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.

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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