Zanzibar

For PCVs in east Africa Zanzibar is the Mecca that we are all driven towards at least once in our service, and for good reason. However, nothing worth having comes easy. I traveled, quite literally, across two countries to reach the holy land of vacation destinations. From the doorsteps of DRC, through a rainforest, meandering Rwandan hills, across savannah, a four hour break in Creeperville, an overnight stay in Dar-es-Salaam in a hotel with the tiniest cockroaches I’ve ever seen, and a 90 minute ferry. I left my house sometime on a Saturday to spend the night in Kamembe to catch a 530am bus Sunday to visit my host family for lunch, spent Monday in Kigali so I could catch the 530am Tuesday bus leaving for Dar, scheduled to arrive Wednesday around noon. If there is truly a heaven and hell then that bus ride from Kigali to Dar is purgatory sprinkled with hints of what hell is like. The bus picks up people heading towards Dar and they stand in the aisle because the bus is fully reserved before leaving Rwanda. I’ve since learned that my sitting height is the same as the groin height of Tanzanian men with different views of hygiene than what Americans are used to. My head is also the same height as the elbows of said Tanzanian men whose arms relax a little from holding onto the overhead railings to support them when walking up down the aisle of the bus. I also apparently give off the appearance of a guy whose face screams “Yes! Please put your arm around my neck so I can smell your armpit! Welcome!”

Once you get through all of that though and you find yourself in Dar, things turn magical. English is nearly ubiquitously understood with minimal special English, food has flavor, there are no hills, people don’t stare you down just because you’re different, the ocean is within walking distance, and there is a Subway the size of a which my arms could touch all sides at once. Judge me all you want but spend a year in a country that borders a country known for its spice trade yet reaps none of its flavor and you’ll understand why Subway was all that I cared about when we arrived (just so you won’t judge too harshly, I did eat local food and it was amazing). I even kept the bag my foot long beef pastrami on “brown” came in, and boy did I ever eat fresh that day.

We didn’t do much in Dar but rest. The ferry ride in the morning wasn’t bad at all and before we knew it…ZANZIBAR! To see pictures just go to the FB once they’re uploaded. Rather than detail everything that went on here’s a bullet point of things:

§  three nights in Stonetown

§  slave market tour

§  amazing Ethiopian food from an equally amazing restaurant that let us in and eat two hours before they opened

§  wandering meandering roads

§  night market

§  kitties in the night market

§  Ramadan

§  I SPOKE SPANISH!! (though immediately realized how awful my Spanish now is)

§  spice tour, with tasting of food on the tour, lunch, and beach after

§  swimming in the Indian Ocean

§  two nights in Jambiani at a house we rented

§  drinking cocktails at a bar on the beach as the tide comes in and nearly reaches said bar

§  dolphin chasing (we went on a boat and found an area where dolphins hang out, put on flippers and snorkel masks and had our guide yell, “Take mask on! Take mask on! GOGOGOGOGO!!!” every time dolphins came near the boat so we’d know to jump/fall into the ocean. Our masks always filled with water, causing us to choke when we breathed in, our flippers nearly always fell off, the waters were choppy and made it kind of disorienting, and the dolphins didn’t like being berated by tourists trying to touch them so they always dove or swam away so we’d have to jump (fumble is probably more accurate) into the boat and repeat.

§  fishing

§  snorkeling (this time in calm, shallow water), where one of the girls on the group found Nemo!

After all this we had to trek back home. The ride back was better and worse at the same time. This time it was traveling the width of Zanzibar (2 hours) a choppy ferry ride back with people vomming (2 hours) overnight in Dar to take a 6am bus back to Kigali. The better was that no, or relatively few, people stood in the aisle to go to Kigali (though those who did inevitably stood next to me of course) and that this bus had a TV which showed us Rambo, Rambo II, Rambo III, Rambo IV, and a Chuck Norris movie. The worse was that rather than the compulsory rest from midnight to 4am in Tanzania (a safeguard against hijackings and lootings on the road) we stopped from 930pm to sometime before the sun rose, which happens around 630-7am in Tanzania. But, with all that’s said and done I am happy with everything about the trip. The bus ride is almost like a rite of passage for PCVs, similar to how a pilgrimage isn’t meant to be an easy journey.