Living like a local in Zanzibar!
Trip Start
Sep 15, 2006
1
44
80
Trip End
??? ??, 2007
Stone Town, Zanzibar,
Tanzania
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Actually, we had bought a knife in Mbeya to cut up fruit on our journeys. Where had I packed it again? "Umm. Yeah, I do. It's somewhere here."
The lady looked at us unimpressed. "It's just for cutting pineapples," Cierra added.
"Leave it in the box," she said, and waved us on. Too bored to deal with us any longer.
We got rid of the dockside help by repeating slowly that we were staying with a friend and didn't need a room. Eventually the last guy got the message and wandered away.
We called our new host Abou, who told us to take a cab to Michanzani, Block 5, then ask for Abou. Michanzani turns out to be a "Projects" style development, and Block 5 is an insanely long 5 story chunk of tenements. We pull up and ask for Abou, and this gets a laugh from the local residents. "There are so many Abous" one guy said. "Which staircase does he live on?"
We didn't know that. So, we called Abou again and he came to meet us where we were. His place was on the top floor, and we climbed a graffiti covered staircase. Thankfully, Abou's room, in a apartment shared with 2 other families, was a relative oasis of cleanliness and calm. He had a fridge, stereo, and a new retro-looking television. Since there was only one bed, Cierra and I assumed that we would have the floor and immediately set out assuring him that we would be fine, although we were questioning that ourselves. But it soon came out that we would have the bed and Abou would go and stay with a friend.
We went with Abou to his girlfriend Mirfat's place, another room within a shared house. There we met her mother Miriam, a boisterous woman who was excited to have an opportunity to practice her English. She'd been taking night classes and could communicate some things well, but most of the time was too passionate for mere words and would resort to long Swahili sentences, an English word here and there, mixed with numerous sound effects and gestures.
The family was watching a Tanzanian horror movie, which was pretty well done compared to most home-grown entertainment. That's not saying too much, though and it still resembled a high-school class project. The plotline? A woman is haunted by witches who have cursed her life for some reason. Witches and witchcraft are a major fear even today for many Africans, so I'm sure that some would find this movie terrifying. However, we weren't exactly shaking with fear, and returned to Abou's place for peaceful slumber with no nightmares at all.
In the morning, Abou was a late sleeper, and we hadn't any keys to the outer door yet, so we had to wait to meet up with him before leaving. We went to Mirfat's house for lunch, pilau with samaki (spiced rice with fish). In Zanzibar, apparently rice dishes are also eaten directly with your hands, crushing the rice into a ball within your hand, then popping the bite up on your thumb and into your mouth. I got the technique pretty quickly, but Cierra had trouble, then got frustrated and grabbed a spoon. She would get a second chance, though, because the next day Miriam planned to take her along to the market in the morning and then show her how to cook lunch for me, and presumably the rest of the family too.
While we were eating lunch, a call came for Miriam. Her friend was having a birthday party tonight and she was invited. Could she bring a couple of muzungu friends along too? That's how we got invited to our first Zanzibarian birthday party. Cierra said she had nothing to wear, so Mirfat took her into the next room and outfitted her with a beautiful white skirt and red blouse. She looked stunning. But she needed to smell good too, so they draped all the clothes for the evening over a bowl of burning incense.
As we now had plans for the evening and cooking in the morning, there was no time to waste on walking into central Stonetown for a look at all the usual tourist junk. We went by the Anglican Cathedral, built on top of the former slave market after its closure in 1873. The high altar inside is placed right where the whipping post once stood. Slaves were whipped in front of potential buyers in order to establish their price. If you cried, you were weak, and would fetch a lower price, or possibly be put back in the holding cell to await either death or the next auction. The tour included a visit to the holding chambers, cramped basement spaces that somehow held 75 slaves. Three days without food or water, another way to supposedly separate the strong from the weak. In a trade already horrible, it seems that no expense was spared for additional cruelty.
We wandered the tight alleyways of Stonetown for a while without getting truly lost, then had an ice cream bar and sat on a park bench for a while. Stone Town's buildings had a lot more history than other places we'd been in Tanzania, and the Arabic carved wooden doors and frames were beautiful, but most places were in such a state of disrepair. Trash in huge heaps everywhere. A few public areas are pretty cleaned up, but mostly it's just throw your garbage on the ground and let it blow where it will.
All of a sudden, it was blowing around pretty fiercely, as a wind and rain storm came in off the coast. We sought shelter in a series of shops, got truly lost in the alleyways, then finally emerged about where we were hoping to near a little cafe.
Finished with our snack, we walked outside again and an older white lady said "Jambo, Muzungu!" as she walked by.
I wasn't going to let her get away with that, so I said "Hey, Muzungu!" right back. She turned around, a look of amazement in her eyes.
"Did you say muz-zoon-goo? Where are you from?" When we replied North Carolina, she practically jumped up and down and said she grew up on Wrightsville Beach. She'd been in Africa for 2 years and hadn't seen a face from home in a long time. We never got her name, but she was so excited that she gave us both a hug.
What a night it was! Zanzibar is known as a very conservative society. The norm of dress here is never reveal, always conceal, with most women in public wearing the flowing black garments that hide all but their faces or eyes. Zanzibar is also more evidence for my theory that began in Japan... that the more buttoned up a society is on the outside, the crazier they get when they let their hair down.
I should have known it when we saw the gift Miriam was bringing to the party. A deep fried chicken, with a perfume pad for your private place (let's not talk about how we learned what that was for) sewed on where its head had been. Around the chicken's little fried rump? A wrapped string of beads, apparently to go about the birthday girl's waist and with more erotic portent.
Miriam planned to visit a bar first, and after viewing the gift, I had no problem with that... this party might be easier to take with a healthy dose of alcohol. A friend of Miriam's met us there, and brought a policeman friend, who drank outside with his partner and kept coming back in for more (on his friend's tab). We watched the beers flow and sipped ours, then sat frozen as Miriam screamed at the bar's management when they disagreed over how many beers had been drunk. We thought for sure there would be a fist fight, but fortunately the bar staff was accustomed to dealing with angry drunkards (who knew?) and there wasn't any violence past what we were doing to our own livers. Shock and surprise as well when we tried to pay for our own when we left and found that Miriam's friend had everybody covered. Many people here are in need and asking for help, but it also seems true that if a Tanzanian has money, he doesn't worry about spending it, even on friends he's just made.
On to the party. Wow. A crowded room. Great food. Arabian music and dancing. At least one transvestite. (Possibly more... you can never be sure.) We were given glasses of wine and refills whenever we got anywhere under half full. Tried to booty shake out on the dance floor, but got showed up by the more experienced. The slow dexterity that Arabian women show off with their hips when they dance is quite impressive. As the music heated up, girls were grinding on each other, Miriam hiked up her skirt, and Cierra and I just looked at each other and kept dancing. Soon after, at a lull around midnight, we started to yawn. Miriam had threatened to take us to a disco afterwards, but didn't protest much when told we were going to bed instead. A short stagger home, then out until morning.
Cierra got up early and went to market with Miriam while I wrote. Biriani was the dish of the day, a deliciously greasy mix of beef, potatoes, onions, garlic and other veggies served over rice. Watching home-style food prep here was wild. There's no cutting board, so everything is held in the hands and cut into a bowl. All the cooking is done over charcoal, and the time it takes is the main reason why people cook for lunch and have leftovers for dinner. Cierra started cooking around 10:30 in the morning and lunch was ready around 1:30. Oh, the taste was worth it, though. It was another dish that is eaten with your hands, though the grease in this one doesn't encourage clumping. I tried the same technique from the day before and got completely messy before taking note that others were using their fingertips only. Except for Cierra, who was using a spoon.
A leisurely afternoon in Stone Town, because we'd run out of purpose before we ran out of time here. We bought our tickets back to Dar on the cheap overnight ferry three nights from now, then sat in the park and talked with a local.
Abou helped us rent a movie that night and we settled down for a little time together with "The Missing", a frontier drama about a young girl stolen by natives and her family's struggle to get her back. But the girl barely had time to get herself stolen before PKewww the power went out, the fan stopped turning, and we felt our way to the window, looking out on a darkened city with the occasional snaking illumination of headlights. We laid in bed, sweat covered. Discomfort turned to misery in the absence of a ceiling fan, and we took turns fanning each other with some ripped out magazine pages.
In the middle of the night, the power came back on, and in the morning we set out to finish the movie. A few more scenes in and PKewww again. Perhaps we just weren't going to see the end of this thing. Oh well.
We were heading out to a village on the Indian Ocean side of Zanzibar. Abou accompanied us to the dalla-dallas to make sure that we wouldn't be taken advantage of with a high price, then walked off towards home without another word. We had to call after him so we could wave goodbye. Hopefully we didn't do anything to upset him, since he was so generous and self-sacrificing. Perhaps it was just too early, or maybe it was a cultural difference that we just didn't understand. At any rate, we had a great time for the two days we shared with Abou and Mirfat's family, a really eye-opening experience about what it's like to live with not much more than yourself and your loved ones.
Our ride out to Jambiani was in a truck bed packed with people and a wooden frame with cargo and baggage piled on top. There was so much flour and rice on the roof in 50 kilogram sacks that I thought for sure the whole thing would be on its side when we got off on uneven dirt detours around endless road works. But it stayed upright, and we rolled into Jambiani 2 hours later, past beachside resorts and the crumbling huts of the locals.
It took a while for us to find something in our range, and it was my turn to guard the bags while Cierra searched. More than an hour passed before she returned and said she'd made a deal with someone 15 minutes down the beach. On our walk, we were set upon by a pack of seaside urchins in secondhand dresses. (Jambo, Muzungu, Jambo) They wanted money but settled instead for a muzungu ride, clasping both my hands and getting swung around in a semi-circle.
It's always a shock when we get back to the beach how much things can be. Lunch was a shared small pizza for the price of a double room in the rest of the country. But it was served at a cute beachside hut, so at least we had a pleasant wait.
When we got back to our bungalow, which had a fan, a breeze, and a western toilet with running water and toilet paper provided (Miraculous!), Cierra decided that she would take a dip in the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately, the tide was on the way out, exposing around a kilometer of tidal sand-flats. We waded out for a bit, decided to turn back, and upon turning discovered that in just a few minutes, even the water we'd waded through had disappeared, leaving us to wander back through wet whiteness. The rippled sand was ground so fine that its wet consistency between our toes was like walking through someone's recently completed oil painting.
A couple more hours of laying about and then the sun was setting. Dinner time! We'd found a restaurant down the shore a little ways where prices weren't too crazy and had pre-arranged for some fresh seafood. Here by the shore, if you go by a restaurant a few hours before you'd like to eat and let them know, the chef can make sure he lays hands on something that's just been dragged out of the sea. In a country where fish usually means a smelly dried thing, blackened and wrinkled and wholly unappetizing, the two barracuda steaks that show up on our plates are a minor miracle. Delicious!
Our night started off pleasantly enough, but then Cierra's stomach started to rumble. Seems that after a blander diet for 5 weeks, the ol' tummy just didn't like fresh seafood. Up for bathroom trips all through the night, and in the morning I was sent to beg another roll of toilet paper from reception.
I went into the village and bought a cheap and bland breakfast for us from a friendly shopkeeper. Once back, we ate a little bit and then a lady from the resort's restaurant came by and asked when we were coming to breakfast. Silly us, we forgot to ask if it was included!
My stomach bravely soldiered on and ate Cierra's egg as well as my own. We've noticed something strange about the chicken eggs here... the yolk is just as white as the white. Tastes the same, but there's not a hint of yellow. Maybe it's because they don't get fed much here, just running around pecking at garbage on the ground. While the breakfast might not have appealed to Cierra that much, the view from the arched window was magnificent. Sun gleamed across white sand flats and sea grass in tidal pools. Fishing boats sat mired in the sand as locals waded far out in the sea, harvesting seashells and seaweed for sale. Finished with second breakfast, we went back to enjoy midday with a little nap in the hammock.
Cierra's sickness increased and turned into dysentery, which sounds worse than it is, trust me. She was concerned, though, and on the good doctor's orders I went to the local shops again to get sugar and salt so we could make her some rehydration fluid. The local shopkeepers were getting to know me well. I mixed up the medicine, but now the doctor thought it tasted bad, so countermanded her own orders and drank all the rest of our water. She'd taken her temperature while I was out, measured a slight fever, and was now convinced that she'd contracted malaria, making plans to get tested as soon as we got back to Dar.
We left Jambiani as we came in the day before... in a dalla-dalla, but with Cierra's colon threatening to interrupt our trip at any moment. Fortunately, she held it together really well for the 2 hours we were bouncing along. For my part, I was terrified that every bump would be the one that would set her off.
We arrived early at the dock for the ferry's nighttime trip back to Dar. Load up at 7:30, Sail at 9, at 9:05 we drop anchor in the harbor at Stone Town and wait until 2am, then we sail to arrive in Dar at 6am. Hmm. Makes just about as much sense as everything else here. The pushing power of the crowd behind us was incredible, and for a few moments I thought my life might conclude with a tumble down the steep ramp leading to the boarding area. But a policeman at the top kept a tiny bit of order, and we got on and were shown mattresses on the nice deck while most of the crowd were locked on the main deck, told to sit in their hard chairs and like it.
We didn't have long to wait before we were joined by Josh, an affable Canadian fellow, around 20 and on his third long backpacking trip. We found his perspective on Tanzania alternately refreshing and hilarious. He'd forgotten all about malaria, and the anti-malarials he was supposed to be taking. Arriving in the country knowing nothing of the visa requirements, he was shocked that he had to pay to get in. He was also surprised to learn that the "friend" who'd bought the ferry ticket for him had made $5 on the deal by telling him the ticket was more than it actually was.
Cierra went to sleep while I stayed up and taught Josh all the card games in our limited repertoire, and he thoroughly beat me in most of them.
In the morning, we decided to skip the pushing and waited for all the other passengers to disembark. Josh agreed and waited with us, until he remembered that he had to be on a long-distance bus in less than an hour and he didn't know yet where it departed from. We watched him bound away with a smile.
