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.