Zanzibar aka Heaven

I’m back in Arusha! It’s only been five days, but we managed to fit so much in that I feel like it’s been a year. On Sunday we got up and left at 6 am. The bus came to our hotel where the 8 of us met with Martha (our program coordinator), the driver, a friend of the photography professor who came to take pictures (he was nice but the picture taking was not very welcomed at 6 in the morning), and Frank who the son of our tour organizer. He goes to university in Nairobi but took the week off and came with us instead.

The first place we went was Tanga. It is on the coast, about three hours north of Dar Es Salaam. It took around 5 hours to get there with a stop for lunch in the middle, and the drive was beautiful. There aren’t a lot of roads here (in fact it’s pretty much just one regular two-way street the entire way) so it takes a lot longer to get anywhere than it would at home. The scenery is absolutely beautiful, though, and the villages that we passed through on the way were really cool to see. I started the vacation off right by leaving my camera battery at home, so I didn’t take any pictures. It sounds rough, but it actually meant that everyone else was taking pictures and I just got to experience it all.

We freaked out when we got to our hotel in Tanga because even though it wasn’t that nice relative to hotels in the States, it had air conditioning! And the beds were comfortable and the room was really pretty! So, we settled in there and then went to these caves that Tanga is famous for. On the way we stopped at an orphanage, which was interesting. Our professors/coordinators don’t seem to understand the concept of exploiting people. That sounds harsh, but we literally stopped into this orphanage (without them telling us first) to look at the kids on the way to our vacation. I can kind of get the idea of showing us a good place to volunteer, but the man running it gave us a talk and then our photographer had us take pictures of the kids. Honestly, we didn’t do anything for the kids, or even know their names. We don’t have the right to have a picture with them that Arcadia (our school) can use for their website. Sorry, tangent…but that made me really, really upset. I’m going to talk to Martha about it, though.

On a lighter note the caves were so sweet! They connect for miles and miles to other cities and are supposedly haunted. I climbed up a vine (or maybe a root since we were underground). There were tons of bats flying all around us. For dinner we went to go swim at this restaurant on the water. We got there, all ready to swim in our (now I can see) extremely skimpy bathing suites, and found hundreds of guys swimming. There was literally not a single other white person there. I saw maybe five girls and all but one were swimming almost fully dressed. I was really hot, though, so I basically told my friends to speak up quickly if they wanted to leave because I wanted to get in. I wore a tank top over my suite and just ran from our table to the water. It was so worth it! It seemed so much more buoyant than the water at home and the sun set while we were floating around.

We woke up at 5 the next day and drove to Dar Es Salaam where we took the boat to Zanzibar. This is where the real adventures began. First, we missed the ferry. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but we were all tired, cranky, and unimaginably hot. I mean…Dar and Zanzibar are hands down the hottest places I have ever been, EVER. We eventually got on the ferry and I sat with Frank. I looked up at the movie that was playing at one point and it was Congo. I don’t know if that is a popular movie, but from what it looked like it’s pretty offensive and a bizarre choice for a ferry in East Africa.

I forgot to mention a detail earlier: we didn’t bring our passports. Now, Zanzibar is part of Tanzania so we wouldn’t need them, right? We are well-trained young Americans, and we have always been taught to leave our passports in a safe place in the hotel unless we absolutely need them. Well, apparently we needed them. Martha says she assumed that it was common sense to bring them (people who aren’t Tanzanian don’t think so I don’t think). Needless to say, we got to Zanzibar but didn’t get into Zanzibar right away. It took about an hour of Frank, Martha, and our tour guide (who apparently knew the guys) to convince the border control to let us in under the condition that the three of them would go to jail if anything bad happened.

The first two nights in Zanzibar we stayed at a hostel that used to be…a church? Or something like that. It’s built on top of what used to be chambers that kept slaves before they were sold. The church next door was built on the whipping platform. We got a tour and it was really interesting to compare our slave trade to the one that affected East Africa (if you separate them). That first day in Zanzibar we went on a walking tour of Stone Town, which was really cool and yet extremely hot. It’s a beautiful city where Arab sultans built palaces. Now it is kind of falling apart and it only costs $10 a month to rent and apartment! I briefly considered moving there for the summer, but decided against it because I would feel far too guilty living in such a beautiful place without anything productive to do at this point in my life.

After the tour we went on a tour of some spice farms. Spices are huge in Zanzibar, and the farm we toured was essentially a forest and a bunch of neighborhoods with spices that grow everywhere. I think I met some of the nicest people I have ever met. It rained in the middle of the tour so we waited around under a hut and I talked to one of the guys. We compared what I grow on the farm at home and what he grows here and how all of it works. It was so cool!

That night some of us walked – yes, at night, we walked outside at night – to a bar down the street. It was kind of empty due to the fact that it was Monday, but it was so awesome to be outside at night and not be afraid of being robbed! Arusha isn’t the best for Mzungu at night so freedom of movement is a luxury. We did have a bit of a scare on the way back, though, when Sara, Alainna, Frank, and I accidentally didn’t read a street sign that said not to walk where we were walking. These two police officers with giant guns stopped us and started talking to Frank in Swahili. I figured out what was going on and they made Frank walk back and read the sign, but there were a few minutes there where I had all sorts of police brutality stories flashing through my head and was planning what to do if they were going to shoot Frank. We made it through, though.

After spending two nights in Stone Town we got up early again and drove north to Nungwi, which is at the Northern tip of the island. It is weird because our hostel was pretty much in a residential neighborhood (and thinking of it full of tourists in high season seemed bizarre), but it was pretty and there were lots of school kids running around and playing with us. I had one of the best days ever there. We started off hanging out on the beach (look up Zanzibar in google images…there are no words) in the water and the sun and on the hammocks at the bar. Then we jumped off this little cliff with some of the local teenagers that were hanging around. In the late afternoon we took a sunset ride on a traditional sailboat. We went snorkeling, jumped off the boat, and then one of the guys (about sailors came with us) got us up dancing. At sunset we watched the horizon and then mooned a huge crowd of tourists that were on shore. Looking back, that may have been a bit disrespectful, but it was also hilarious and I’m not sure anyone saw us.

After dinner we went back to the beach and hung out under the stars for the evening. It made me think about how in the cities, or even just areas more developed than East Africa, you can’t see the stars at night. I wonder how much impact that has on our psyches, or even just on how we view ourselves in relation to our environments. At home I can sometimes see the stars clearly, but I am not constantly aware of how small I am. It would be interesting to do a study on people based on how well they can see the stars (and maybe whether or not they are religious).

Overall it was a wonderful trip and I really enjoyed seeing different parts of Tanzania. Zanzibar is almost a whole different country. The call to prayer was much louder there (because it’s something like 90% Muslim) and I thought the guy might be singing in my room at 5:30 in the morning. The people in Zanzibar treated me a little differently…I guess maybe they weren’t as pushy? I don’t know if it’s because their livelihood is less dependent on me buying things or if it’s because they see white people more often. I definitely have gotten to the point where I am not constantly aware of being white anymore. I sometimes notice when I see another white person, but for the most part race is much less of an issue for me than it was when I got here.

I think the part of the trip that had the most impact on me was the drive through the country. I got to be in neighborhoods with houses made out of mud and sticks and realize that I still look at people who live here through a set of standards that come from home, don’t apply here, and don’t necessarily need to apply at home either. For instance, front yards. I realized that subconsciously I largely view wealth through how a house looks from the outside (as much as I don’t want to admit that). In the States we all dress up our houses with nice front yards for our neighbors to see and our kids to play in. Here front yards are used for the animals to graze or vegetables to grow. It doesn’t really make sense to paint houses because it’s so dusty that they get really dirty anyway. And if it’s hot out why do you need a thick front door? I think my point is the same one that I made a few posts ago. It’s so easy to walk around here feeling bad for people because they “have so much less.” Sometimes that is the case, but I think usually it is more the case that things are just so different. What people have is different, and not everyone’s goal is to have a pretty front yard and painted house.

Until Next Time,
Sarah