Winter Holiday Part Four (Final): Pemba

After arriving in Pemba, somewhere around the time when most people wake up and sigh in relief when the clock tells them they can sleep in for another few hours before getting up, we walked the half mile to the hotel. I was in a grumpy state due to sleep deprivation and couldn’t help but think we had left a beachside bar for an isolated piece of rock. This is when we met Tusker/Mr. Smiley/Real Name Unknown, the sweetest man alive whose job at the hotel seems to be annoying the ever loving hell out of guests.

Getting mad at Tusker/Mr. Smiley/Real Name Unknown is like challenging the intelligence of a toddler for being unable to relay quantum physics to you. The man doesn’t have a mean bone in his body but still drove me to the brink of insanity. He was perceptive enough to see we were all very tired, a fact he brought up a dozen times in five minutes. The silence we offered must have made him uncomfortable, as he didn’t let more than a minute go by without offering thought provoking questions like “Do you enjoy Pemba?” or “Is the weather nice?”

At one point, after the 15^th attempt at conversation, I had to remove myself from the table where we were sitting and waiting for the rooms to be prepared, and ambled over to the deck railing. I realized in horror that the deck wasn’t high enough off the ground to do more than break a leg or two if I jumped, certainly not enough to do irreparable brain damage like I was hoping for. Mercifully our rooms were ready a few minutes later, and I took the best nap of my life.

Weighing my options

After the nap and breakfast we headed into a car and took an hour ride to a beach recommended by the hotel manager. Pictures of the beach, I’m sure, are on the desktops of thousands of office computers around the world. There was empty stretches of sand for as far as we could see, and the water was clear enough to pick out sea grass 30 yards away. It wasn’t for a few hours that some local boys came by, and we kicked around a soccer ball together and wasted the day away on a stretch of earth that would make the Garden of Eden look like the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel.

Vacations spent in total isolation from modern society are generally the best vacations

As dramatic as it sounds, soccer is one of the most beautiful and communal experiences mankind can claim as its own. The universal language of manipulating the movement of a ball with your two feet is, regardless of nationality and without any exaggeration, awe inspiring.

Toward the end of the day it was my turn to guard over our bags as everyone else went for a walk. A few different local boys were on the beach doing their own thing, and as soon as I was alone they came closer to me. At one point they had me surrounded in a semi-circle and were snickering in between staring me down. I was convinced that at any moment the ringleader would give a signal and they would rush our belongings and scatter.

One of them had a homemade soccer ball pieced together by strings and dozens, maybe hundreds, of plastic bags. I pointed at it and gestured with my foot, and within seconds two of the boys stepped forward and we spent 20 minutes trying to outdo each other with tricks. The other boys watched on and clapped whenever a trick was pulled off and laughed when another wasn’t. When Sara got back from the walk we played two of the boys in a two versus two match. They were no older than 16 and pummeled us somewhere around the tune of 15-4.

Besides boats and a creepy under-construction/abandoned hotel, civilization was non-existent. It ruled. 

I woke up the next morning in a rather perky mood, and for no reason other than childish humor gave Tusker/Mr. Smiley/Real Name Unknown another nickname of Mr. Chuckles. We took a private hire to Chaka Chaka, where we hoped to find an ATM (we had been told by some locals it was possible, while others looked at us like we had asked where the nearest Club Med was), and buy ferry tickets back to Dar es Saalam to catch our flight home. ATMs exist in Pemba, but because tourism is generally limited to snorkelers off the coast, international cards were not accepted. This left Sara, Katy and I with the comforting feeling of being $190 short on the hotel bill, with electronic payment or other means to currency impossible.

We decided to buy ferry tickets with what money we had left from Stone Town, which were overpriced and only departed on days we hadn’t planned on leaving. Our choices were either to get to Dar es Saalam with an hour to spare before our plane left, leave for Stone Town to connect with another ferry to Dar es Saalam the day of our flight with no guarantee tickets wouldn’t be sold out by the time we got to Stone Town, or pay a ton of money to go to Stone Town a day early, spending Christmas night there and leaving for Dar es Saalam the next morning. This was all of course dependent on whether the hotel owner would let us get off the island without his $190.

There was a real moment of about five minutes where I considered ditching the flight back to Kampala and joining our three other friends on their remaining trip to Kenya just so I could avoid the ferry debacle, and simply because I didn’t care at all about money, responsibility, or, really, anything at all. I wasn’t mad, frustrated or annoyed. Tyler Durden had just taken his hands off the wheel, and I was ready to give up everything so I could be free to do anything.  I was Jack’s lack of giving a reasonable fuck.

If a situation is dire enough to make you reference Chuck Palahniuk’s trite bullshit, you know it’s bad.

Katy and Sara had their wits about them, thankfully for my bank account, and we decided we would spend Christmas in Stone Town while our other three friends would stay in Pemba an extra day. An unfortunate option but the only realistic one for us to take. We forked over nearly all the money we had with delirious smiles on our faces.

By the time we got back in the car I still felt like I had been pumped full of laughing gas, and Mr. Chuckles/Tusker/Mr. Smiley/Real Name Unknown (who came with us without asking and brought nothing to the experience) and I sat in the back of the van and forged a fleeting moment of solidarity over the Tanzanian music playing on the radio. After explaining that one song was about love lost but not forgotten (not in those words, mind you), he explained his desire to marry an American woman and have four children with them. I did my best to pawn off Katy and/or Sara to him, but they had played that game many times before and were quick on the draw with “I’m married” or “I have a boyfriend,” or they just acted deaf and mute.

Mr. Chuckles/Tusker/Mr. Smiley/Real Name Unknown and I during my stint of insanity

The beach, on the northern tip of Pemba, was another stunner. Mango trees dipped into the water and we spent the day eating fruit, swimming, and contemplating the best way out of our money issues. The two best options we came up with were seducing some locals into a free night at their house, or committing a minor crime so we could spend a night in jail, which couldn’t be much worse that the overnight ferry. Later in the day Mr. Chuckles/Tusker/Mr. Smiley/Real Name Unknown offered me a Christmas present of taking a local woman back to Kampala with me, and the bond we shared in the car was broken, never to return.

Pemba, Day 2

Back at the hotel the manager, instead of breaking our legs and forcing us to maintain the hotel grounds for three months as a method of payment, just gave us his bank information and told us to wire us the money whenever we could. We celebrated with a few bottles of wine - “Normally not OK, but it’s Christmas” – and I basked in the knowledge that the slightly ridiculous concept of capitalism had trumped the absolutely ridiculous aspect of the religious tenant known as “sobriety”.

Pemba at sunset

A few of us rang in Christmas on a balcony overlooking the ocean until around 4 AM. For my first Christmas in a foreign country, at least the early morning hours of one, I have no complaints.

Christmas morning

And that’s about that. The next day we went to Stone Town where Sara had her debit card eaten by the ATM, but I was more pissed off about it than she was. She had her own ferry ticket moment and couldn’t be forced to care about it. We had Christmas dinner overlooking the water and the next day traveled by air, land and sea back to Kampala. The airplane wine, 10 days in the sun, and general lack of sleep did a number on me, and the customs official told Katy and Sara that their friend was “pretty weird” after I passed through, which I will always cherish.

If your life isn’t weird, it’s probably boring and not worth reading about. If any aspect of mine is, I can leave this world with a smile on my face.

Winter Holiday Part Three: Nungwi, Zanzibar and the Ten Hour Ferry Ride

Nungwi, Zanzibar

After our second day in Stone Town we headed an hour north to Nungwi, where we stayed at the Baraka (Obamaa?) Bungalows, another low-key hotel a few yards away from the beach. While Bwejuu was novel for its sea life and lack of visitors, Nungwi was special for its turquoise water that never receded and its beachside bar offering over 20 cocktails. There were significantly more tourists, including one who couldn’t handle his scuba trip and spent an hour vomiting on the beach due to compression sickness, but there wasn’t a particularly tacky aspect to the place.  

Nungwi's beach bar, or the eighth wonder of the world

There is something to be said when you can spend an entire day without a single want or worry - Nungwi is that place. The food was phenomenal again, the drinks good and plentiful (and cheap), the view and touch of a three-hued blue ocean at our fingertips, and the company was boisterous and comical.

Neha, Katie and I enjoying the eighth wonder of the world

After lunch we headed back into the water, floating around lazily and taking swigs of our beer in the still ocean. Later in the afternoon, Sara, who had managed to avoid the pain of sea urchins in Bwejuu, stepped directly on one in the water and experienced the full brunt of their bastard needles. As she hobbled back to the beach, I decided (the cocktail menu helped play a role in this as well) that justice needed to be done. I dove underwater – the only body of saltwater I’ve been in where keeping your eyes open is easily accomplished – and tried to pluck one of the urchins out of the water. What I planned on doing with it after that hadn’t been decided, although it would have probably involved childish giggling on my end, and Sara rolling her eyes and telling me to put the urchin back where I found it.

In Bwejuu, Ahmed had shown me how urchins can be picked up with relative ease, but the urchins in Nungwi are a different breed of monster. Their needles are larger and more spread out, making carefully balancing one in your hand nearly impossible. After one of their needles punctured my palm, I decided against turning my hand into Swiss cheese and headed back to the beach.

Sara in good spirits, besides being left with only one capable foot

The Rastas who patrol the waterline, when not trying to sell you boat rides or weed, keep an eye out for hobbling swimmers, and Sara was quickly plucked out of the water and taken to a lounge chair. It was obvious she was in legitimate pain, and the bottom of her foot looked like she had just taken off a shoe made out of porcupine. The Rasta assisted her by dropping kerosene and papaya juice on the entry points – “The miracle cure, mon!” – although according to her it didn’t do any help. The scene was rather hilarious for me though, and I almost lost it when he told her that, if worst came to worst, she could just buy some of his weed and smoke the pain away.

Katie and Sara woke me up in the middle of the night with the world's largest hermit crab. I was less than excited at the prospect of spooning with it for the rest of the night. 

The Ten Hour Boat Ride to Pemba

We spent the next day lounging around the beach before heading back to Stone Town and getting on the night ferry to Pemba, a slightly smaller and significantly less populated island in comparison to Zanzibar. In order to have enough time in Pemba to make the trip worth it, we had little choice but to take the night ferry, which took 10 hours to travel the arduous 70 kilometers across the ocean. Most ferries, or “fast ferries” as they’re called, take around four. We were told that under law the ferry couldn’t dock before 6:30 AM, so we were prepared for a fair bit of waiting around followed by a solid few hours of twiddling our thumbs.

For my part, "lounging around the beach" also included commandeering a small ship and launching myself off the roof a few times. 

Upon researching our decision, we found out the company we booked with owned the ship responsible for Tanzania’s largest maritime disaster, in which a vessel with an 800 person capacity ended up carrying around 3,500 people at once across the open water. The ship hit heavy weather, an engine failed and the ship capsized. The government, after releasing numerous and contrasting figures, stated that close to 3,000 people were either missing or dead. Much like last year, when I decided to go to an Africa Cup of Nations qualifying match that al Shabaab threatened to bomb, we shrugged  our shoulders and hoped for the best.

I won’t pretend that I don’t experience white privilege on a daily basis in East Africa, and it was rather obvious by the stares of other passengers that mzungus rarely go to Pemba, and those who do don’t generally take the slow ferry in the middle of the night to get there. The single employee I saw took to us like a pig to shit. If I ever needed to get out of my seat for anything, he was there to offer his service of guide, even making people sleeping in the aisles get up and out of the way. This was generally followed by ugly looks in my direction from disoriented passengers, and my attempts at an apology in a language virtually none of them could understand.

My body has the uncanny ability to stay awake while in a moving object, regardless of how tired or pumped full of alcohol or sleep-inducers I am. Neha was my dutiful counterpart, and we took turns coming up with storylines for the ridiculous Swahili soap opera on television. Following the show, which must have been filmed in 1994 as part of a high school audio/visual project, a loop of three music videos came on and didn’t stop for at least two hours. The similar film quality to the soap opera, dance moves performed by actors who looked catatonic and one female singer wearing a shirt that simply read “I love Facebook” provided decent entertainment, but you can only be an ethnocentric tool for so long before you get bored. Neha’s valiant effort to entertain me lasted until 1 AM before she handed me a sleeping pill and wished me luck. Five hours of sleepless boredom ticked by – characterized by numerous trips trying to navigate the aisles to the deck while under the influence of a sedative – until we landed safely in Pemba.

______________________________________________________________________________

A Completely Unrelated Sidenote

On a completely unrelated sidenote, do yourself a favor and listen to Astronautalis’ “Measure the Globe.” Astronautalis was the first show I ever booked, and it ended in decent disaster, the least of which was raising around $100 for a man who, within a year after the show, would be touring Europe with Tegan and Sara. Anyways, Andy will always hold a special memory in my brain and I’ve been on a nostalgia trip with all the free time I’ve had on my hands. Instead of pulling a high school move and making a Facebook status, I’ll just throw this up here for the hell of it; I’ve been listening to it way too much over the past few days.

I know what you dream of, I dream of it too

Of roads that are endless and rooms that are huge

Are these visions of heaven or nightmares I'm living?

All I know is I'm scared of the truth

And if the world could end very soon

And all we've accomplished is moot

I'll coat the carpet in gasoline

Strike our last match and leave

Before the whole house is consumed

So I'll cover my hand in tattoos

I'll kiss any woman that moves

There's no Lord to forgive me and physics is tricky

So all that I'm left with is you

Winter Holiday Part Two: Stone Town, Zanzibar

The hotel we were staying at offered guides tours of Stone Town – where the ferry dropped us off and where we were staying for the next two nights – with free transport if taken on the departure, so we decided to give it a shot. After breakfast we packed into the car and were off.

I’m generally wary of guided tours. If it’s somewhere like a nature reserve than I’m fine with them, I’m no naturalist. If it’s a city tour, however, I figure I’m capable enough of walking around myself and eventually stumbling upon something of historical significance. That, and tourists are easily identified when being slowly guided through a city, and as scientific proof has it, white tourists in developing countries are generally the worst people on the planet. For the sake of my roommates, who are unpretentious and genuinely friendly, I kept my mouth shut.

The tour was fine enough, with visits to an old Arab fort, the site of a slave auction, a quick lunch, and Freddy Mercury’s (disputed) place of birth, which proudly announced that Freddy and his music would live forever (false and true, respectively). The only cringe-worthy moment came at the beginning of the tour, when the guide took us through an open air market and encouraged us to buy anything we wanted. He would step in and help out if we were getting a raw deal, thank god, which just meant he would encourage us to buy only slightly marked up goods from his friends’ stalls.

I wanted to tell him my daily commute from work in Kampala took me by Owino, which is 100 times bigger, more crowded and corrupt, and at any given time, more likely to violently catch on fire. However, I doubt anybody informed him that a presumptuous 24-year-old asshole would be on his schedule that day, so I simply smiled when he informed us we were in the meat and fish section of the market.

Keeping my head down and staying quiet on the tour

Apparently this explanation is necessary for some people, despite the smell resembling the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, the thousands of flies, and meat and fish carcasses strewn about. In particular, the “some people” was a group of four or five middle-aged folks who took pictures of every stall like they were proof of Africa’s stereotypical image of primitiveness and brutality, instead of just a banal facet of everyday life. I swear to god one of them said, “Honey, I don’t believe it, come take a picture…this meat isn’t refrigerated…just astounding.” At least that’s what I assume the direct translation was, they were all speaking German.

Over the next two days I saw three tourists wearing shirts that simply read “Mzungu”. Despite personally never being heckled once in the country, the only thing whiter than actually being white and taking a week vacation to Zanzibar just to go back home and regale your co-workers with your adventures on the dark continent (nobody would wear such an embarrassing shirt if that wasn’t a perfect description of their life), is buying a shirt to advertise your own whiteness. That said, I know a few Ugandans who own the same shirt and wear it for shits and giggles, which I think is comedic gold.

While I may talk trash on white tourists, 5 PM tea time provided me the opportunity to go bottoms up, pinky out, or BUPO. We all have our moments. 

For all of my sarcasm, the tour was rather enjoyable. Eighty percent of Zanzibar’s economy comes from tourism (after the three hours of walking around Stone Town with a guide I’m virtually an expert), so at the very least I’m glad we could contribute to the local economy. Stone Town itself is gorgeous, with the African, Indian, and Muslim worlds combining everywhere from the food to the architecture. The people are genuinely friendly and happy to help, and outside friends and family, and the Acholi in northern Uganda, to generalize, some of the kindest I’ve ever encountered.

I can’t stress enough that in six months of living in East Africa, the worst things I’ve seen have generally involved Westerners, and the violent continent so often portrayed in the media is sensationalist nonsense. That said, the walk to dinner on our first night in Stone Town offered one of the more visually arresting moments of my life.

As were walked perpendicular to the harbor, we got within 100 yards of a large, loud crowd. When this happens in Nsambya, the village where I live in Uganda, it means somebody has just been circumcised and everyone is drunk and celebrating. In Zanzibar, in this instance, the crowd was surrounding a man with his hands tied together and they were beating the actual fuck out of him with everything from their fists to empty jerry cans. To make the scene more surreal, one of the attackers was holding a chain leash looped around the neck of the monkey. The monkey was rather calm, given that at any given moment a stray foot could have crushed its entire skeletal system.

The man, I’m assuming, got caught stealing and was being led to a police station by 40 friendly men who happened to distrust Zanzibar’s formal justice system and decided to take the law into their own hands for a bit. There is something utterly terrifying about a crowd whipped up into a violent frenzy, and the three of us ducked into an alley until the mob passed. From there we made it to dinner without incident, and aside from the terrific food and drinks, I ended the night with a double shot of Jack Daniels. I smiled at the thought that, 8,000 miles away, my parents would end their night the same way.

Deep in contemplation, or there's a chance Katy just asked us to pose like this.

Three more friends from Kampala – Allison, David and Neha – joined us at the hotel on our second night in Stone Town. The six of us went to an open air eatery next to the harbor, with dozens of stalls selling everything from fresh seafood to chips and pizza. I ventured off with Neha, a fellow vegetarian, and we decided to try Zanzibar pizza, which is comparable to a large Hot Pocket, cooked from scratch in front of you and sold for $2. The vegetable and cheese was superb, but the real treat was the banana, mango, nutella and honey pizza drizzled with chocolate on top.

The food in Zanzibar is absurdly good, better than most food in Uganda, and America for that matter. The kicker is that Zanzibar is a relatively remote island and everything aside from what is locally grown or caught must be imported from the mainland. In comparison, Uganda, with its bragging rights of the Pearl of Africa and much-too-large expatriate community, has Western food that wouldn’t be deemed fit for a Russian gulag. That it’s a landlocked country with ample supermarkets and easy access to goods makes the situation that much more frustrating.

More posing in Stone Town

The best meal I had in Stone Town was at lunch the second day – A chickpea burger with the fixings and guacamole, in between a bun that must have been baked by the Virgin Mary – it was culinary wizardry in its purest form. Despite its food, Stone Town essentially shuts down at 10:30 PM, and our search for a bar after dinner was more futile than attempting to cartwheel across the Sahara.  

Winter Holiday Part One: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania/Bwejuu, Zanzibar

Daily Musing has quickly become A-Few-Times-A-Month Musings, which I blame on the lack of coffee available to me on any given day in Kampala. However, I plan to post a decent amount in the next few days and weeks, so keep checking back in for more. Also, I failed to bring a camera on holiday and all of the pictures posted were taken by my roommates, Katy and Sara, or my friend Allison. I would like to be able to blame my horrible planning on the male condition, but really, it's probably just me.

Day 1: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Given the relatively seamless journey from Entebbe to Dar es Salaam (My roommate Sara’s sunscreen was deemed to be a security threat and was removed while going through security in Nairobi, although they didn’t care about Katie and I. Must have been the SPF levels.), the airport in Dar es Salaam reminded us that we hadn’t left the continent of Africa and its various inefficiencies. I can only imagine that during the construction of the airport, the concept of immigration and customs procedures were briefly explained to a small child, who was then responsible for implementing the process. After  filling out the customary paperwork we waited with a large mass of aggravated travelers, until after 20 minutes an airport official approached us and asked us to hand over our paperwork, passports, and $100 entrance fee. When I prompted what we were supposed to do next, she smiled and replied, “You wait.”

From there on out we waited with the now slightly more aggravated travelers as airport officials shouted different names, generally in incomprehensible forms, although to be fair I can’t pronounce many European names either. However, “Kuklick” was the obvious breaking point, as after 40 minutes of waiting an official simply held up my passport ID and yelled, “Who is this?”

And with that, I was in Dar es Salaam.

After taking a taxi from the airport we checked into the Juba Hotel, a four story innocuous building run by a Somali couple who apparently don’t realize Dar es Salaam isn’t in South Sudan. I cringed at the posting on my door that read that drinking and smoking were not allowed in the building before joining Katy and Sara outside to walk around. For probably the same religious reasons that barred the chemical substances I hold so dear to my heart from the hotel, Dar es Salaam on a Sunday was virtually a ghost town. More people can be found in my village on a Sunday than in Tanzania’s largest city, but it was a nice change of pace from the streets of Kampala.

The people we did run into were friendly, although the Rastas who approached us took the annoying and time consuming approach of complimenting my tattoos, telling us about their artwork, showing us their artwork, trying to sell us their artwork, and finally pulling weed out of their pockets and trying to sell us that (“Arusha has the good shit, mon!”).

Later on in the night we grabbed dinner at Mamboz, a popular outdoor Indian restaurant. Remembering the lack of a hotel bar I had to look forward to, I scoured the menu for a drink list, turned it over and saw a notice that alcohol was not allowed on the premises. With that I ordered spicy paneer and left my roommates at the table in the search for a beer, which I figured I would drink next to our table on the street, which was decidedly not on the premises.

There is a little known but highly acclaimed movie called Brazil, in which the protagonist dreams of leaving his dull, dystopian life to be with a girl initially from his dreams and later in his everyday reality. Toward the end of the film, just when you think he has overcome all of his obstacles and has gotten the girl, the protagonist, just as the viewer, realizes that the happy ending is a matter of his delusions. With that hideous moment of self-relization, the protagonist promptly dies.

I am in no way being melodramatic when I say that I had a similar feeling when the next two restaurants where I had anticipated finding a cold Tusker had the same guidelines as Mamboz. At one restaurant, the waitress, after crushing my dreams, asked me, “Do you really need alcohol?” I felt like “need” was a strong word, but after two international flights, the passport auction, and Rembrandt the Rasta and his Arusha weed, my want of beer was probably close to a necessity. I trudged back to dinner empty handed and broken hearted.

By this point it was dark and I became are of how at ease I was walking around the city. I realized, unlike Kampala, where the UPDF occupies virtually every block of the city and policeman with high-powered shotguns guard grocery stores and churches, nothing of the sort existed in Dar es Salaam. Ugandans like their drink, and I wondered if there was a correlation between the amount people drank and how much of a police force was required. This, I quickly realized, was nonsense; Harrisonburg, Virginia would have the most concentrated military presence in the world if this was the case. Uganda is simply a militarized state, one in which President Museveni doesn’t want to the people to forget the monopoly of violence he controls. For its lack of beer, at least Dar es Salaam is relatively calm and peaceful.

After dinner, which was superb, the three of us ventured back to the restaurant where the waitress had questioned my temperament to enquire about another bar. She informed us that “Protein” was nearby and gave us directions. Half-way there  a man approached us, telling us we looked like we wanted a drink (I must have been projecting it in Morse code through my footsteps at that point), and that he would take us to a bar down the street.

“Protein?” we asked. He nodded. The bar had found us just as much as we had found it.

It could have been the small size, lack of advertisement, or general feeling of doing something we shouldn’t be doing, but I swear that the bar was a vortex to prohibition-era America, just with Tanzanian beer. After exchanging pleasantries with two Indian men, the only other patrons at the bar, we pulled out a deck of cards and tried to teach them how to play “Asshole”. They never fully grasped the rules of the game, or that in no situation can a five beat a Queen, but they took to heckling the loser with great joy.

Like all good things, however, it came to an end with they got too comfortable with my roommates and creeped them out enough - namely by texting prostitutes at the table – to force our quick departure. I was tired of them calling me an asshole as well, as I had lost simply because I got tired of correcting their incredible lack of understanding of the numerical system and let them win. We were all happy to go.

Day 2 – Bwejuu, Zanzibar

After a night of tossing and turning in my room that had a temperature somewhere between a sauna and the inner depths of hell, I got up at 5:30 AM, took a cold shower and met my roommates downstairs to grab a taxi to the waterfront. After getting our ferry tickets to Zanzibar we joined around 200 people amassed in front of a gate with a single open door and a port official checking identification. Most people in East Africa keep to the time with the same level of concern that the driver of a Humvee does toward the environment, but they’ll be god damned if they’re going to be the last one aboard a ferry they’ve already paid to secure a seat on.

Getting through the gate was a process of self-restraint on my end, and after a particularly hard elbow to the ribs by the man behind me I made a point to block forward progress around me and gave him a look like he had just punched a small animal in the face.

“This is Tanzania, shove your way through,” he said with a smile on his face.

“I live in Kampala, sir, and even there we don’t push people like this,” I said back.

He kept the smile on his face, so I turned back around and continued to do my best at slowing down his assault into the harbor.

The ferry to Zanzibar, which only left five minutes late, was quite nice. The inside seating was highly air conditioned and food and drinks were sold throughout. Outside, where the three of us sat, offered a gorgeous view of the Indian Ocean. Even the bathrooms, the cleanliness of which I generally use as the measuring stick for how nice an establishment is, were spotless.

Sara, myself, and Katy before a ferry ride; not the ferry from Dar to Zanzibar, but I needed to give you something after 2,500 words. They're all the same anyways, unless it's the night ferry, the story of which is coming in a few days. 

After arrival in Zanzibar two hours later, we made our way past insistent private hires to the dala dala park, where we could grab a ride to Bwejuu for $2 each, as opposed to the $30 wanted by private drivers. That said, the ride was hell and filled with numerous stops and a distinct lack of spacial comfortability on the part of the conductor. At one point over 23 people were crammed into a van made for 16. The conductor also didn’t know where the three of us wanted to go, despite his previous assurances to the contrary, and eventually we were dropped off a 30 minute walk from the hotel.

A car with employees from the hotel next to ours eventually drove by and stopped, to our surprise, and inquired as to what we were doing, as it was obvious no tourists had any reason to be walking along the road in the middle of the summer heat unless they were stranded.

Sara and I, stranded tourists walking along the road in the middle of the summer heat

They generously offered us a ride, and inside their van we met a rather odd German woman who only had nice things to say about the beach except for the cleanliness of the ocean. She had been staying at her hotel for two days and hadn’t stepped foot in the water.

Upon getting to the beach and checking into the hotel we realized that not going into the water for sanitation reasons was akin to avoiding the Appalachian Trail because a few sticks might have fallen on the footpath. During low tide the water level recedes over a mile, but during high tide you can see every step you take in the water. It’s a shame the German lady was forced to stay on the beach due to the health-treacherous seaweed that she could have the misfortune of encountering.

Bwejuu during low tide

It was low tide after we ate lunch, so the three of us – two recently graduated college athletes and me, a former bench warmer for club and high school teams who can smoke a pack faster than he can run a mile – played soccer against three Maasai who worked security at the hotel. I’m woefully ignorant of Maasai culture; last year I took a walking tour of a sacred Maasai historical site in Kenya, but the only thing I could tell you with confidence is that one of the Tomb Raider movies was filmed there.

Katy loved "artsy" pictures. Unfortunately for her, a helpful stranger took the only one of the Maasai that could fit that description. 

There is, however, something stoic, almost honorable, about the way they went about their work, seemingly more of a duty that a job. I imagine if an invading army landed on the beach to sack our hotel, the Maasai would have rather died defending it with the knives and spears than letting us fall into harm. They’re not bad at soccer either, and despite the best efforts of Katy and Sara, and the general apathetic efforts on my end, they won in a close match.

I'm probably about to back-heel the ball to Katy in a second, or lose it and give my Maasai friend an open goal to aim at. You decide. 

A potential entry for the "Stereotypical East African Mzungus" photo awards

The next morning I woke up early and walked the 30 or so steps from my room to the beach, which was at high tide. After a quick dip I joined my roommates for a complimentary breakfast of coffee, fruit, juice and eggs at the restaurant of our hotel, which had open walls and sat a few yards from the water.

Home in Bwejuu

After I few more swims and kicking the ball around with the Maasai we had lunch, where I indulged in two glasses of white wine, which were filled to the brim and thus were probably closer to three or four. The resulting buzz gave me the bright idea of walking out barefoot to the waterfront, now over a mile away during low tide. I figured it would be a nice stroll, although I didn’t really have the faintest. That said, given the state I was in, you could have told me that, in reality, I was about to walk through a minefield of sea urchins and coral reef without any protection on my feet, and I still would have shrugged and skipped toward the beach.

I managed to make it a few hundred yards without hitting an urchin, which I had the joy of doing the day before. Sea urchins are comparable to a bed of nails: You can’t blame it for the pain it inflicts, but that doesn’t make stepping on it feel any better. It also doesn’t help that their needles (Which, according to a recent episode of Lost that I watched, are hollow and can be used in a pinch to secure a blood transfusion if somebody falls off a cliff while exploring an old, crashed plane) enter into your foot individually and have to be pulled out one by one.

On my journey to the water I stopped for a bit so my roommates, who had a late jump on the horrible idea, could catch up. Within a few minutes, however, a local boy, maybe 11-years-old, named Ahmed joined me, and we set off together. Ahmed didn’t speak a word of English but could probably tell I was going to kill myself if he didn’t intervene, so he became my impromptu tour guide. At every pool of water he pointed out the fish, small octopi, eels, and anything else he could find. I don’t understand more than a few words of Swahili, so I just repeated everything he said with a shit-eating grin on my face.

As we walked closer to the water, which was still over a thousand yards away, we came across a fisherman poking under a rock in a small pool of water with what looked to be a metal coat hanger. I knew what was going on, but the wine overpowered my vegetarian sensibilities and I was excited by what was about to happen.

Ten seconds after what looked like an ink plume emerged from the rock, the fisherman hooked a big octopus out of the water, killed it with a knife and stuffed it into his bad. I’ve been a vegetarian for seven years and find the notion of pescatarianinism, at least on moral or ethical grounds, to be preposterous (“I can’t eat a land animal, but look at this carnage from the sea, now that’s my kind of stuff.”). There wasn’t anything offensive about what I saw, however, just a man whose life, whether for food or livelihood, depended on the water and what it had to provide. There was something respectable in how personal the process was, and at the very least I appreciated the opportunity to watch him at work.

We trudged (Ahmed walked carefully, I stumbled) along, until Ahmed lost concentration and pulverized his foot on a sea urchin. He grimaced as he put his arm around my shoulder so I could pull the needles out of his foot, and I was able to get all of them but one. He was obviously in pain, so I pointed to myself and the water up ahead, then to him and the beach back by the hotel. He obliged and limped back, probably happy to let me fend for myself.

I walked for a few more yards before finding a gorgeous pool, knee deep and filled with coral, a red starfish, and various fish plucked from Finding Nemo. I figured this was a good enough spot to wait for my roommates, so I sat in the water and marveled at the little world that surrounded me. Thankfully I like to sit cross-legged, and in the clear water I noticed that at some point I had stepped on an urchin myself (thanks for blocking my pain receptors, wine!), and had pushed them deeper into my skin with each step. I found a thin, pointed seashell shaped like a vuvuzela, thin on one end and getting wider in the other direction. I pressed the skinny sharp end below the entrance of each needle, giving me enough leverage to pull most of the out. Having lived a life coddled by low-demand, high-pay desk jobs, and without the ability to grow facial hair, it was easily the manliest thing I’ve ever done.

My roommates caught up soon after and we sat in the pool for a while. I personally imagined people I don’t care for ambling to pointless and unfulfilling jobs in 35 degree weather, which made sitting in our little paradise that much better.

The walk back without Ahmed leading the way was more perilous, and each pool we came across presented the options of stepping on one of around 70 urchins or trying to avoid them by scraping your foot across bits of coral. I’ve read stories of surfers shredding their bodies on coral reefs following a crash, but not having felt it myself I was oblivious to how painful it actually is – something comparable to shards of glass made out of concrete. Needless to say, if your foot steps on it, its immediate reaction is to remove itself back off the ground.

After planting on a particularly unforgiving piece of coral my foot jerked up, I lost balance and hurled myself forward, landing on my hands and knees. I have no clue how my palms avoided the urchins, but some of their needles found their way embedded in my wrist and underneath my fingernails. Digging under your nails with tweezers to pull out a sharp object the length of a thumbtack is about as pleasant as chugging a bottle of turpentine, but then again, how many other people spent their Tuesday afternoon on an island in the Indian Ocean walking among octopus and starfish? Worth it.

Katy also managed to step on some urchins, and ol' steady hands Kuklick did his best to take them out with tweezers. He failed.