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.
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