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 15th 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.
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