle-things, banana chapatis, and these funny little "Swahili pizzas," which were dough pockets filled with ground beef, an egg, and cabbage, and topped with the strawberry-jam-pinkish-red ketchup that they served all over Tanzania. The fish was actually rather dry--maybe I was a few hours too late--but it was still fun to be out in such a lively atmosphere. I also ran into a Dutch guy I'd met back in Lushoto and an Icelandic girl from the spice tour, and I convinced them to join me in searching for this place I'd read about in my Lonely Planet where some taarab band rehearses in the evenings. We actually found it--no small feat in those winding alleys, especially since it turned out to be in the top floor of some unmarked, mostly-empty building. We just followed our ears up to where the band members (several violinists, an accordian player, some tambourine players, a bassist, and quite a few singers) were practicing their rhythmically wailing, Arab-inspired music. For the last number, the women floated over to us in their acres of sumptuous fabric and asked the Icelandic girl and me to dance with them, which we did while laughing at our own robotic attempts to mirror their effortless undulations. It was a good time.

Afterwards the three of us went to a ridiculously overpriced bar on the waterfront and chatted for a while; I joked that I was hanging out with my two oldest friends on Zanzibar, which was amusingly true. Our bar, along with pretty much the entire city, shut down by 11pm (the Islamic influence, no doubt), so after not too long we called it a night.

The next morning I got up with the mosque at dawn again, put my bathing suit on under my clothes, and headed out to the sketchy-as-hell bus station to find my ride to the beach village of Jambiani, on the southeastern coast, chosen because of my guidebook's description of its quiet atmosphere and "otherworldly" turquoise waters. The driver told me I had about a 45-minute wait until my "bus" (read: flatbed pickup truck, actually rather nicely appointed with benches in the back and a covering over the top) left, so I wandered over to have black coffee and sweetbread with a group of men seated under a tree. They found this very funny in a good-natured sort of way, their amusement augmented by my comical attempts at Swahili. The guys were even so kind as to offer me my sweetbread for free, and while I didn't take them up on that, I sincerely appreciated the offer. These salesmen posed an interesting contrast with the dozens of guys per day who tried so hard to sell me overpriced stuff. By doing something completely out of the ordinary for a tourist--after all, only local dudes sit around under trees drinking out of weeks-since-they-were-washed enamel cups--I suddenly became their guest, and they wanted to take care of me as such. It was a really lovely moment.

Anyway, the ride to Jambiani took somewhere in the neighborhood of three hours, despite the fact that it wasn't that far away. The driver and his two helpers were remarkably amenable, though, to helping passengers hoist all kinds of luggage up onto the roof over the flatbed: stalks of bananas by the dozen, huge bundles of firewood, bags and boxes and burdens of all sorts went up there.

I've spoken before about the idea of personal space in Tanzania, but this bus ride provided the best example yet. In Western countries, when boarding a public vehicle with benches stretching out in front of you, you'd probably scoot all the way down to the far end to make room for the people getting on behind you. There, though, people sat as close as possible to the end at which they entered, whether there was any room there or not. If other people were sitting by the end, they'd just sit on them. Even if there was no one at all sitting on the back half of the bench, people entering would still crowd into the front half as if they had no other choice. And, perhaps strangest of all, those sitting on the far ends made no motion to scoot down to alleviate the crush on one side of them. Nobody minded being squished. It was just so completely normal to them.

Anyway, Jambiani was as idyllic as the book said, with little tiny huts made of rough white sea stone (some kind of coral, maybe) and the whitest white sand I'd ever seen. It was so powdery that it swirled into the waves as they lapped the shore, giving the shallows a milky quality; it was so fine that, when wet, it was sticky to the touch, sucking my sandals off like a giant mixture of flour and water. I was the only patron at my little guesthouse (whose "reception" was a solitary desk with absolutely nothing on it in a bare concrete three-walled room, while the "breakfast area" consisted of several chairs and tables plunked into the sand under a thatched roof.) I swam, practically at my doorstep, in the Indian Ocean that night, and spent the next morning walking out to much-receded waterline. The tide was at least a mile out, leaving behind a fascinating array of tide pools filled with sea urchins and starfish that took me over an hour to veeeeeery carefully pick my way through. The water was so marvelously clear that I could see every hair on my toes, even through knee-deep pools. There were lots of women and children in the water tending the seaweed crops (some random guy named Ali who walked me all around the beach the day before had told me that they sell it to Denmark for cosmetics.) It was such a beautiful scene, with the women's kangas and headscarves billowing out on the water as they worked, fully clothed, up to their chests in the vividly blue-green water. I wandered around that foreign landscape for quite some time.

I took the open-sided dala-dala back to Stone Town that afternoon in time to catch the night ferry back to Dar. The ferry trip to Zanzibar usually takes about two hours. Because of the currents, the ride back usually lasts four...unless you take the infamous night ferry, that is. Then it takes ten hours.

My rusting hulk of a ship was crammed to at least 150% capacity. Walking down the aisles between the rows of seats was impossible, as every square inch of floor space was covered in sleeping people. We finally sputtered away from the dock at about 10pm, proceeded a hundred yards into the harbor...and dropped anchor, staying put for the next two and a half hours. I think this was done for safety reasons; they didn't want us to have to be in the Zanzibar port too late at night and didn't want us to arrive in the Dar port before dawn. While I did appreciate the concern, the wait was excruciating. My knees ached from the cramped seats; babies all around me were crying, and while I understood their discomfort, they were really loud; the chalky fluorescent lights were glaring, even through my eyelids when I attempted to close them. I finally forfeited my seat and climbed over the bodies to a patch of standing room by the rail, where I was quickly joined by a local guy who made the interminable wait pass a little faster by asking my questions about what he euphemistically called "instructional videos" (i.e., porn) in America.

Several hours, a light rain, and a handful of invitations to Porno Man's house later, the ferry finally started moving and I made my way to some chump's vacated seat, where I nodded off sporadically for the next five and a half hours, my moments of wakefulness punctuated by the melodic sounds of vomiting all around me. We docked in Dar at first light, and I groggily got a cab and headed straight for the airport to await my afternoon departure.

I once again had an overnight layover in Doha, Qatar, and was completely prepared to spend it, as I had on my way to Tanzania, alternating between dozing in a chair, pacing the airport, and accidentally squirting myself awake with the bidet in the ladies' room. Because it was still relatively early in the evening when I landed, though, I decided to try going through customs first to see if they'd let me out into the city for a few hours without buying a visa. I went up to the guy behind the desk, told him I had a connecting flight in the morning and that I was hoping to leave the airport...and then the clouds parted and Allah smiled and he handed me, completely unbidden, a voucher for a free cab ride to my free hotel with a free buffet dinner and breakfast before my free cab back to the airport in the morning to catch my next flight. Not kidding.

What little I saw of downtown Doha (on the way to my Free! Free! Free! accommodations) was a bizarre mass of construction projects and brand new skyscrapers flaunting an abundance of shiny steel and an excess of windows, all incongruously thrust into the 110-degree air (and this was at night) above empty streets blowing with desert dust. It seemed very much like a city that had just sprung up the week before, built by an eager contingent of citizens who had suddenly realized that they're richer than God.

I chased the sun westward all the next day, and by the time I touched down on home soil it was still high in the sky, though 20 hours had passed since my sunrise. I was glad to be back in my beautiful and diverse home country, glad to be in a place where I could communicate easily, understand the customs, and not be a public spectacle. I was also, though, truly sad to stop traveling, sad to no longer be living so independently and spontaneously. Sometimes the trip was very removed from my typical daily reality; a life-away-from-real-life. But then again, sometimes I was frustrated. Sometimes I was bored. Sometimes I was excited, nurtured, afraid, content, amazed, lonely. In many ways, the trip was as real as real life gets.

I am now a graduate student. I arrived in Hawaii one week ago, just eight days after I returned to the US. I've been to the beach, the forest, the art museum and the farmers' market. I've gone to a slack key guitar festival and been given a lei. I've been rained on at all times of the day and night. I've watched geckos scamper across my kitchen table.

I start class on Monday, and I'm a little nervous.

I'm already planning my next big trip.