Mambo....Poa....Poa kichizi kama ndizi

Picking up where I left off after the safari post...

To get to Zanzibar from Dar Es Salaam, you can head to the airport and pay for a quick flight on a puddle jumper, or you can take a cab to the harbor, fight off aggressive touts, try your best not to get hosed on the price of a ferry ticket, and then push your way onto a crowded ferry that may (Rose) or may not (me, but I was close) make you sea sick. Needless to say, our budget required that we choose the latter.

The ferry deposited us in Stone Town, and after going through the motions at immigration (a useless and merely ceremonial puffing of the chest to remind tourists that Zanzibar was once independent from Tanzania), we made our way to St. Monica’s hostel. The location of St. Monica’s—adjacent to an Anglican church, abutting a former slave market, and within earshot of the local mosque’s early morning call to prayer—is symbolic of Zanzibar’s fascinating mélange of African, Middle Eastern, and colonial culture and history. Labyrinthine is probably over used as a descriptor of Stone Town’s tiny streets, but there’s no better way to describe the winding, bending hallways where Burqa-clad women glide past Indian shop owners selling their wares to Western tourists who have to jump to avoid the local children’s speeding bicycles.

It was dark when we arrived, so we took all of the next day to explore. We took our first walk on the beach, did some souvenir shopping, and ate a lunch of Zanzibari pizza (half Spanish omelet, half chapatti quesadilla) at a food stand where the most competent employee kept track of our tab in his head, spoke three languages, and had at most 11 candles on his last birthday cake. Before all of that, though, we stopped by a restaurant called Sambusa Two Tables to check on a dinner reservation Rose had made the week before over the phone. The thing about this restaurant is that it’s not really a restaurant, it’s a family’s home. The reason it’s called Sambusa Two Tables is that there are only two tables. When we rang the doorbell, a boy stuck his head out of the window on the floor above us and quietly waited for us to explain why we’d bothered him. He told us that, yes, we were welcome back later for dinner and that we should show up around seven. When we came back that night, we entered into a quiet, dusty sitting room where one other party (table number two) was already waiting. The room was painted light blue and decorated with a collection of old American album covers. When the owner/cook/waiter/father/host invited us to sit down, we went up a flight of stairs, through his family’s living room, and settled in for an incredible meal. There’s no menu, so we just sat back and watched as platters of spiced beef, curried lentils, sweet bread, vegetable soup, and a perfectly soft dessert plantains were brought to the table. The whole experience was one of the biggest highlights of our trip.

To the right is the entryway to the restaurant:

From Stone Town, we went north to a beach called Kendwa. By this point our group had expanded to include three of Ben’s friends who also had been traveling, and at Kendwa we were fortunate to get three rooms at a tiny hostel-like place on the beach. The rooms were basic, but we were literally steps from the sand and we had a clear view of the water. Each morning we were served chapatti, mango, and coffee for breakfast as we stared at the vibrantly turquoise Indian Ocean. While our temporary home was only steps away, watching the locals push their boats along the shoreline and wade out into the water to collect seaweed tended to remind me of just how far away from home I really was. Here's my favorite shot from Kendwa, which I took from the breakfast table:

On the second day of beach time, Rose and I went farther north to a resort called Ras Nungwi, where I’d read online that there was a surfable wave breaking off the coast. The owner of the resort was friendly enough to lend me his board and by about 10:30 I was ready to paddle out. The problem was that the wave was about a kilometer offshore, and I haven’t surfed or done any swimming since I was last in San Diego. By the time I made it out to the wave, I was pretty beat, and the conditions had deteriorated a bit. The sandbar that causes the break proved a really helpful resting place. After some time, I did manage to catch a couple waves and being completely alone in the water added to the peacefulness that I always feel when I’m out in the ocean.

Me getting ready to paddle out:

The rest of the week was glorious for its repetition: wake up, coffee and chapatti on the beach, read my book, go in the water, play cribbage, have a beer, and eat dinner. The title of this post is a Swahili exchange we heard over and over again. Mamba (what’s up), Poa (cool), Poa kichizi kama ndizi (cool like a crazy banana). And one other unexpected bonus from the trip: a crab, banana, and avocado sandwich. It’s incredibly tasty.

More BBQ's

I had some students over to my house for a BBQ this weekend and Rose wrote a great post about it here.

Moto Polo

My friend Katherine came by the house yesterday and mentioned that she'd spent the day watching a Moto Polo match. When I ride around on motos here, I usually think "wow, I really wish I had good health insurance", not "wow, wouldn't it be fun to ride around a field on these things and hit a small ball into a goal." Apparently, the guys in this video DO think that.

"Matches" occur somewhat regularly here in town and I definitely need to make it to one before I go.

T 2000

Rose is blogging too (www.roseleda.blogspot.com) and she was able to add photos directly to her posts. Sooo, I thought I would try again after I wasn't able to do so way back when I started this thing. Here's my practice photo, which we took at a store called T 2000 on Rose's first day here.

What, your local store doesn't have foam animal hats right next to the vinegar and powdered milk?

Get your safari on

Last week Rose and I returned from a 10-day trip to Tanzania. It’s taken me some time to get back into the flow of things here in Kigali, catch up on email, and generally readjust to a life that doesn’t involve sleeping five feet from the beach. In short, the trip was amazing. We spent three days on safari in Tanzania’s Northern Circuit, took a 9-hour bus ride across the country to Dar Es Salaam, ferried over to Zanzibar, and then hung out on the beach for seven days. As we like to say in Rwanda: nice time.

After catching an early morning flight from Kigali, I was hoping to catch a glimpse of Mount Kilimanjaro on our descent into Tanzania but the cloud cover was too thick. The safari company’s Land Cruiser was there to pick us up when we landed at Kilimanjaro (the driver was even holding a nice hand-written sign that said “Nicholas Cain X 2”). Our first stop was the city of Arusha, where we met up with our friend Ben Lawless, a fellow former paralegal from DC who was wrapping up a 4-month-long pre-law school jaunt around the world. After collecting Ben we were on our way to our first safari stop: Lake Maynara National Park. Over the next two and a half days, we meandered through Lake Maynara, Ngorongoro Crater, and Tarangire National Park. Elephants plodded, rhinos lumbered, lions dozed, giraffes postured, and hippos harrumphed as we bounced along in our car, amazed at how close we were able to get to the animals. The animals were always framed by stunning vistas of the surrounding landscape. The crater—savannah on the floor, jungle-like near the rim—was particularly special, and it was where I had most of my “I feel really lucky to be doing this” moments. Our driver usually turned off the engine when we approached a group of animals, and when other vehicles weren’t around, the only sound would be the breeze and an elephant swinging its trunk, a wildebeest grunting, or a zebra clopping along in the grass.

In addition to the obvious perk of seeing wildlife in their natural habitat, being “on safari” provides some interesting people watching, too As often happens when you take Westerners out of their natural habitat, our fellow safari goers wore some absolutely outrageous clothing. Apparently, when people come to Africa to look at animals from the comfort of a car, in parks where you aren’t allowed to get out of the vehicle, they think they have to stop at REI and buy mounds of khaki vests, ridiculous hats, and convertible pants. When we saw one especially colonial troupe, Ben said it looked like the people raided the basement of the British Field Museum to come up with their outfits. Probably not too far from the truth. Not surprisingly, there was a direct correlation between the absurdity of a group’s get-up and the luxuriousness of their safari vehicle. Pay more for your trip, look more like a fool.

Because the crater and the rest of Tanzania’s Northern Circuit are such popular destinations, there were lots of other people driving around with their heads sticking out of their cars. In the crater especially, each time we stopped in front of a rare animal, we would inevitably joined by as many as seven other vehicles. This didn’t bother me nearly as much as I expected it to and I spent a lot of time pondering the sociological implications of the whole safari experience. We came across families, groups of students, older folks, almost all of them white (I only saw one African family in a safari vehicle during the whole three-day trip). Some people spent most of their time with their camera in front of their faces, while others chatted away loudly every time their car stopped in front of a group of animals, tainting otherwise peaceful moments of immersion in the natural world. Allusions to Thoreau aside, the people watching was often as interesting as the animals themselves.

Zanzibar deserves its own blog entry, and I hope I’ll have time to get to that soon.

You can see all of the pictures from the trip on my Picasa page. I made a separate album for the Tanzania trip.