When I landed in Zanzibar (after having to go through security twice in five minutes at Dar-es-Salaam airport), I started looking around for a taxi or shuttle to my hostel. As I looked back towards the baggage belt, I saw a taller guy who was wearing a Milwaukee Braves cap. Naturally, I went over to inquire about what a Wisconsin emblem was doing in the Zanzibar airport. We got to talking, I told him I was from Madison, and then out of nowhere, a young woman’s voice:
“Ben?”
I turned around to see Callie Alexander, an old college chum that I had performed with in a 2002-2003 musical production. I hadn’t seen her in probably 6+ years, and here she was, at the Zanzibar airport. The gentleman I had approached with that ended up being her husband, Chip. They live in the Caribbean island nation of St. Thomas; she is a manager at a snorkeling and kayaking company, and he an agricultural project planner. His job was the reason for them being in Tanzania as he was overseeing a farming development. I split a cab with them into Stone Town, which is the metropolitan portion of Zanzibar, and got their African cell phone # before the driver took me on an adventure through unlit backstreets and alleys until we finally tracked down the Princess Salme Inn. He thought he was taking me to the Princess Sonja Inn. There were several Princesses over the course of the Sultan-ruled history of Zanzibar, and apparently several of them got hotels named in their honor.
The place was just what I needed for 20 bucks—bed, shower, internet, good breakfast. I ended up rooming with a chap named James, a veterinarian from Birmingham, UK. We had a pretty nice little lounge on the rooftop of the building, where he and I and a girl named Katherine who was in Zanzibar to swim with the dolphins hung out and had a beer. I needed some food, so we decided to take a walk.
A few blocks away off to the side of a main road I got a reasonably large order of fries for 1,000 shillings (60 cents) that were covered in various spicy sauces and mayo. Really good. As we were waiting, a man on a bike kept riding by and asking where we were from. When he found out I was from the United States, he asked “You know Michael Phelps? You know Michael Phelps?’’ I replied that I didn’t know him personally, but that yes, I knew who Michael Phelps was. At this point, he started pointing to his USA swimming jacket and USA swim trunks he was wearing. ‘’Very nice,’’ I said. ‘’I got from Michael Phelps; he give this to me,’’ he said. According to this gentleman, he had met Mr. Phelps at a world swim meet in 2009, in which he was representing Tanzania. He said his name was Amaar something. We thanked him, wished him luck and started to walk. He must have really wanted to make sure we believed him, because halfway down the block, he cruised up on his bike once again, this time brandishing a laminated badge from the very 2009 games he spoke of. Sure enough, there was his picture on the badge. I have since google searched and found that a swimmer named Ammaar Ghadiyali did, in fact, represent Tanzania in the 2009 international games. I have not been able to find a correlating image yet, and quite frankly, it’s not high on my priority list.
A little bit later, James, Katherine and I were part of the most elaborate tourist trap I have ever seen. To be honest with you, it didn’t even piss me off—I mostly thought it was ridiculous and funny.
In Zanzibar, there is a famous night market where you can get all types of food and it stays open all hours under bright white lamps. They sell samosas and sugar cane juice and even pizza, but the thing that is most common to do is to just pick out a piece of seafood and have them grill it right in front of you. Like just about anywhere in Zanzibar, you can haggle on the price with them. James and Katherine had just gotten lobster there the night before and said it had been ‘’a bit rubbery’’, so I abstained. We were just passing through at this point because we were meeting up with Callie and Chip at a bar that had live Reggae music.
Just as we are working our way out of the market and across the street towards where the music was coming from, a dreadlocked guy approaches and says ‘’You want to come to Reggae bar? I take you.’’ We politely said no and that we could find our own way over—we could see the lights from the band’s P.A. in the distance. He doesn’t want to hear no as an answer apparently, because he walks across the street all the way to the bar with us and takes us to the front entrance. ‘’Good band, you guys pay cover. $5,000 shillings.’’ Not a big deal…a little less than 3 dollars. We go in and find Callie and Chip, drinking at a table and enjoying what I thought was the Reggae band…instead, it was a lit empty stage with a speaker system playing Reggae music. If the cover had been heftier, I might have put up a fight, but instead I just rolled with it. I was irritated to find out that Callie and Chip had only paid 2,000 shillings, i.e. not having to pay the dude’s commission for bringing us into the “concert”. We had a drink and watched as one lone man, probably mid 40s, went in front of the stage and moved to the music. I say move in this case because I’m not sure you could call it dancing. There were a fair amount of Rastas shooting pool and reveling in the Stone Town nightlife. When our group arrived, we increased the population of females by approximately 200%. Eventually we left, closed out another bar, and parted ways, still flabbergasted by the fact that we ran into each other at the world’s smallest airport halfway around the world.
Friday morning I woke up all set for my beach day, disappointed to see it pouring rain. A man from the van service came up to the front door of the hostel to fetch me. The van started with two couples from another hotel, a driver, his two sidekicks and me. Three minutes later, the man who came to get me from the hotel was replaced by another man and his friend, a big guy they all referred to as “Heavy D”. At one point, the other three gentlemen began to serenade him with Heavy D’s old hit “Now That We Found Love”, which I didn’t expect to hear in 2011, let alone in Africa (until I heard that the real Heavy D passed away. Rest in Peace, Heavy D). Ten minutes later, we picked up another passenger, this time a young woman. This would be the last stop up until African Heavy D was dropped off at his place of work, which I want to say was a fruit stand.
The way it works with these shuttles to the beach is that whether or not you have already booked the hotel is of absolutely no consequence. You still have to ride from one crappy hotel/hostel to the next and entertain the idea of staying at them, and look at the same 4-bunk rooms with plain white walls and a shared toilet. My guess is that maybe the drivers have contracts with all of the hotels to stop and show the passengers their facilities. I couldn’t differentiate one from the next, and though they were cheaper, I tried to make it clear to the drivers that I was holding out for Sunset Kendwa bungalows. One of the couples got sick of riding around and pulled the trigger on one of the lesser bunch. The other couple, Gabriel and Marnie from Sydney, Australia, listened to me and held out for Sunset Kendwa (Kendwa being the name of the beach town). They were really glad they did—the level of quality was apparent right away. It was the 5th place we stopped. I paid $55 for a huge room with a front deck on the beach. Not too bad.
Gabriel and Marnie and I became fast friends when Gabriel saw I was reading George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novel masterpiece A Storm of Swords. A nerdy icebreaker, if ever there was one. After we went to our separate rooms, we ate lunch together and I found out they were Australian cops. Marnie essentially works a beat in the Sydney suburbs, but Gabriel’s job is a little more intense. He coordinates undercover drug buys and builds up surveillance on dealers. He’s recently transitioned a little into organized crime surveillance, which sounded intense. We tried to snorkel but the last boat had already taken off for the day. While Marnie went off to work on the laptop, Gabriel and I went swimming and found that we may not have even needed to snorkel. The water looked so clear that you could more or less see the bottom. We saw some schools of fish, some bright angelfish looking things, some small areas of coral. I stepped on something that I thought was a sea urchin, but the fact that I didn’t have to pull out a stinger and have someone pee on my foot to get rid of the venom told me that was not the case. Still hurt, whatever it was. Eventually, Gabriel went back to his room so I walked around, took some pictures and got some quality hammock time that rotated between napping and reading about the lords and ladies of Westeros. The sun finally came out around 4:00, so I did get a pretty decent beach sunset.
I hooked up again with Gabriel and Marnie for dinner. Again I’ll emphasize how far the money goes here—a plate of crab, rock lobster, prawns, some other type of fish and a couple of sides ran about $10. During meal time, there was a Masai (the tribe of cow herders local to Eastern Africa) who would walk around and sing songs to your table, even if you didn’t want him to. A nice enough guy, but the songs were these bizarre castrato-style tunes with weird grunts and chants mixed in. Didn’t really feel like dinner music. I found out later that he helps out around the hotel with picking up bottles and trash as a side job to his cow-keeping, and that his name was, in fact, Kilimanjaro. I have a video of one of his songs that is too big of a file to send, but I’ll show whoever wants to see it upon my return. After dinner, Marnie went right back to the room (to be fair, they had just taken a three-day bus ride from Botswana to Tanzania) and Gabriel and I had one more drink before he called it a night. It was 9:30, and initially I was getting ready to do the same, but I thought I’d have one more look around the beachside bar. The next time I looked at the clock, it was 2:30.
I started out by talking to a gal named Allie, early 30s, whose job is to lead what are called overland trips. Basically, she and a driver and other staff take people all over the continent in a big bus, and people can sign up for whatever chunks of it that they please. Her commitment is 83 days. She’s been with the company for a year and a half, and was at around the halfway point of her 5th 83-day trip, so she hasn’t much time off. Throughout the night I met the people on her tour, and there were about 20 of them. Some were just on a two to three-week section of the trip, and a few were in for all 83 days. Most were on the younger end, but a couple of the people were my age or older—a woman from the UK was in her mid-40s and still hanging strong with the young folks. Due to the dark hair/blue eyes combo, nearly everyone in their group thought I was from Ireland. They even said I sounded Irish when I talked. That was interesting.
As the night went on, the beachside bar became more and more lively. More people came, more people drank and sweated, more people danced. In contrast to Pub Alberto in Moshi, the dance floor was significantly better-smelling because the bar was outdoors. Like Pub Alberto, the DJ also spun a couple of Dr. Dre tracks, including “Still D.R.E.” After hearing it twice, I can now say with some certainty that even in Africa, Dr. Dre still rocks his khakis with a cuff in the crease.
At one point, Allie turned to me and said something British like “There! That’s the dance we buggered up last night! The new African dance they do here!” I looked over towards the dance floor and, after a little assessing of the situation, determined that the “new African dance” was actually just the electric slide, step-by-step. “I’ve been to enough weddings in the last three years to know the electric slide when I see it,” I told her. This argument went on for a few more minutes and she finally conceded, disappointed to find out what she thought was something unique to Africa was actually just unique to Bar Mitzvah DJs.
I noticed after a little while was that the local African men, in general, are all about synchronized dance moves. I went over and stood by a group of them that were in a line and I studied. The steps were not necessarily hard, but it took me to determine when and why the move switched. It turned out that there was a man who stood on one end of the line, and every couple of minutes would change up his steps. Once I had that understood, quite clearly I joined in. Some of them were happy to see a Mzungu (Swahili for “foreigner”, more commonly used to mean “tourist”) in their dance line, and others were completely indifferent. A couple people from the overland trip came over and tried to work their way into the line and suddenly—
The power went out.
The power tends to go out in Africa from time to time. This particular outage lasted for 10-15 minutes. In the dark, a group of about 20-30 people started clapping a beat together, chanting in Swahili and in time, began dancing to the song they were chanting. I thought that was pretty cool. After the lights and music came back on, I hung out for a little bit, looked at the time and tromped back to my beachside bungalow to crash.
The next morning I went back to Stone Town to meet my friend Cody Taggart, his wife Nora and their kids, Hami and Otis. Cody and Nora teach at IST in Dar-es-Salaam, which is an athletic and enrollment rival of the International School Moshi. They have been in Dar for 5 years now and really like it. Hami just turned 3, and is adopted. From the sound of it, they went through a lot of bureaucratic B.S. to make the adoption happen, but it ended up working out. And thankfully it did, because Hami is absolutely awesome. Otis is their biological son, and he is 18 months. He’s really into peek-a-boo, which I exploited whenever I had the chance. They took the ferry over from Dar, which only takes about two hours and is quite affordable.
I got to the hotel and the kids and Nora were all in nap mode, so Cody and I went to the tower top restaurant, where I ate a falafel on top of a 6th floor rooftop. Stone town is really cool to look at from up there…a lot of the architecture is very old and the roofs all vary in their construction, though a lot of them are metal. In general, the day was pretty low-key in comparison. After the kids woke up, we went out again for more food, and then ice cream, and then to look at the Dhows, which are big fishing sailboats that are all over the east coast of Africa. The family went to the hotel pool and I went and swam in the ocean for a little bit. Stone Town is of course a port city, and where I went swimming there were a lot of little fishing boats just hanging out in the bay. We went to dinner and again had ridiculously affordable seafood (swordfish and baby calamari this time), and after the kids went to bed, Cody and I went out for a beer and a hookah on the beach. It was good to catch up with him. It’s pretty fortunate that out of all of the countries in Africa, I happen to have a friend in the same one that I teach in. I crashed really early and took advantage of the giant bed and air conditioning, neither of which are present in Kisanduku.
In the morning, they took me to the Stone Town market. The place was pretty wild. There were stands with hundreds of bananas, people carrying around live chickens, giant fish lying frozen on slanted tables. The one downside to Stown Town and Zanzibar in general is that even when you’re not in a market, it’s hard to walk very far without people trying to sell you something. I learned two important things: One, the phrase “Si HaTaji” which means “No thank you”; and two, that you can always lowball people trying to make sales. I liked to utilize the hard-to-get method because I know that regardless of price, they need to unload their merchandise. You can definitely talk down just about anything. I wanted a Tintin in Zanzibar shirt, the guy wanted 30,000 shillings, I said I’d do 20, he said 28, I said 20, he said he couldn’t, I said thanks but no thanks, and as I walked out of the door, he said “Okay, okay…I’ll do 20.” I left Zanzibar with two shirts, a pair of Ray-Ban knockoffs and a watch for around $45. Cody looked at the sunglasses and said “Oh, you got the good ones. They usually say ‘Roy Bean’.”
On the way out of the market, we stopped by the birthplace of Freddie Mercury. This is one of Zanzibar’s claims to fame. Yes, Queen’s frontman was born in a humble apartment in Stone Town. Being that it was a popular tourist attraction, the Mercury House was closed for renovations, which was a bummer. But I still got a couple of pics of the front plaque and the pictures outside. Next time, Freddie.
I’ll send pictures along soon as well as a brief e-mail about my Thanksgiving here as I get ready for the all-encompassing ISM Sports Weekend, in which programs from all over Tanzania (including Cody and Nora’s) come to compete for international school athletic glory.
Asante Sana...
