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May 12, 2004Tomorrow in TanzaniaDAY 193: For most of my days on The Global Trip 2004, I often wonder what the next day will bring. While some people need to plan a long way in advance and know what they'll do the next day -- or even the next week or next year(!) -- it's somewhat refreshing not to know what the future holds until it becomes the present. People have asked me, "Erik, what are you going to do when you get back home?" The reply is always the same: "I don't know. I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow."
HOWEVER, LIKE DAILY BLOG WRITING, the daily process of figuring out the next day can sometimes get tedious -- as the James Bond film title goes, "Tomorrow Never Dies" -- especially when you have a whole country at your finger tips and plenty of options. Should I stay a while in Dar-es-Salaam, or fly off to Zanzibar? Plan a trek up Mount Kilimanjaro? A wildlife safari in the Serengeti? Oh, the life of a traveler is so hard, isn't it? It actually is hard when you're committed to doing a daily Blog and the hotel's lobby internet cafe has a bad connection. I would have moved to a different cafe after all the problems I was having, but I had already downloaded all my files to the Windows XP desktop and from my experience, sometimes it's more of a hassle to download drivers if a lab doesn't have XP. Anyway, I spent two hours more than necessary trying to troubleshoot the weird errors I was getting, but then gave up to walk around and blow off some steam.
My hotel was in the city centre (picture above), a district filled with people going about their business, some business being trying to rip off obvious-looking tourists (like myself) in the streets with claims of better black market money exchange rates. I avoided these guys calling out "Kichina!" ("Chinese!") to me since I changed money earlier that morning. (The woman at the exchange bureau warned me about them because "they will rob you on the street.") I walked away from the city centre, up the main downtown street and on the road along the Dar-es-Salaam Bay, which went up to a greener and less crowded suburban area. Wandering aimlessly, I managed to stumble upon the National Museum of Tanzania, one of the few worthwhile things to visit according to my guidebook. The museum, spread over three buildings, had exhibits of Tanzania's history, its culture and its animals. After walking most of the afternoon, I had seen most of what central Dar-es-Salaam had to offer and came to the decision that come tomorrow, I would leave and move on.
After stocking up on cans of tuna and crackers, I went to an internet cafe in town to check my e-mail. I had replied to an e-mail from Yvonne (who I met in Nkhata Bay, Malawi briefly) who was three days ahead of me on a very similar itineray as mine. She wrote me because she wanted to know if I'd be in the northern town of Arusha by the next day because she was starting a Mount Kilimanjaro trek, which would be cheaper if she had another person to go with (namely me). I wrote her back asking her to wait up, but she hadn't replied back yet. I even tried to send her an SMS text message, but I couldn't manage to figure out how to do it via the internet. It was still uncertain if I'd go to Arusha in the morning. In the meantime, I e-mailed Tony and Priya, two friends of Cristina (my Filipino-American Connection in Lusaka, Zambia) whom I was told I could look up in Dar. Maybe one of them would help me figure out what to do the next day.
Also in my inbox were replies from Priya -- she was actually in New York for a while -- and Tony, who told me that he actually lived in Moshi (the other Mount Kilimanjaro starting point town besides Arusha) and that he'd be keen on meeting up in either town. I sort of put Zanzibar and the Serengeti on the backburner and just boiled down my options for the next day to Arusha or Moshi. In Arusha, the more popular of the two Mt. Kilimanjaro starting point towns, there was a trek company that people highly recommended to me. In Moshi was an ex-pat who knew the area -- plus there was the Tin Tin Tours company that I was referred to by Peter, the Tanzanian rastafarian I met in Nkhata Bay. I was eating a late tuna and cracker dinner in my room and I still hadn't made the decision of what to do the next day. It simply came down to a toss up, and rather than simply flip a coin, I did something similar to what I read in The Alchemist, the book by Paulo Coelho that inspired me to take this crazy trip in the first place: in the time of a two-way decision, the hero in the book pulled one of two different stones out of his pocket, each one representing a different option. The one he pulled out at random was his answer. I didn't exactly have any stones, so I used coins of similar size and weight: a Malawian coin to represent Moshi and a Tanzanian one to represent Arusha. The 50 tambala Malawian coin came out and the decision was made. What the next day would bring, or where the path of the Malawian coin would lead me I did not know yet, but I knew I would find out all in good time. As the slightly-modified lyrics of the popular song from the musical Annie goes, "Tomorrow, tomorrow, [I'll find out] tomorrow, You're only a day away..."
And We Clik!DAY 194: Peter, also known as Goba, a Tanzanian rastafarian I met in Nkhata Bay, Malawi, referred me to the Tin Tin Tours agency in Moshi, Tanzania. Although he didn't have one of their business cards with him, he wrote some information on the back of another to show them that I was: And we clik! [sic] (It may be of note that the only reason why we clicked was because I had a brief conversation with him over lunch about rapper 50 Cent.)
AS YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED, my style of traveling is to just let one encounter lead to the next like Forrest Gump (as opposed to those to feel like they have to shop around and be in total control of their destinies). I decided to go to Moshi to check out Tin Tin Tours to investigate just how far a conversation about 50 Cent would lead me. And plus, my encounter with Cristina at the ZEHRP house in Zambia led me to her friend Tony, also in Moshi.
I arrived after a short taxi ride by seven o'clock and they put me on a bus leaving at 7:15. In the seat next to me was a Mister Akbar who always addressed me as "Mister Erik" -- everyone in Tanzania seems to use "mister" as a polite form of address with a guy's first name. Mr. Akbar, who looked of Indian-descent, was from Dar-es-Salaam but was on his way to Arusha to pick up his arranged wife from her parents to bring her back home. Mr. Erik just stuck to his story that he was from the Philippines en route to Moshi to visit a friend, instead of admitting he was a tourist with an American passport. The seven-hour bus journey through tranquil greenlands and mountains flew by with my book in my hand, some Blog writing and screenings of Six Days, Seven Nights and a really low budget African movie shot on video called Troublemaker, about an old man who lived in a compound and just yelled at people. (Now that's entertainment.) We arrived in Moshi about 2:30 at Scandinavian's private lot away from the craziness of the main terminal, with its touts trying to sell tours to obvious-looking tourists. However, both my taxi driver to my hotel and a guy who followed me to the elevator tried to get my business by passing me flyers.
After locking up my bags in Room 14 of Hotel KNCU, I went wandering around Moshi, a mid-size African town with a mosque (picture above) and a Hindi temple on the main road. I checked my e-mail at a nearby cafe -- Tony had written me back and I told him I'd call him since I was in his town of residence. We arranged to meet after his work ended.
"Do you know Goba?" I asked him. Names and faces flashed through his mind. "Oh yeah. I know him," Mr. Kimario answered. "He's a rasta man." "Yeah." I gave him the card with the handwritten "And we clik!" on it to show my history with the Tanzanian rastafarian. "I met him in Malawi. He told me you guys were good." The fact that I "cliked" with Goba didn't seem to be of any significance. Mr. Kimario seemed that he knew of Goba a.k.a. Peter, but not know him know him. In the end, he cut me a pretty good deal anyway: a 10-day itinerary, five days for Kilimanjaro, five days on safari in the Serengeti for $1075 (USD). I knew it was a really good deal based on all the prices I'd heard about from other travelers. (Over a third of that price goes towards steep national park fees.) Tin Tin Tours turned out to be a real class act; they were really friendly and weren't pushy about tips like some of the other companies I heard. When I mentioned that the guidebook recommends a 10% tip to guides, Mr. Kimario said, "It should be whatever you feel is appropriate." I read through their binder of positive comments -- checking to see if the handwriting was all from one person; it wasn't -- and eventually just settled on giving them my business without shopping around at all for other deals. Like I said, others did the shopping for me and I just like one encounter lead to the next. I was tentatively slated to start my Mount Kilimanjaro trek the next day, but I didn't put any money down without consultation from Tony, who I was to meet at the popular coffee shop in town. After going to the local market with the friendly Mr. Freddie of Tin Tin Tours to buy a new water-resistant fleece for my trek (to replace the clothes I lost in Windhoek, Namibia), I went off to find the coffee shop. I couldn't find it by the rendezvous time, so I just called Tony's cell phone at a call center. He told he'd meet me there. "I'm wearing a really beat up New York Yankees hat," I told him so that he could distinguish me in a crowd. Spotting Tony out of a crowd of Africans at the nearby bus terminal was easy; he was the only Vietnamese-American within a 500-mile radius. He spot me right away (the only Filipino-American within a 500-mile radius). My baseball cap wasn't necessary at all.
"I'll go order us some beers," Tony said. (God bless the American ex-pats.) The three of us sat around their bachelor pad of magazines and DVD movies, which occupied most of their free time since the Moshi ex-pat scene wasn't nearly as big as the one in Lusaka, Zambia. They confirmed that I was getting a pretty good deal at Tin Tin as I finished a bottle of Safari Lager. Tony and Ted came with me back to the tour office when I went to leave a $50 (USD) deposit to secure my trek the following morning. (I would buy the rest of the money when the banks were open before departure.) Afterwards, we went to dinner at the nearby Chagga Grill, named after the local people of the area. It was a divey sort of place where we really didn't fit in, but then again, being three non-Africans, we really didn't fit in anywhere. Using no utensils (the African way), we had a chicken and beef dinner before hopping into a taxi to meet up with some other ex-pats that didn't exactly fit in Moshi.
That night I met the small group of American and Dutch ex-patriates who were either working the HIV research project or a nearby hospital, or just visiting like me. There I met Phillipa and Alyson, and together with Ted and Tony, we sat around with others over Safari and Kilimanjaro Lagers. "How long have you known Tony?" Phillipa asked. I looked at my watch. "About four hours." I told them the whole story of how I got mugged in Cape Town, which led to flight cancellations, which led to going overland across Africa through Zambia, which led to Shelle, which led to Cristina, which led to Tony. They, along with another ex-pat named Jen, marveled at my big global trip and, like the ZEHRP crew in Zambia, accepted me as one of their own. "It's great to have a fresh face," Tony said. I'm sure not every fresh face could slide right into the Moshi ex-patriate clique, but I suppose, as I did with Goba, "we clik!" And I didn't even have to mention 50 Cent. Not even once.
Cashless.DAY 195: On Easter weekend, I found myself stranded in Livingstone, Zambia without any money because all the in-town ATMs only accepted Visa/Plus/Electron-based bank cards and my Citibank ATM card was on the MasterCard/Cirrus/Maestro network. It's true what the Visa company says in their ad campaign: Visa. It's everywhere you want to be. (However, I'm told MasterCard is accepted in more places than Visa in Southeast Asia.) Of course I found myself stranded in another NMCZ (No MasterCard Zone) and on another bank holiday too; the first of May is Labour Day in most countries around the world. THE ORIGINAL PLAN BEFORE I discovered the bank holiday was simple: wake up and drop off my unneeded items at Tony and Ted's flat and go to the Tin Tin Tours office by eight, so Freddie could take me to the bank or exchange bureau. There I could get a cash advance off a credit card in order to pay for my Mount Kilimanjaro trek to leave right after that day. The first part of the plan was easy; I took a cab to Tony's to drop off my things and hang out for a bit to watch CNN while my batteries recharged. Tony directed me to a taxi which took me to Tin Tin by eight. Freddie got a guy named Sammy to drive us around town in a jeep to places where we could get some cash. Despite the fact that it was Labour Day, Freddie figured that in a tourist hub like Moshi, things would be open anyway.
Calling your mother in New Jersey to see if she received a PIN (and to wish her an early Happy Mother's Day): Cashless. We drove over to the Standard Chartered Bank to see if there was a teller available, but the security guard said they were closed for the holiday, despite Freddie's guess. For kicks I used the Visa-only ATM there, but I only got an error saying that they weren't able to connect to my network. Visiting the local bank on a bank holiday: Cashless. So the bank wasn't open, but perhaps the one money exchange bureau in town that could charge off a credit card would be. Moshi was a tourist hub, right? Wrong again. Going to a closed money exchange bureau: Cashless. "What are my options?" I asked Freddie. He too was surprised at all the dead ends on the first of May and had a really dumbfounded look on his face. Sammy then had this idea; he said there was an old man in town that would help out tourists and that maybe he would loan me the money. Yes, we had resorted to loan sharks, but it was worth a shot. Sammy drove us to the old man's big house, which was surrounded by a tight security perimeter like he was The Godfather or something. We pulled up to the gate and knocked on the door. A minute later a woman opened up. Sammy asked if The Don was available in Swahili. She went into investigate, closing the gate behind her. Would there be interest if I borrowed money from this guy? I don't even know him. He doesn't even know me. Would I have to return a favor to this guy sometime down the line, i.e. would I have to rub somebody out? We waited for a while until the woman came back with the bad news: her boss was away to take care of some business. What that business was I dared not ask. Knocking on the door of a loan shark (and possible mob boss): Cashless. Freddie was fresh out of ideas so we headed back to the office to consult with Mr. Kimario. On the way I had the bright idea that maybe I could wire the money to myself using the Western Union website at an internet cafe and the local office in town. Upon arriving at Western Union, we discovered that it too was closed. Trying to use the company claiming "the fastest way to send money": Cashless.
We only had about three hours to get the money and the race was on. Freddie and I left the streets of Moshi (picture above) and hopped in a public shared minivan headed westbound. (With high gas prices, it wasn't worth Sammy driving us back and forth in the jeep.)
"How much do you need?" the woman working there asked. "Fifteen hundred," I said, placing my MasterCard on the desk. "In dollars." I explained that I was taking out such a big amount all at once to avoid multiple service charges. The woman was about to process it, but decided to be honest with me. The office's rate was really low and she didn't want me to get more ripped off than I already would be at any exchange office. She referred me to an office with a better rate at the Arusha Resorts. Visiting the first open money exchange bureau in a new town: Cashless. The rate at the other office was a lot better (TSh 1000 = $1 USD, instead of TSh 800) and the guy there set it up for me. For some reason, I was only approved for $600 instead of the $1500 I thought I had a maximum of, but I just took the six million shillings and ran. Time was running out and Freddie and I rushed back in the taxi to get to a bus bound back for Moshi. The crowded bus made frequent stops though, costing us time we couldn't afford to waste. At one point on the way the bus just stopped for a long time to unload goods, and we just hopped off and jumped into a minibus. We thought that would have been faster, but it too stopped almost every five minutes. Once we got into Moshi town limits, we just jumped out and paid for a taxi back to the office. I paid Tin Tin Tours the TSh 6,000,000, which I thought would cover the $600 USD fee for the trek portion of my package; I forgot to factor in the actual rate of TSh 1140 = $1 USD, and I barely made it with the extra pocket cash I had. Tin Tin Tours wouldn't let the fee slide any portion since more than half of that $600 went towards national park fees, to be paid at the gate -- the other money was needed for supplies. I rented a sleeping bag, rain pants and gloves on good faith and then hopped in the jeep to go to Mount Kilimanjaro, cashless again.
After the runaround all day to get cash, it was a great feeling to finally have made some progress on my big African mountain trek. Finally reaching the first base camp up Mount Kilimanjaro: Priceless.*
Harder Than They SayDAY 196: Mount Kilimanjaro, known locally as "Mt. Kili" or just "Kili," contains the African continent's highest peak at 19,338 ft. (5896 m.) ASL. Some guy at the Tanzanian National Parks Department with a penchant for superlatives also boasts it is the "world's highest free standing mountain" since it isn't a part of any major mountain range. Kilimanjaro draws trekkers from around the world up its slopes on any one of eight different routes. For those with little to no mountaineering experience, the most popular route is the Marangu Route, an approach from the southeast. Tour companies bring willing travelers up this way with officially-licensed guides -- it is illegal to climb Kili without a guide -- on the standard 5-day trek. The Marangu Route, where is it unnecessary to bring tents because huts are provided on the way, is known as the easiest trail, so much that it has been nicknamed "The Coca-Cola Route." However, from what I was discovering, it wasn't as easy as the tour companies claimed. On my rushed first-of-five days the afternoon before, the trek was easy. My guide Jimmy led me up to the Marangu Route through the rainforest from the park gate to the first of three base camps, the Mandara Huts at 9,000 ft. (2720 m.) ASL. On the way up I encountered a woman on her way down. "How was it?" I asked her. "Oh, it's hard," she said, looking totally beat.
Rama the cook and Waka the porter went ahead of me and Jimmy that morning on the second leg of the trek. It was this leg where Jimmy taught me some useful phrases in Swahili, which he quizzed me on throughout the day: Habari. ("How are you?") Mambo. ("What's up?") Asante. ("Thank you.") He also used two other phrases frequently used on the trail: Hakuna matata ("No worries") and Pole pole (pronounced poleh poleh), which literally means "slow slow," but is also used to mean "relax," "take it easy" or "slow down." (I gathered it was similar to tranquilo, tranquilo in Spanish.) "Mount Kilimanjaro is all pole pole," Jimmy told me. Taking it easy is good advice when you're ascending from 9,000 ft. to 12,340 ft. (3720 m.) ASL. We kept a steady pace and I concentrated on my breathing, using the marathon-worthy technique that forces you to use more of your lung capacity, which I learned from Irish Sean in Cape Town, South Africa a couple of months prior: two nasal inhales followed by two oral exhales. Inhaling the sweet mountain air twice in a row, I made our way with Jimmy passed Kifunika, a hill where local Chagga people used for sacrificial ceremonies. Alhtough not too far away from the path, Kifunika was a little hard to see since we were walking through a cloud and visibility was poor. The route continued on an undulating path, passed birds and field mice, over bridges and through the mountain forest. While this leg of the trail sounds like a leisurely stroll to grandma's house, I was reminded that we were on a mountain expedition when we passed by the sign of the Masheu Point, the place on the path where a guide died of pneumonia ten odd years prior.
"We didn't make it," the woman said. "I thought this was supposed to be the easy way. The 'Coca-Cola Route.'" "It's harder than they say. Five of us tried to go up [to the peak] yesterday and we were zero for five," she said. "And he's usually better at trekking than I am," she continued, referring to the guy next to her. "On the second day I already started getting headaches," the guy told me, citing one of the telltale signs of altitude sickness. "I'm doing pretty good today," I said. "You'll be fine then." Perhaps it was the power of suggestion that spawned the mild headache I got after we went our separate ways, but I kept my concentration on my breathing to the point where it almost because involuntary.
After we checked into our separate huts, there was a break in the clouds above us and the sun was actually out for a while. With the momentary period of blue skies to the south, I went out with my camcorder and SLR to capture the moment. But the good vibe ended when I saw a team of porters take down a guy in a stretcher, wrapped in a sleeping bag (picture above). The sides of his head had gotten all blue from the lack of oxygen to his brain. I was told he never made it higher than the third base camp before altitude sickness got the best of him. Soon after, it started raining again. The westerly clouds kept the highest peak hidden, making me wonder if the supposed "Roof of Africa" was worth the risks.
"You don't have a headache?" Kenji asked me. "No, you?" "Little." One by one, altitude sickness was making its way to the next batch of trekkers. Later on, we encountered a Japanese couple on their way down from the top. They too didn't make it to the highest peak; only to Gilman's Point at 18,633 ft. (5681 m.) ASL -- about 700 ft. short of the very top at Uhuru Peak. That night as I lay in my rental sleeping bag in a cold, cold night, the image of the blue face of the guy in the stretcher stuck in my mind. I hoped that the sleeping bag he was wrapped in didn't become his body bag; otherwise there'd be another point on the trail named after a casualty. Coca-Cola Route? From what I was seeing, it was more like the route of a shot of hard whiskey.
Into Thin AirDAY 197: In 2001, Blogreader oogy and I hiked the Inca Trail in Peru to the archaelogical site of Machu Picchu, high up in the Andes Mountain Range. This four-day trail took us to altitudes of just over 13,000 ft. (4000 m.) ASL, but we already started feeling the nausea and headpains of altitude sickness around 12,500 ft. (3750 m.) ASL. On Day Three of my Kilimanjaro trek up the Marangu Route, I would ascend into the thin airs of 15,520 ft. (4750 m.) ASL, the highest I had ever been to that date.
THE CLOUDS HAD CLEARED UP in the morning and the sun shined down on the Horombo Huts. Finally, the snows of Uhuru Peak, Kilimanjaro's coveted highest summit was in view in the distance. Finally we got to see what we had come for. Kenji, the Japanese guy trekking in tandem with me, chuckled with joy. "Twende," my guide Jimmy said in Swahili. ("Let's go.") We started the third leg of the trail with Kenji and his guide Festo just behind. Waka, Rama and the other porters and cooks went ahead. The environment continued up the marshy moorland ecosystem, with shrubs that only grew higher than about three feet. To our northwest stood Mawenzi, the second highest peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. Like it's big brother Uhuru, it too was an extinct volcanic crater. As we ascended along the path, I continued concentrating on my breathing. I imagined my bronchial tubes were like Krazy Straws and I had to inhale extra deep for all the air to reach my lungs. I exhaled all of my lung capacity until it was empty of all carbon dioxide so that I could repeat the process all over again with fresh air -- all in a matter of a few seconds. Jimmy must have not been doing a similar Krazy Straw technique because around 13,000 ft. (4000 m.), he was already developing a slight headache.
UHURU PEAK PLAYED A GAME of peek-a-boo with us (or is it "peak-a-boo"?); one minute it'd be in plain sight surrounded by blue skies (picture above), the next it'd be hidden from us by clouds. This went on all day; when you're walking through clouds at that height, weather can change in an instant. Sometimes we'd walk through a drizzle, sometimes the sun would beat down on us with powerful rays -- all in a span of ten minutes. I had to keep on adding and removing layers of clothing accordingly to keep my core body temperature consistent. I managed to stave off headaches by the time we got to 14,400 ft. (4400 m.) ASL, the site of the last waterpoint, designated by a sign. It was the last chance to get fresh mountain water from a stream; anywhere higher would be too dry. I filled my empty bottle for my own drinking. The porters collected enough water ahead of us to last our stay at the third base camp. Almost immediately after the last waterpoint, the environment changed to semi-desert. If you didn't know how high you were, you might have mistaken it for the Australian Outback. The trail undulated up and down through the alpine desert, helping us to acclimitize to new heights. "Hakuna matata," Jimmy said, giving me a hard candy to suck on. "Asante," I answered. We stopped somewhere around 14,800 ft. (4500 m.) ASL in the middle of the sandy plain, near some rocks to eat the lunches Rama had packed for us: a hard-boiled egg, a banana, two jelly and butter sandwiches, an orange, a muffin and some cookies -- just what every Kili trekker needs. Kenji ate his pack lunch despite the look of pain in his face; he was fighting off a throbbing altitude headache. I continued to ward off the headpains with my Krazy Straw breathing. It got colder and windier as we continued gradually up the third leg of the Marangu Route through the semi-desert. Jimmy passed the time by singing some Swahili songs in a falsetto voice. I continued to concentrate on breathing -- at that height it started to sound like heaving snoring. I will have to say that one of the best things about concentrating on breathing at such an altitude is that nothing else matters. All etiquette and need for good manners vanishes into thin air. It didn't matter if I farted, belched or spit -- a man's utopia -- the only thing that mattered was getting oxygen into my lungs.
I finally started getting a bit lightheaded when we arrived at the Kibo Hut, the third and final base camp at 15,520 ft. (4750 m.) ASL. As my breathing returned to a state of normalcy -- it's hard to concentrate on Krazy Straws when you're unpacking -- my lightheadedness turned into a full-fledged pounding headache. Drinking tea and eating popcorn became harder to do than a New York Times crossword puzzle on a Sunday. Nausea set in and all I wanted to do was pass out in my bed -- but not before adding to the graffiti underneath the top bunk. Kenji and I awoke in our shared dorm room when dinner was served in the tables inside. Although we had both taken altitude sickness medication, Kenji only had a headache, while I was still battling nausea. "Do I have to eat?" I asked Festo and Jimmy. "Yes, you lose your appetite above four thousand, but you have to force some food down," Festo advised. "It's normal," Jimmy added. I told them how nauseous I was. "It's normal to feel like vomitting," Festo said. "Up here there is only half the oxygen than normal. But once you vomit, you will feel like you have new energy." They really wanted me to eat something to keep my energy up so I stumbled to the table, still in my sleeping bag and sleep sheet. I started eating the hot mushroom soup with pieces of bread I broke floating inside the bowl. It must have triggered something in my digestive system because I felt a certain unpleasant feeling in my esophagus. Feeling the inevitable, I emptied the nearby bowl where the two other slices of bread were. Five seconds later I vomitted into it, three upchucks in a row (without commercial interruption). The bowl overflowed with my own regurgitated food, but as Festo predicted, I immediately felt a lot better. I sat there a while staring at my own vomit and thought, Oh well, what's done is done. I just nonchalantly continued eating my soup from the other bowl like nothing happened. Kenji started laughing but then went off to get my guide. Jimmy came to my aid as I was eating soup from the bowl next to the other filled with puke. "Could you take a photo of me?" was my only request.
"Oh, you're right. I feel a lot better after vomitting," I said. "I'm a new man." I kicked my heels in the air like a dork. Waka came over to help clean up the mess. He wrapped the bowl of vomit in the tablecloth, but it was so full that some vomit just spilled onto the floor. I helped him clean up using some of the precious water from the last waterpoint. The watered down mess on the floor was disgustingly smeared away with the sweep of a broom. I went to bed shortly thereafter, but not before writing an addendum to my graffiti under the top bunk:
Surviving KilimanjaroDAY 198: Perhaps it was Ernest Hemingway's classic novella The Snows of Kilimanjaro that spawned the popularity of trekking the African mountain; each year hundreds of tourists flock to Tanzania with plans to "conquer Kili." However, the mountain that Hemingway glorified through prose is not without its dangers. According to my guide Jimmy, in the first four months of 2004 three people died in attempts of reaching Uhuru Peak, its highest summit. In 2003, Kili claimed six, three of which were porters. Kili knows no nationalities and takes its toll on locals as well. "I'm not feeling well in my stomach," Jimmy told me when he came to the Kibo Hut a little before midnight. Even on a guide of four years, Kili made its mark. "Waka will take you up." Kili also affected Kenji's guide Festo; like me the evening before, he had just thrown up his dinner. However, as he predicted, his regurgitation only resulted in "new energy," and he was ready for the final leg up to the peak.
Although the moon wasn't completely full, it was still bright enough to illuminate our journey so that flashlights weren't necessary. What was necessary was warm clothing; at gusty sub-zero temperatures, I prepared myself with eight layers on my upper body, four on my lower extremities and four on my head. Waka took point, followed by me, then Kenji and Festo behind and we started up the last leg around 12:30 a.m. The fourth and final leg was also the hardest, much steeper than anything we had trekked the past three days. Some sections were so steep that we had to make gradual zig-zags to make it easy on ourselves with the lack of sufficient oxygen. However, it was on these sections that were bedded with loose rocks, making us waste energy to keep from slipping. Body energy was a valuable commodity for that final moonlit leg. The energy to walk three-inch baby steps was all we could afford; everything else went to breathing. My inhalation technique continued to be my deep Krazy Straw one, followed by one release of carbon dioxide with a long and whispered "Ho..." Over and over this process repeated. Inhale like a Krazy Straw. Exhale with a "Ho..." (These were The "Ho's" of Kilimanjaro.)
We continued the arduous journey towards the heavens, racing the rotation of the earth in hopes of reaching the top before the sun came up around the horizon. To aid me I had Jimmy's walking pole and with it I developed a sort of rhythmic strut like a pimp from the 1970s. With both hands on the pole and my "Ho's of Kilimanjaro" (get it?), I worked my way up the incline, stopping every ten or so steps to catch my breath. The higher we went the more frequent the stops were. I'd call to Waka in front by saying "Wait" and after a couple of measures of breathing, I'd call "Twende." If Waka was going too fast I'd call "Pole, pole." Kenji didn't mind the frequent stops; often he sat down during them calling "Rest," extending the break even longer. It was needed up there in the stratosphere. Our efforts weren't fast enough because we had only made it about two-thirds of the way up when the radiant aura of the sun starting coming above the slightly curved horizon line -- at that height, you could even see the curvature of the earth. We continued upwards, still racing the sun, but soon we realized there was no point. The inevitable sunrise came on schedule and we just sat where we were to watch it. Slowly the rays of earth's closest star revealed the Mawenzi peak (Hi-Res) beneath us to the southeast. Even with the added "warmth" of the sun, the temperature was still in the cryogenic range. When we crossed the snow line at about 16,000 ft. (5000 m.) we began seeing the snows of Kilimanjaro that Hemingway named his story after. The snow was trapped in the nooks and divets of the big rocks and boulders surrounding us, the same rocks and boulders we had to use extra energy to climb over. Breathing became harder (my nostrils started frosting), as did hydration; my water bottle purification filter froze shut. Luckily Kenji had some water to spare. The top of the ridge we were climbing towards seemed like it was always getting farther the more we progressed. The guides were men enough to take our backpacks for us and with Festo's added motivation, we trekked on under the morning sun. We eventually made it to the top of the ridge at Gilman's Point at 18,633 ft. (5681 m.) ASL around eight o'clock. We were greeted by a congratulatory sign posted by the national parks department. "Congratulations!" Festo said. "You made it!" Despite the slight lightheadedness I was having, I was level-headed enough to realize what he was trying to do: make us feel accomplished for reaching Gilman's Point -- "You still get a certificate" -- because being a guide, he knew we probably weren't fit enough to hike the ridge to Uhuru Peak. Kenji, with an even more intense look of pain in his face like he was about to give birth, still wanted to go for the summit. "You've come up too slow," Festo told us. True, we had arrived about two hours later than a person fit enough to make it all the way. "Even if we make it there, there's no support team to take you down. It's the low season. I can see you won't make it. Trust me. That's why I am a guide." Later I discovered that the mountain guides get fined by the parks department if they advise wrongly to their clients.
I was content with what we had accomplished. One can't say I didn't reach the top of Kilimanjaro because looking down the otherside of Gilman's Point, it went downhill again. For the sake of bragging rights I suppose I at least made it to the highest point on the eastern side of Kilimanjaro's highest ridge and that I made it to the very end of the Marangu Route -- some didn't even make it that far. I heeded Festo's advice; attempting Uhuru Peak wasn't worth the risk. Although it was only about a 700-foot difference in altitude, it was still about a mile or so laterally. Besides, we had come for the sunrise, and we had seen it. The sights at Uhuru Peak would be similar to the ones at Gilman's Point (picture above) anyway.
While high altitudes can kill you, it can also just make you delirious; Jimmy told me one Japanese girl started hitting him with a stick. Kenji was another Japanese person gone delirious. His face started turning a shade of blue and he lost all mind-body coordination. Finally taking Festo's advice, he started his way back down the trail, only he couldn't walk on his own. In fact, he couldn't even stand. Every attempt to do so resulted in him falling over like a marionette without a puppetmaster. Festo, his guide-turned-puppetmaster carried him by the shoulder like a soldier injured in battle. Not to make light of a serious situation, but it was like watching Weekend At Bernie's. Festo brought Kenji down to a level where he could stand on his own with a walking stick -- until he just started falling over again. I gave him my walking stick to use. He used them like a pair of crutches, but he still couldn't make it on his own. Festo helped lead him down gradually over a period of about three hours, stopping about every ten feet for another break. As for me, I only had a slight headache as I marched down the slope, gravity finally on my team. My headpains got heavier as I descended though with the morning winds scattering precious oxygen molecules all over. Waka was behind me, but he kept on stopping to rest for long periods of time. What is my responsibility here? I mean, I'm the client and he's the guide. Wait a minute, he's not even my real guide! That guy's already got altitude sickness! "Is he okay?" I asked Festo. "Yeah, he's just resting." Festo called to Waka and he eventually came down. Perhaps he was just admiring the Mawenzi peak jutted out of a sea of clouds. He eventually caught up to me and together we arrived at base camp. "Congratulations," Jimmy wished me.
"Did you make it?" the Horombo caretaker asked me. "No. Only to Gilman's." "Good enough. Congratulations." I supposed congratulations were in order. Although I may have not "conquered Kili," at least I survived it.
The Path Of The Other CoinDAY 199: On Day 193: Tomorrow in Tanzania, it was up in the air where I would go after Dar-es-Salaam. I had boiled down my plethora of options to just two: 1) go to the touristic town of Arusha and organize a trek and safari combo with a Mr. Jalala of Kilimanjaro Crown Tours (recommended by fellow travelers Frank, Francesca and Yvonne in Nkhata Bay, Malawi); or 2) go to the smaller town of Moshi to meet American ex-patriate Tony (referred to by Cristina in Lusaka, Zambia) and organize a trek/safari with Tin Tin Tours (recommended to me not by a fellow traveler, but a Tanzanian rasta named Goba). In the end, it boiled down to a simple toss-up and rather than just flip a coin, I played the laws of probability in a more mystical way. Like randomly picking one of two stones out of my pocket as done in the book The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, I blindly picked one of two coins -- a Malawian and a Tanzanian -- the former representing Moshi, the latter for Arusha. Malawi came up and my path from there was decided. But little did I know at the time that the path of one would lead me right back to the path of the other one.
THE FIVE-HOUR TREK DOWN the rest of Mount Kilimanjaro's Marangu Route was straightforward. After breakfast, Jimmy and I hiked back the way we came, through the moorland, heather zone, mountain forest and rainforest. Halfway down we stopped at the Mandara Huts for lunch. Nearby a family of black colobus monkeys looked down on me from a tree branch above. Back at the entry gate I received my certificate for reaching the end of the Marangu Route at Gilman's Point. I returned my rental raingear and hopped back in the jeep bound back to Moshi. Before returning to the Tin Tin Tours office, we stopped at an exchange bureau so that I could charge cash off my credit card so that I would no longer be cashless for tips. "How are you feeling?" Jimmy asked me. "I'm so dirty," I answered. "But it's good to be breathing air again." I thought I might have had the rest of the day and the next before starting the second half of my trek/safari package with Tin Tin Tours, but when I arrived back at the office, Freddie told me I was already booked for a safari to leave the next morning. It being the low season for tourism, there weren't enough clients in Moshi for them to organize a trip themselves. Instead, they tagged me onto a group from another tour agency based in Arusha. After taking a much needed shower in a nearby guesthouse courtesy of Tin Tin, Freddie escorted me all the way to Arusha to oversee that my transfer to the other company when smoothly. We rode in the comforts of Princess Class on a Scandinavian coach bus and were picked up by a jeep at the bus terminal.
"Yeah," I answered. "I'm Mister Jalala." Slowly it began to register; this was the Mr. Jalala that Yvonne had e-mailed me about. By some strange coincidence, the path of the coin I chose the week before had led me back to The Path Of The Other Coin. By some strange coincidence, out of the dozens and dozens of tour agencies in Arusha fighting for the tourist dollar, Tin Tin had picked one that I might have gone to anyway.
Mr. Jalala put me in the same guesthouse that he put Yvonne in. She wasn't there when I arrived; she too had just come down Kilimanjaro (via a different route) and was out somewhere in town. After settling down in a room, I went out somewhere in town too: to the internet cafe down the block. I was instructed by the hotel manager not to stray any farther than that; at night Arusha got very dangerous and strangle muggings were a common thing. When Freddie and I went out to dinner at Khan's Barbecue (picture above), a humble-looking but incredibly delicious sidewalk barbecue buffet on nearby Mosque Street, the restaurant owner reiterated the warnings of nighttime Arusha, even to a local like Freddie. "If you want to keep that jacket, you should take a taxi," he advised him. I stayed in the courtyard of the guesthouse the rest of the night.
"Hey, Mr. Jalala said you never came," she said. Last she heard from me I was only just thinking about going to Arusha to meet the folks at Kilimanjaro Crown Tours. I told her of the strange coincidence of the day. We passed the time through the night chatting at the table in the courtyard. We swapped Kilimanjaro stories; she told me how she had actually reached Uhuru Peak via the Machame route, a different and steeper trail spread over six days, which she decided to take after hearing that the "easier" "tourist" "Coca-Cola" Marangu Route was actually the more challenging one. (The percentage of people reaching Uhuru Peak via the Marangu Route was lower than the number taking the Machame Route. In fact, she spoke of a Japanese guy that had attempted reaching the peak via the Marangu Route four times, failing each time.) Yvonne was slated to stay in Arusha for a day to catch up on her writing duties -- she too was a freelance travel writer (based in Hong Kong), also maintaining a blog -- before going off on a specialized five-day safari. I thought maybe we'd head off on the "standard Serengeti safari" together, but she had already seen those grasslands on a previous assignment and was headed south on a pricier trip to see the bushmen. The Hong Kong-based writer filled me in on what kind of service I might expect from the Arushan tour company. Her trek guy already started asking about tips before the trek was over, and she was dropped off in the wrong town (Moshi) after her tiring descent. She had to organize her own ride back to Arusha and was so pissed off when she got back to the guesthouse. Perhaps the random selection of the Malawian coin that night in Dar-es-Salaam led me the right way after all. Whether or not the questionable service on The Path Of The Other Coin would continue on my upcoming safari I didn't know, but I was soon to find out.
Modern MaasaiDAY 200: You may have seen footage of the Maasai tribal people of eastern Africa in movies or documentaries. These people of the Tanzanian-Kenyan border region have maintained their cultural identity for centuries, often seen wearing red cloaks known as shukas, holding big staffs to lead a herd of cattle, or jumping up and down as high as they can in what looks like a contest. The Maasai are best distinguished by their jewelry and ornamentation in their "self-deformation" of the body: elongated or torn ear lobes and stretched out lips. While these images are true to life, they aren't the only way the Maasai people live. Like many other "primitive" tribes in the world, people have learned to adapt to modern society.
MY ENCOUNTER WITH THE MODERN MAASAI didn't come without a long morning journey from Arusha to the town of Mtowabu, about two hours west. Mr. Jalala picked me up at the guesthouse with driver/guide Elia. From there we picked up my two other safari-mates: Francesco and Paola, two Italians from the Tuscanny region. We finalized some business at the tour office, where Mr. Jalala bossed around his underlings in his Sean John gear like a big shot. He bid the three of us farewell -- after reminding us that "tipping is recommended" -- and left us with Elia and Simon, our cook for the next five days. Before leaving Arusha, we made a couple of stops for supplies around town, including one important one. "Are we going to stop at a bottle store?" I asked. "We have drinking water," Elia answered. "Do you have gin?" "Ah, gin and tonic." We drove to a nearby liquor store. "You can't go on safari without gin and tonic," I said, buying a small bottle of London's Dry. From a previous safari in Botswana in 2000 I learned that G & T's were the quinessential safari cocktail; the quinine in tonic water wards off mosquitoes. (The gin just gets you drunk.) Mosquito-preventative cocktails were a good call because our destination was Mtowabu, which translates to "Mosquito River." It being the rainy season, mosquitoes were more present than normal, so much that Elia made the decision that we'd stay in a guesthouse with mosquito nets and beds for our first night instead of in tents. After hanging my clothes to dry (and worrying about putsi flies eggs) since they hadn't dried completely from laundry service in Arusha, I had a box lunch with Francesco and Paola. As we ate, Elia introduced us to Isaac, a modern-day Maasai and our tour guide of the day. He was wearing a button down shirt, slacks and loafers instead of the traditional Maasai garb. The only physical evidence to his tribal roots were the etchings in his face (believed to prevent disease) and his elongated and torn ears, for ornamentation.
Isaac explained the traditions of the Maasai as we strolled around town. He told us that the "jumping contest" often seen in documentaries is actually a form of celebratory dance for ceremonies of marriage and a boy's circumcision into manhood. What Westerners might call "self-mutilation" of the face is actually considered attractive -- although I don't see even the teenaged body-piercing crowd of the West ripping off their lips anytime soon. The Maasai, a people of shepherds, are dependant on cattle; cows serve many purposes, including medicinal ones. Pure blood extracted from a cow's jugular vein is consumed to "replenish" blood lost of an ailing person. For example, a woman who lost a lot of blood in the process of giving birth is given cow's blood to drink. As far as the Maasai diet, it too is dependent on the cow. Unlike most of the other tribes in Mtowabu that grow grains, fruits and vegetables, the Maasai essentially eat nothing but meat. Perhaps this explains why many of them are so slender; they are all on the Atkins diet.
"I think I prefer beer," was Francesco's analysis. From town we walked a dirt road towards Lake Manyara, passed villagers, banana plantations, coconut trees, yellow acacia tree nurseries and African bee honey orchards. Isaac continued his informal lecture on the life of the Maasai. "A man can have many wives," he said. "But every night he has to decide which hut to sleep in." "So how many wives do you have?" I asked him. "Just one." "Less problems," Francesco added. Isaac's monogamy, as "modern" as it was, was only due to circumstance; to acquire a woman from another family requires an offering of many cattle, and his family couldn't afford it.
After about an hour's walk we were at the muddy and smelly shore of Lake Manyara, where flamingos and other birds came to drink and feed. The winds shifted a little, blowing our scent to a lone buffalo so we had to go around and through a muddy creek that soaked my boots and socks in water infested with God-knows-what. We walked a long and tiring way back through the grasslands towards a herd of wildebeests that mistook for predators and got out of our way.
With Isaac's long leg stride, it was impossible for me to keep up and with the sun going down fast, he hardly stopped to wait up. For an hour and a half I strugged non-stop in my wet shoes with flies buzzing all around me and I'll admit, I really hated it. We eventually got back into town by sunset at the Maasai market where people from all the far villages came to trade and buy goods. The blend of traditionalism and modernism still continued; I noticed a guy with a slick leather jacket under his red shuka; another guy simply waited for a ride instead of walking (picture above); and one guy simply enjoyed the refreshing taste of a Coca-Cola instead of that mbege concoction. Elia picked us up from there and drive us back to the campsite/lodge. It was there we said goodbye to our Maasai guide for the day Isaac, who, in true modern-day style, wouldn't leave without a tip.
Crater Of LifeDAY 201: Two million years ago, lava erupted from a hole in the earth's crust in what would later be known as Tanzania. The lava spewed out and cooled, layer after layer until a big volcano was formed, just east of what would later be known as the Serengeti. Over time, the eruptions ceased and the volcano collapsed, leaving a huge crater in the earth where plant life flourished, providing food for the lives of all the African animals that climbed up over the rim and inside. These herbivores attracted carnivores and thus, a self-sustaining "crater of life" was born. Known as the Ngorongoro Crater, this self-contained biosphere was formed in an area that would later been known as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, coincidentaly where 2003's Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life was filmed. The term "ngorongoro" is a Maasai onomatopoeic word for the ringing of a cow's bell -- the Maasai are permitted by the Tanzaznian government to graze their cattle within its bounderies -- although I really don't get how they got "ngoro" after hearing the rings from under a cow's neck.
FELLOW TRAVELERS FRANCESCO AND PAOLA, along with cook Simon and guide/driver Elia had breakfast in Mtowuba and then hopped in the 4x4. En route to the crater, we made a quick pitstop in the town of Karatu for some bananas. Street vendors -- one of which thought I was Brazilian -- tried to sell us crafts through the window, but got no sales. Driving up through a big troupe of baboons in the middle of the road, we arrived at the Ngorongoro Conservation Area entrance gate, stopping briefly in the visitors' center. "You were right about the rains," I told Elia. He had predicted the grey weather the night before. "I know the area," he boasted.
We continued through the morning mountain fog of the rainy season over the rim and down a rocky and bumpy road into the big crater of life, 23 km. in diameter (picture above). On the way, we encountered two elephants. "That one has a fifth leg," Elia pointed out, referring to its well-endowed, leg-long genitalia.
When we noticed a group of other 4x4s in one area, we went to investigate. They had found a lioness. Soon, other jeeps came and surrounded her like crazy papparazzi. It was sort of sad to see the female feline trapped by metal and rubber, but she eventually moved on, with cubs behind her. With the cubs came the Lion King of the pride himself, who had no qualms about stopping the flow of traffic by taking a brief nap under one of the trucks -- the King of the Jungle Bad Ass he was.
Elia drove us out of the crater, up the rim to several garages established to fix damaged safari trucks. The third one we went to actually had the parts we needed, which was a good thing because the rest of the day we went down a rocky road towards the Serengeti National Park. En route, we passed Maasai herders with their flocks of sheep and cattle -- I still didn't get how they got "ngoro" from the sound of a cow bell -- and then we made a short stop at the Oldupai Gorge, "one of the most important archaelogical sites on Earth" according to the site museum (which was closed; Elia instructed us to just loook through the window). The gorge 1400 m. ASL was once the site of a prehistoric lake and now holds layers of two million years of geological and paleontological history. Each of the five layers provided a look into the past, with fossils of primitive giraffes, elands, elephants and mankind itself.
Simon prepared dinner while we set up the tents together with the last remaining minutes of daylight. Distant lighting flashed through the big African sky, revealing the silohuettes of acacia trees on the horizon. The rain turned into a light drizzle by that time, which was good. But in lieu of the roaring thunder came the roar of a lioness in the distance. "The wildebeest are nearby from the migration," Elia said. "So they predators are nearby?" "Yeah." The only other sound caused by nature was the sound of raindrops falling off the branches and hitting our metal plates like church bells. I still didn't get how the sound of bells translated to the onomatopoeic term "ngoro."
Stranded in the SerengetiDAY 202: The Serengeti, the vast grassland measuring over 9,100 square miles (over 14,700 sq. km.) in the northwest of Tanzania, is home to a multitude of mammals, reptiles, birds and insects all living in a grand circle of life. The name "Serengeti" is derived from the Maasai term siringet, which means "land of endless space." Nothing accentuates the feeling of endlessness of the Serengeti than being stranded in it for an unforseen amount of time.
THE DAY STARTED OUT like any other budget camping safari. Francesco, Paola and I had a basic breakfast of eggs, toast, fruit and coffee before hopping in the 4x4 for a game drive. Since we were to stay at the same campsite later that night, we just left our tents -- and our cook Simon -- there to wait all day. The game drive continued like a a good game drive should. We saw jackals, black-eared foxes, francolins, guinea fowl, crown cranes and herons, all feeding near a water source. "This is a springs. The predators come to hunt the animals coming for water," Elia said as simply as he could. The predators were nowhere to be seen, but were probably somewhere hiding in the long grass. Some Nubian vultures, zebras and wildebeests later, we found ourselves deep in the African bush, in the middle of nowhere, looking for more game to shoot with our camera. For most of the time we went trully offroading, driving far away from anything resembling a road, dirt or asphalt. The grounds were still wet from the storm of the night before, which formed the muddy ditch that trapped us about nine in the morning. Elia gave the 4x4 some gas, but it wasn't budging. "We have to collect grass," he instructed to us clients. He'd put it under the tires to provide traction. We all went out to collect some -- at least in the grasslands there was no shortage of it. "Not shitty grass, biggie grass," Elia scolded me in his African accent when I went straight for the short wimpy grass.
"You have to be strong guys or we will be sleeping here," Elia said at the wheel. We pushed. The truck tires spun. The 2x4 went nowhere. After a few more attempts with even more biggie grass, the Land Cruiser just got deeper into the mud. What was worse was that the engine died right after. This was no surprise because even before we left Arusha we already started seeing the problems with our transportation. We had to push-start the car from the liquor store, and at one stop at the market, the car starting moving backwards into traffic when Elia left us there, and the handbrake didn't do anything. (I had to leap from my chair to push down the foot brake with my hand in one action move into a really awkward position.)
"We have to wait for another car," Elia said. "I think I saw one over there." He pointed to the endless horizion where we saw nothing but grass and some acacia trees. Elia went on foot towards another seemingly random point in the vast grassland, leaving us stranded in the middle of the nowhere (picture above). The morning clouds had cleared by that time, making room for the hot African sun to beat down on us. "Look. Vultures," I pointed out to the Tuscans. "I think they know we're going to be here a while."
"Which animal do you think will eat our guide?" Paola asked me, flies buzzing around her head. True, Elia did mention the predators were lurking about. "I hope," Francesco added. We passed the bottle around and waited some more as the temperatures began to rise. Francesco told me that a similar situation happend to them in Guatamala, only they had been stranded in a motor boat at sea without any gas. "How long did you wait?" I asked the Tuscan. "Only about an hour." "I think this will be longer than an hour." "Yeah."
The circling vultures got closer.
"I think I see a car," I said, looking out with the binoculars. Paola took the lenses from me to confirm. She saw nothing. "It's a joke," she said. I looked again and upon closer scrutinization, it was only a big bush. The mind plays tricks in those type of situations I supposed. I thought I started hearing the sound of a car horn, but it turned out to just be the buzzing of a big bug flying in the air. "Do you have any more gin and tonic?" Francesco asked me. We made another cocktail in my water bottle, this time with a hint of orange.
"I tried to find the car, but it went far away," he told us. We had to do this on our own. Leave it to a budget safari company to not have a radio when you need it. Cell phones got no reception, and I think Elia was trying to hint to us that we couldn't flag down a ranger because he had snuck us into the park the night before without registering. Francesco said that we'd need harder pieces of wood to put under the tires for a better grip with the ground. The nearest tree wasn't too far away, but through unpredictable grasslands. We had no choice -- but no problems getting there. There wasn't much loose deadwood around, so we had to break off some branches. It wasn't so easy with all the thorns, but we managed to get some with the help a knife and a little elbow grease.
After an hour of our efforts, we gave it another big heave ho. Our 80s montage succeeded only to get the 2x4 out of the hole and swerve into a deeper ditch. More wood. More grass. Tensions started to rise as the temperature did. "Grassa issa all water," Francesco argued in his Italian accent. "Itsa just lika da mud." "The wood is too hard. The tire can not pass," Elia retorted in his African accent. I remained neutral and just shifted grass and wood around with Paola.
We made it back onto solid ground. Paola smiled a relief. I high-fived Elia in true 80s film montage style. "Alright, let's go drink some gin," I told Francesco when we hopped back in the 2x4. "Salud!" I said. "Prost!"
The game drive continued. Around late afternoon the sky went overcast, just when we found a tree with eighteen vultures perched above. We stopped to shoot them with film and digital pixels, which was a bad idea because the 2x4 died again. "We have to push," Elia said. Hmmm, when have I heard that before? Francesco wasn't happy. He had reached his threshold and was all pissed off, doing Italian arm and hand gestures in disgust. "This is not a car for safari, this is a shit car!" We had no choice but to push-start the 2x4, again, through the mud. We managed to push it to the edge of a hill where gravity did the rest of the work. The jeep started again after Elia popped the clutch. None of this seemed to bother Paola -- that is, until an acacia branch bent back with the forward force of the car and flung back through the roof opening, striking the bridge of her nose. It started bleeding and she, in lack of an appropriate Italian hand gesture, just kicked the seat in frustration.
"How was the game drive?" Simon asked when we returned to camp. He was answered with groans. Elia broke the silence. "Uh, I gave them stories to write about." Yes Elia, you sure did.
May 13, 2004MigrationDAY 203: Every year, the wildebeests (a.k.a. gnus) of the Serengeti plain migrate back and forth between Tanzania and Kenya, following the rains that grow the grass they require for survival. The month of May being the rainy season in Tanzania, all the wildebeests were around feeding; they would remain until mid-June when the grasses dry up before heading up north to greener pastures. Like the wildebeests, Francesco, Paola, Simon, Elia and I left our southern camp and headed north towards greener pastures. After push-starting the 2x4 (again), we made our way up the dirt road to the big open plain where the wildebeests grazed amongst groups of zebras. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but grass, wildebeests and zebras stretching out to the horizon.
Driving by white egrets, ostriches and elands, our jeep -- or "wheeledbeest," if you will -- continued its northbound migration. We stopped at the national park visitors center at Naabi Hill, where I discovered that we were truly onto greener pastures; they sold Pringles! After eating the same old thing everyday prepared by Simon, junkfood was a much welcomed change. Naabi Hill looked out onto the northern grasslands, which appeared to be relatively empty; most of the wildebeests were still down in the south. When we drove through these grasslands, it continued to be fairly empty up close. The only things jutting out were kopjes, "islands" of boulders in a sea of grass. Kopjes, like Ngorongoro Crater, were a result of prehistoric volcanic activity oozing to the surface, cooling and being shaped by winds.
"Bravo," Francesco said in a sarcastic Italian accent after opening his packed lunch. Sarcastic clapping added to his attitude. "Ah, big tip." For him, the migration northbound didn't necessarily mean greener pastures. For me, well, at least I still had my can of Pringles.
THE ANNUAL MIGRATION OF THE WILDEBEEST (picture above) is not without its pitfalls. During the 100 odd-mile journey between Tanzania and Kenya, the thousands of wildebeest face disease, river drownings or attacks from predators; not every one makes it. While their partners the zebras don't necessarily migrate all the way with their four-legged partners, they too are vulnerable to any of the obstacles that Africa poses upon them. Our "wheeledbeest" was not without its own "diseases," namely engine trouble. When Elia veered off the main road to a smaller one to get a closer look at some elephants, he started going back the way we came with some famous last words: "We have to go back, the road is not safe." Just then, the engine died. We were stranded again, this time not just stuck in the mud but also in high grass with no room or energy to push-start the 2x4. Elia abandoned us again and walked to the main road with Simon to try and get some help, leaving Francesco, Paola and me in a familiar situation. Our spirits weren't so optimistic this time. Francesco started with his Italian hand gestures and Paola (in lack of an appropriate gesture) just starting slashing the upholstery of the jeep with her knife while casually humming a tune. "Itsa crazzy day," she said. Only about forty minutes went by (it seemed a lot longer) when another truck with license plate "ARQ 787" rode by on the main road. Elia and Simon flagged it down and had them come to our ailing vehicle in the tall grass. Seeing the ARQ 787 truck with its true 4x4 action cutting through the high grass really got me jealous. We tied a tow rope between the two wheeledbeests, and of course it didn't work on the first try. Nor the second try. But as they say, the third time's the charm, and we were back on our feet, er wheels, again. Obstacles continued to confront us like they do to the actual wildebeests. The gnus sometimes have to deal with high river crossings. The ones that aren't strong enough get swept away by the current -- or simply get eating by crocodiles. When we arrived at a crossing of the Gameti River, it was overflowing from the rains, and we wondered if we could make it. ARQ 787 went ahead and showed us that it could be done; we followed closely behind in case we'd need another tow but it wasn't necessary. Afterwards, ARQ 787 left us in the dust. However when we caught up with them, it was they that stalled. Like the co-dependent relationship between the wildebeest and the zebra, we towed them this time, pulling them down the road until ARQ 785 came to their aid and took over for us.
"You think there's a crocodile?" I asked Francesco as we watched Elia put his hand into possible croc-infested waters. "I hope."
Greener pastures? I wasn't sure, but at least I still had some Pringles leftover.
Straight From The SourceDAY 204: Lake Victoria, Africa's biggest (and the world's second largest) lake, encompasses over 42,000 square miles (68,800 sq. km.) within the boundaries of Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. With the force of gravity, its millions of gallons of freshwater flow northward all the way to the Mediterranean Sea on a mighty river called the Nile. While my adventures on the Nile would not come for a few more weeks, I was glad that I was able to at least see its source, for Lake Victoria isn't a destination in a "standard 5-day Serengeti safari." The only reason why we were there was because of the special request by Tuscan travelers Francesco and Paola; instead of returning back to Arusha, they would continue northwest towards Kenya. For me, setting sights on the big body of freshwater kept me content amidst all the arguing between everyone else in safari.
Elia tried to compensate the Italians not with money (of course) but with an arrangement of guide for the day to explore the nearby lake region since they were complaining the night before that they paid for five days, only to get four. That new guide, Joseph, took us to the nearby fisherman market at a port outside of the village of Lamadi, where fishermen hunted the waters for a latest catch in wooden boats (Hi-Res). Joseph walked us around the many piles of freshwater sardines on sale for consumption. Nearby, fishermen displayed their day's catch of tilapia and nile perch at tables (picture above) or in baskets. Elia, although on "work hours" couldn't pass up a deal on some Lake Victoria fish and bought enough to sell back in Arusha. I reckoned he used the safari gas money because he asked to borrow TSh 10,000 from me in order to get fuel for the long haul back southeast.
"The italianos are complicated," Elia said to me when they were out of earshot. "They don't know what they want." I wasn't a mind reader but I think they wanted an enjoyable safari.
The long 9-hour drive back through the Serengeti and Ngorongoro regions wasn't too exciting. There was nothing on the way back that I hadn't seen before more than twice and perhaps I was just bored of seeing the same old thing again. If you've seen one (thousand) wildebeest, you've seen them all. I just spent my time alone in the back of the Land Cruiser staring out the window, sleeping or just standing with my head out the roof to watch the clouds (Hi-Res) and let the wind blow through my hair. We stopped back at the Naabi Hill visitors center where I used the facilities. One look in the mirror and I saw the reality of myself: I looked like shit.
"Hey, did you get my e-mail?" I asked. "Yeah, did you get my reply?" "No, I didn't have time. So is it cool?" "Yeah, no problem." Ted came to the living room to greet me as I sat on one of the cushioned chairs. "Wow, you either got a lot of color or you just have a layer of grime on you." True, I hadn't showered in about four days. A hot shower followed. Lather, rinse, repeat. Four times. Down the floor of the tub, all the grime built-up on my skin flowed down the drain in streams of grey and brown. I was clean again after that long drive from the lake region on other side of the country. People can marvel at the freshwaters of Lake Victoria, but at that moment, I knew the fresh waters coming out of a showerhead were the only ones worth mentioning.
The Man And The RefrigeratorDAY 205: "Wow, I haven't seen one of these in a while," I said to Tony in the kitchen as he made his morning coffee before going to work. I went to get some milk. "What, a refrigerator?" "Yeah." After being on a non-stop tour for ten days in a row in the wilds of Africa, climbing mountains and going on safari, it was nice to come back to the conveniences of modern life.
THE REFRIGERATOR WAS JUST ONE OF THE LITTLE THINGS of modern technology that recharged my soul. That and the fact that I was staying in another ex-patriate bubble of American suburbia for a while with computers, MP3s, DVDs and a portable "Mr. T in Your Pocket" talking keychain (172k .WAVe file). Needless to say, I barely had reason to leave the apartment. That's not to say I didn't veg in, watch movies and play with talking keychains all day. (I pity the fool that does.) I had a long day of Blog writing ahead of me, which I was soon discovering by early afternoon, would spill into the next day, or even the next. From eight in the morning until about two in the afternoon I didn't even get up to typing my handwritten work yet; for hours I had sorted through over 1,200 digital photos between my little digital spy camera and my camcorder.
"There's something going around," Ted told me. "So I'll probably get it next?" "Yeah." Ted went into his room to sleep it off. Later I gave him some anti-gripal pills labeled in Portuguese that I bought in Brazil, which knocked him out again.
Ndowo, the very friendly woman of World Quality Travel, sorted me out with flights that would get me to Zanzibar and from there to Addis Ababa in the most convenient way possible with the lowest cost -- the airline would even send a car to pick me up at the apartment. I booked a provisional itinerary with her so that I could sleep on it and then head back upstairs to the flat. Tony came home three minutes after I did.
"Looks like its just the two of us," I told me. He put all the steaming dishes on the dining table (picture above) like a waiter of wholesome homecooked food, telling me his grandmother would have been proud. We ate the chicken, basil, cabbage and rice with condiments of salt, nuoc cham hot sauce and fish sauce over conversations of PCs vs. Macs, and in the end there was still a lot of food leftover. I wondered what Tony would do with it, but then I remembered, Aha! Someone invented the refrigerator! Sure the homecooked meal was much appreciated, but wow, the refrigerator. What a concept.
The Ultimate DayDAY 206: In the morning I had no plans to do much in and around Tony and Ted's apartment while they were away at work (Ted was feeling better, so he went in too) other than continue to catch up on Blog duties. Little did I know then that the day would be an "ultimate" day. The daily cleaning crew came in the morning and cleaned up while I worked on my laptop. Lucy, the head housekeeper took my grimy laundry to wash, leaving me to just concentrate on my work, which ultimately was a good thing because I finally finished everything that I had handwritten up until that point. I went off to an internet cafe in town and uploaded everything over a two-hour session. Afterwards, I confirmed my flight tickets at the travel agency under Tony and Ted's flat -- and paid for it with cash dispensed from the local ATM since I finally received a Visa PIN from the States -- and went back upstairs. The phone rang. "Erik, it's Tony." "Hey." "Do you have any plans for later on?" "Actually I was wondering if you guys were available for me to take you out for dinner." "Well, before that, would you be interested in playing a game of ultimate frisbee?" "Yeah!" I met Tony at the apartment, where we both put on shorts and then head off to meet up with other ex-patriate and local children at the campus of the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center where most of the ex-pats worked. Getting there wasn't as simple as it usually was for Tony; when we got on a dalla-dalla (the Tanzania term for a shared minivan) bound for KCMC, a cop stopped us about a third of the way there. For some reason, the police that day started to have a conscience about overcrowding in the vans and buses and started stopping them to take people off. (To be fair, I suppose it wasn't safe for me to be riding in an upright position while hanging out the open doorway.) "Wow, it's always an adventure with you, isn't it?" Tony commented while we waited at a dalla-dalla stop for another minivan to come. One with enough space never came, so Tony called one of his three usual taxi drivers to pick us up.
I HADN'T PLAYED ULTIMATE FRISBEE in over a decade when it was in the curriculum in high school. I do remember that I enjoyed playing it and when the game started going (picture above), it all came back to me. The only difference between playing in high school and playing there at the KCMC campus was that the field had a lot of ditches and potholes that tripped almost every player. There were about sixteen of us playing, most playing for the first time,from KCMC workers to local children to other ex-patriates from Sudan and England. We played eight on eight, although it was hardly even because for some reason all the tall people ended up on the same time. No matter, the two-hour game was just-for-fun, and it really worked up a sweat -- and an appetite. Tony and I hopped in a taxi and went back to the flat to put on some pants and to pick up Ted. From there we went to Salzburger, a steak house in town frequented by ex-pats and other more well-off people, which was created by a Tanzania who had visited Salzburg, Austria once and loved it so much he wanted to recreate a little slice of it in Moshi. Although their definition of steak was a crudely cut portion of beef, it tasted good and the presentation was decent. I thought I might not have enough cash on me to cover all three of us -- I only had about $40 worth in T. shillings on me -- but when I saw the menu I discovered the most expensive thing was only about three bucks. I gladly paid the bill of food and drinks and left a tip as well.
The next morning, I swore never to overuse the word "ultimate" and its derivatives ever again.
May 15, 2004Apologies and FarewellsDAY 207: "How was your safari?" Jimmy, my Kilimanjaro guide asked when I ran into him on the road when walking around Moshi town to run errands. "Oh..." I groaned with a smile. "It was... memorable." I told him about the whole fiasco, how the first two days were great and then the next three turned into a safari from hell. I told him how unprofessional it was conducted, from the faulty vehicle to the somewhat shady guide. Although Jimmy wasn't directly involved with the safari, he apologized on behalf of Tin Tin Tours, the Moshi-based company that had sent me to the Arusha-based Kilimanjaro Crown Tours when they didn't have enough clients to warrant a cost-effective safari group themselves. "We are deeply sorry." "It's not your fault." Jimmy walked with me down to the Tin Tin Tours office; I was going to pop my head in anyway to say hello and to give them the heads up to never do buisness with Mr. Jalala at Kili Crown Tours in Arusha again. Mr. Kimario, the head of Tin Tin, was all smiles when I arrived; as far as he was told, Mr. Jalala said everything on safari went fine. When I told him otherwise and he apologized like a madman. "Would you like to write an evaluation?" he said, giving me the standard form where 1 was poor and 5 was excellent. "Oh. I could write a book." I started circling the numbers -- nothing was higher than a 3 (for itinerary), bringing the average to about 1.5 out of 5. I wrote detailed paragraphs of how unprofessional Elia the guide handled everything. "Have you eaten yet?" he asked me. "No." "What would you like? Chicken and chips?" "Sure." Mr. Kimario was really embarassed at the situation, taking the safari-from-hell from Kili Crown Tours as a bad reflection of his own Tin Tin Tours company. He apologized and apologized and tried to make up for the money neither of us would probably get back from Mr. Jalala, with food and friendliness. A woman came with a wash basin and kettle for me to wash my hands. The big plate of food came, and it was more food than I had had in a single sitting on safari. "It's okay, it's not your fault. It was Jalala," I told Mr. Kimario. "I was just telling Jimmy that I never realized how professional you guys were until I saw the other company." Professional, yes. Mr. Kimario told me how this was all detrimental to his four-year-old business, which he had prided on building on friendly service and honesty. In fact, in some of the comments I read, people raved about how Tin Tin Tours always seemed to "bend over backwards" for its clients, even picking them up at the airport and escorting them all the way from Nairobi, Kenya. This was all the opposite of the other company, whose guide Elia was quite shady from what I was discovering from the more information I got from Mr. Kimario. Driving off the main road in the Serengeti is not permitted; when we veered off on the boundaries between Ngorongoro Conservation Area and Serengeti National Park, it was probably to avoid a day's park fee, which Elia most likely pocketed. This explained why when we got stranded in the mud, no other car was in sight to help, and the help from the ranger stations were implied to be "out of the question." All that and the fact that Elia simply dumped all our plastic trash behind a tree. Mr. Kimario apologized again. "If we knew it would be like that, we would have told you to go to Zanzibar first while waiting for a safari group the next week." Tin Tin Tours extended their hospitality when a Maria who worked there, escorted me around town to run all my errands, holding all my groceries for me too. She led me from place to place and held my things -- all things I wouldn't have gotten from Elia. Tin Tin's hospitality may have been the only thing they had to give after all that had happened, but I'm telling you, hospitality goes a long way.
Tony, Ted and I tidied up the apartment and put it into party mode, with snack foods on the tables, MP3 music playing off the computer speakers with iTunes' (for Windows) trippy visualizer on the screen, and, most importantly for a successful party, dim lighting. Tony's place had been picked for the party since out of all the ex-pats, he had the most hooked up place with enough room.
By sundown, people started coming over to catch up on old times, new times, theirs days at work, or as in my case and the case of a few others, to be introduced for the first time. Mingling (picture above) went on through the night and I met familiar faces -- like ex-pat Jen at the end of her volunteer work at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center -- and new ones -- like Jen's visiting former dot comer friend Dory -- sitting on the couch, out on the terrace or around the dining/living room. I introduced myself and answered the same questions over and over with the same answers, but didn't mind so much. Tony's friend Helen caught on: "Wow, you've been getting the same questions all night." Other than the usual questions and jealous comments about my global trip (i.e. Carl: "You were in the Carnaval in Rio?!"), I got into the familiar conversation about PCs vs. Macs; it seemed that my out-of-the-blue times with Tony the past week turned him into an Apple "switcher." With that, the whole night was reminiscent of a mingle party I might have gone to in Brooklyn or held myself in New Jersey. Speaking of New Jersey, I met a fellow chatting with Ted named Chetan, one of the Duke volunteers that was actually a fellow Rutgers University alumni like myself, graduating in '96. (He also went to the UMDNJ, in case you Jersey folk out there may recognize him.) "Wow, I didn't expect to come to Africa and run into another Jersey boy," he said. When you come to Africa, I suppose you expect some things and don't expect others, but that unpredictability is the allure of coming to Africa in the first place. It was my last night in Moshi however, and I'd fly off the mainland the following morning. Whether or not I'd encounter another excursion-from-hell I didn't know, but I'm sure Mr. Kimario at Tin Tin Tours would like to apologize for it.
May 16, 2004The Zanzibar ConnectionDAY 208: I suppose a lot more good things came out of the mugging at knifepoint in Cape Town than bad ones. Ever since the incident, my itinerary had been sent on a tangeant that led me to connections I might not have made if nothing happened. The mugging led to flight cancellations, which led to going overland through Zambia, which led to Shelle, which led to Cristina, which led to Tony, which led to one connection no one could have predicted in Zanzibar.
TONY LEFT THE FLAT at 6 a.m. to go on safari with fellow ex-pats on a long weekend. After an early morning farewell and thank you, it was just Ted and I left in the flat, but Ted was up to run some early errands before going to work. I left with him to run some errands of my own before my shuttle bus to the airport at 10:30. I was in dire need of a haircut -- Can you say Q-tip head? -- and went to the barber that Chetan recommended me the night before, a place that could do something with straight hair. However, with the morning rain, it wasn't open. Eventually too much time went by and I forsake it, which was a good thing because it gave me time to sort out the temporary nightmare that I might go to ATM-lacking Zanzibar cashless, since the PIN from my Visa card wasn't working for some reason, and apparently my MasterCard had been maxxed out on cash advances. After thinking it over under the showerhead, I went back to the money bureau to do a call-in cash advance on the Visa -- it worked. It was a good thing I had that Visa because in Moshi you can organize a safari or a trek up Mount Kilimanjaro.... but they don't take American Express.
I found myself in this hodge-podge of society after a short one-hour flight from Kilimanjaro International Airport. I landed in Unguja, one of the two major islands of the Indian Ocean archipelago. I took a taxi from the airport with a taxi driver named Mansour, who despite his name was a friendly guy. "Zanzibar is pole pole," he told me. I asked him to take me to the Karibu Inn which was recommended by Tony and Lonely Planet, but he referred me to a cheaper, just as nice place called the Jambo Guesthouse. (He still gave me the option of the Karibu if I didn't like it.) Jambo was great; for $10 I got a private room with A/C and free breakfast. Later I learned that Karibu Inn had a reputation amongst travelers where you got your stuff stolen by the staff. The Jambo Guesthouse was just one of the many accommodations in Stone Town, also known as Zanzibar Town, the main city of Unguja. Stone Town is something out of Aladdin or The Arabian Nights, only set on a tropical island. The city reminded me a little bit of Venice, with its confusing maze of narrow alleyways -- it's no wonder; both cities evolved as trading port cities to the Orient. Unlike Venice, Stone Town has a very Muslim vibe to it, and it's evident every minute when you see a Muslim man wearing a white galabiyya outfit, or the Muslim women completely covered in black dresses with hijabs, veils that sometimes cover everything except the eyes. Prayer sessions five times a day are regular, and it is broadcast everywhere in the streets so that one doesn't have to go to the mosque necessarily. The Muslims live and work with the other people of Zanzibar, from Hindis to Christians to the flocks of tourists that come and fill the island from July through January. It being May, it was the low season, so not many foreigners were around. The few that were stood out like sore thumbs with their big cameras and straw hats. I got lost in the maze of alleys -- with no hat and a small camera -- and at times it got a big confusing; on the Lonely Planet map, it literally looks like a maze I might have done on paper in elementary school, complete with dead ends that lead to nowhere. One can't get lost too long because Stone Town isn't too big; all you have to do is find a main road to get your bearing.
I followed one of the main roads and went in the direction of an arrow labeled "Internet" and did some e-mails. The guy there led me to a hardware store to get an adapter for the unique 250V electrical system in town, and the guy there directed me to a barber for me to finally get a haircut. From there I ended up at the gardens of Shingani, along the waterfront. Nearby was the House of Wonders, a Sultan palace-turned-museum built in colonial-Victoria style, which harbored interesting exhibitions of Zanzibari culture and history and an overhead view of the city and port (picture above). Nearby was the office of Grace Tours, an agency that I heard Tony and Helen mention from their trip to Zanzibar the February before. There I met Willie, a tourism student working there as a sort of intern, although there wasn't much work to do in the low season. His boss, Mr. Ali left him there alone to mind the shop to deal with people like me entering the door to enquire about the standard Zanzibar tours. "Where do you come from?" Willie asked me. "I came in from Moshi." "Oh, I have a friend there. Tony. He works at KCMC." He showed me Tony's e-mail address in his little address book to prove that he wasn't trying to scam me or anything; it really wasn't necessary because he mentioned Tony and KCMC before I did. "Oh, Tony, I was just with him this morning!" Instantly Willie took me in as a new personal friend of his simply because we had a mutual friend. "How is Helen?" he asked. (Wow, he knew Helen too.) "She's fine. I just saw her last night." With the icebreakers out of the way, I asked Willie about things to see in the city. It was about closing time, so he volunteered to just show me around for free, instead of charging me the $25 he quoted me for the City Tour before the Tony Connection. We walked around Stone Town to see the sights, including the Old Fort where slaves were once auctioned off in a big field, and performers (still to this day) performed on the stage of an outdoor amphitheatre. From there we wandered the maze of streets, developing a bond as walked through the market and down the main road for a sugar cane juice stop. The experience was educational for not just me by Willie as well, when we visited the site of the Old Slave Market and took a tour -- Willie hadn't been on it before. Christopher, the guide there, showed us the dungeons were 75 slaves were stuffed into tiny rooms with hardly any air space or food. The ones that were strong enough to survive the dungeons proved to be more valuable that the other slaves, and came at a higher price. Under the appeal of explorer/missionary Dr. Livingstone, slavery was abolished and in place of the main slave trading post an Anglican church was built. Nearby, a slave memorial (sponsored in part by Sony Ericcson) was built in respect of the slaves that suffered at the spot decades before.
"You want to go to the night markets?" he suggested. I was keen on seeing them anyway since Tony raved about them. "Okay." "It's cheaper there. These prices are for tourists." Cheaper was right. For less than the price of a couple of fancy cocktail drinks at Africa House, you could get a big seafood platter. Local fishermen set up tables of their latest catch of the day. All you had to do was point to whatever you wanted, and he'd put in on the grill. Lobster tails and king crab claws were only two dollars; octopus, squid, tuna and skewers of prawn or baracuda were only one dollar. An avid seafood lover, I pointed and pointed and pointed and had a pretty awesome seafood feast for about six bucks. Willie only ordered a tuna steak, and I was glad to buy it for him for his courtesy of the day. We sat down at an outdoor picnic table across from other tourists who knew about the dinner bargain, a German guy in dreads and a blonde from New Zealand. The blonde asked me about my relationship with Willie. "He's a friend of a friend I have in Moshi," I answered. "So he's keeping you out of trouble?" "Yeah." "That's a good thing to have around here," the German rasta said. This was true; the Shingani area was swarming with what Willie called "Street Boys," the crackheads on the street out to charmingly scam tourists for money with bogus tours. One of them introduced himself to me as Willie's friend, since he knew of Willie. Willie was polite about it until the guy left. "He's telling you he's my friend, so if he sees you later alone, he can say that you recognize him. But he's a cocaine smoker. There are many of them. Just get rid of him, but politely." After filling my stomach with fruits of the sea, Willie led me through the dark maze of alleyways back to the Jambo Guesthouse, so that I wouldn't be targeted by the Street Boys. Willie sure was "a good thing to have around" for he was my Zanzibar Connection on a confusing first day in Stone Town.
May 21, 2004Street BoysDAY 209: The touts of Stone Town usually hang around the main ferry port area where tourists come and go on the two-hour ferry ride to and from mainland Dar-es-Salaam. Most of these touts, which Willie refers to as "Street Boys," are good-for-nothing drug addicts usually strung out on crack cocaine, desperately using a facade of charm or friendliness to score any cash from unsuspecting tourists with bogus tours. A suspecting tourist can usually tell a Street Boy a block away; they often just look all drugged out, or they reek of booze, and they look all disheveled like they just got out of bed. Street Boys make Stone Town look more like "Stoned Town," and I'm sure any suspecting reader might have seen that pun a mile away.
I HAD MY COMPLIMENTARY BREAKFAST at the Jambo Guesthouse on the other side of town away from the port and its Street Boys. I dined with another guest across the table: Anders, a Danish songwriter/inventor on holiday from his job in the U.K. Over fried eggs, toast, fruit, spice tea and coffee, we talked about travel and politics, which these days are very related to each other -- particularly since I had an American passport. He told me that I would probably get by, even in the Middle East because I don't look like a typically American tourist. In fact, one guy on the street mistook me for Israeli. From foreign affairs the conversation with the Dane switched to something more local: harassment from all the Street Boys in town. It being the low season, the Street Boys were more desperate than normal; usually if you give them the hint that you don't want to be bothered, they leave you alone and move onto the next person, but in May, they are a bit more insistent. Anders told me he was usually good about picking out the Street Boys and avoiding them, but there was one well-dressed guy that gained his trust and confidence over a course of a couple of days. With this trust, Anders and his friend decided to go to on a spice tour with the guy -- only to have the guy's shadiness revealed at the end. Threatening the Danes with emotional blackmail (crying after getting lost in a forest) and then violence ("If you don't give me more money, I'll beat you up"), the guy turned out to be just another Street Boy -- but an elusive one at that.
After discovering that, I really didn't have any plans for the day. Anders went off on a dalla-dalla to the north to meet up with his friend who had gone on bicycle. I was just tired and vegged in an internet cafe to work on The Blog. I was unusually tired, and I figured it might be because of the redness in my eyes; they had been red for a couple of days and I suspected some sort of an eye infection. With the directions from Eddie at the Jambo Guesthouse, I took a dalla-dalla out of town to a nearby hospital. The eye specialist wasn't there, but the in-house pharmacist prescribed some medicinal eye drops. I walked back into town from there, passed kids playing soccer in a field by the beach. The walk gave me an appetite, so I went off looking for pilau rice, a spicy rice dish that Zanzibar was known for. I went off to the Grace Tours office to get some suggestions from Willie; he wasn't busy at all and just walked me around town to find a place. "I just walked here from the hospital," I told him. "Oh, I live near there, in Kilimani!" he told me excitedly. "Maybe I can show you later." I couldn't help but think about Anders' story that morning. Was Willie one of the elusive Street Boys gaining my confidence with all these strange coincidences? First he pulled the familiar names of Tony and Helen out, and now this. I wasn't sure yet. However I did know though that the guy that started following us around town was an obvious Street Boy; he "kindly" escorted the two of us to a cheap locals restaurant where they didn't have pilau rice, but wali, a curried rice with beef that would suffice. Willie remembered that at that time of day on a Saturday, most restaurants would probably be out of pilau rice and so I settled on the dish that came out of the kitchen in about five minutes. "What would you like to drink?" the Street Boy asked us. I ordered a Stoney Tangawizi, a sharp ginger beer produced by the Coca-Cola Company. Willie just got some water and the Street Boy, after pleading with his kindness, asked if I could buy him a drink too. What the hell I figured -- What's another 30 cents for a soda? -- until I found out he got a beer for more than twice the price of my soft drink. The Street Boy and his beer came back and forth to our table to "check up on us." When he was away, Willie told me that the guy was actually embarrassed that he was trying to hustle me in front of him. The Street Boy was using the same tactics as the ones the night before: gain my confidence by associating himself with Willie, who had gained "the good guy" reputation on the streets. The Street Boy sat down with us for a while for conversation; most of the time he and Willie spoke in Swahili that I didn't understand. I did make out the word "cocaine" though. I paid the food guy and the barman separately, but in person instead of handing the money to the Street Boy like he requested since he had been playing "waiter." Willie and I were on our way out when the Street Boy was distracted, but he caught a glimpse of us near the door and rushed to "accompany" us. Willie and the Street Boy had some words in Swahili, and magically the Street Boy left us alone after thanking me for the beer. "I told him, 'Don't you remember you telling him that you are a cocaine smoker?'" WIllie told me. The Street Boy was too drugged up to realize that perhaps I didn't even hear anything about drug use since it was in Swahili, but was also too embarrassed to carry on the charade. For assurance that he wouldn't follow us on the main road, Willie and I took a scenic detour along the beach.
We took a dalla-dalla to the hospital and met up with Willie's friend Baraka, another tourism student working at another agency in Stone Town. The two of them had matching button-down blue shirts and navy blue trousers. We sat around a food stand while Baraka got something to eat; he told me that he knew Tony and Helen too. Hmmm... were these guys trying to gain my confidence with association with other "good guys," the way the shady Street Boys tried to do with Willie? "Tony only stayed in Stone Town. He didn't come here," Willie told me. Perhaps Tony was smarter than I was and didn't fall into the possible trap? In Moshi, Tony nor Helen never mentioned Willie or Baraka or Mr. Ali; they only sort of said "Grace Tours was good," but they didn't exactly rave about it or its employees.
After Baraka ate, we walked down the hill into the ghetto of Kilimani, where the two tourism students shared a room. Walking the dirt paths of the little village (picture above), I greeted the residents sitting outside with standard Muslim greeting "As-Salaam-Alaikum" ("Peace be upon you,") or the standard Swahili greeting "Jambo" ("Hello"). They brought me to their dark, very-modest and unfurnished room where a friend of theirs was sleeping on a mattress on the floor after an eye operation. It was getting dark, which wasn't a good thing. Is this it? Did I just walk into a trap? Would the shadiness be revealed? Man, I'm outnumbered three to one now. For some reason, I still had trust in these guys; you can tell when someone is lying by the way they behave, or the way they often slip in the consistency of their story. So far, all the details of their encounters with Tony and Helen and even Chetan were all jiving like it was the truth. In the end, the visit went exactly the way it was intended; it was just a visit for me to simply see how they lived: in a small dark room with things scattered on the floor and clothes hanging on a line across the room.
While a suspecting tourist may find it easy to spot a Street Boy in Stone Town, it is perhaps a bit more difficult to spot a legitimately good guy that you could consider a friend. The next day, I received an e-mail from Tony in Moshi confirming the good people at Grace Tours, and I knew that perhaps I had found one.
Dolphins, Monkeys and QueenDAY 210: A German ex-pat named Thomas living and doing PhD. research in the other main Zanzibar island of Pemba was sitting in the back seat of a minivan. With him was only his visiting friend Volker from their hometown of Heidelburg, until I arrived. The three of us had signed up for the Dolphin Tour from different tour agencies, but it being the low season, we had been pooled together for efficiency. Our driver and guide drove us to the south east of Unguja Island for the beginning of a day full of Dolphins, Monkeys and Queen. Our destination was the shore town of Kizimkazi, where local boat captains took the passengers of minivans from the city on their vessels around the bay to search for dolphins so that clients could jump in and swim in with them and re-enact their favorite scenes of Flipper. After the 90-minute drive, Thomas, Volker and I rented snorkeling gear from local boys for about three bucks and then walked out to the ocean, wading the shallow waters alongside fishermen and little children, wary of sea urchin spines on the ocean bed. We boarded a motor-powered wooden boat, which someone had cleverly handwritten "Jumbo Jet 747," and took off passed the dhows. I don't quite remember the name of our boat guide. All I do remember was that he was a friendly guy who had elephantiasis in his right leg and foot. (How could you forget that?) It didn't inhibit him from steering the boat around the bay, and we were in good hands at least. He told us that it could take anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour before we'd find any dolphins. Half an hour went by and there was nothing -- nothing but other similar wooden boats looking for the same thing. Another half hour went by and a sighting of dorsal fins had been found by one of the other boats, causing our boat and the four others to go rush over. Keeping track of the school of eight dolphins was hard to do because this particular one wasn't as playful as the ones you might have seen at Sea World. These wild dolphins just swam about their own business, the business of diving for food and coming up for air in a slow but rhythmic pattern. They really didn't interact with the boats or its passengers, probably because the novelty of seeing them wore off years ago when the Dolphin Tour was popularized.
"Go there, there are right there!" The Friendly Elephantitis Man told us. Thomas, Volker and I put on our snorkels, masks and flippers and jumped in to see the other "flippers." There were ten other snorkelers from the other boats swimming towards the school (picture above). Ascend. Breathe. Descend. Ascend. Breathe. The pattern went on and on for the marine mammals, although it was hard to follow their actual path when they were submerged for minutes at a time. After one breathe sighting, they'd disappear and then reappear in a different location like a Whack-A-Mole game. And when they did appear, they were far faster than any swimmer. "It's impossible to keep up with them," one guy said. No one person could keep up with the dolphins' undulating pattern, but everyone, including myself, at least got to swim behind them as they came up for air and above them as they were submerged. From near the surface, the shadows of the eight creatures looked like a squadron of fighter planes without wings.
I don't quite remember the name of our forest guide. And he didn't have elephantiasis either. He led us on the main trail through the Jozani Forest, a relatively new forest with trees only about fifty years old since it had been planted after the area had been once cleared for a village. The forest now inhabits the land with a variety of species of palm and ficus trees, and it is the young leaves of these trees that attract the big groups of feisty red colobus monkeys that weren't hard to find at all. Our guide took us to one section of the trail where the rustling of leaves was heard almost as soon as we arrived. Suddenly, one by one, red colobus monkeys jumped from tree to tree like little 18-inch trapeeze artists. One monkey even looked like he was doing a countdown in his head: "Okay, you can do this. One... Two... Three.. JUMP!" We spent a good half hour with the monkeys as they jumped from branch to branch around us, climbing up and down trees to feed on the leaves. After a while it got to be a little tiresome -- even with the female with the saggy nipples -- and we went off to see the mangroves on the otherside of the forest. Our guide showed us the slender seeds of mangrove trees, which had a strikingly similar shape to saggy colobus nipples, and planted them into the swampy water for another generation to be born.
Sorting out the tour delayed me from my meeting with the Germans at the Africa House terrace at sunset, but I managed to find him upstairs at the restaurant, where I joined them for dinner; the food wasn't as expensive as I thought it would be. Afterwards we decided to have drinks at the haunt of most travelers and every diehard Queen fan in the world: Mercury's, named after lead singer Freddie Mercury who had been born and raised in Zanzibar until about the age of nine. Mercury's was fairly empty since it was the low season; only a handful of people were sitting scattered across the establishment on an outdoor deck near the ferry port. The Germans and I sat at a table overlooking the candles someone had laid out on the beach nearby and drank under the stars and talked about travelly things. On the speakers, it was all Queen, all the time and I could have sang along if I felt like it -- but I think the still vivid image of elephantiasis of the leg was occupying my mind.
Spice IslandDAY 211: What would the world be like without spices? For one, Colonel Sanders and his Kentucky Fried Chicken would have eleven less ingredients to put in his secret recipe and probably be out of business. TV chef Emeril Lagasse probably wouldn't have a career involving yelling the word "BAM!" and would probably be a janitor somewhere. And you could forget about going out for Thai food entirely. (God forbid!) In short, a world without spices would be a pretty boring and bland world.
Luckily, spices have been a valued culinary treasure throughout history. In fact, most of the exploration of the early European explorers was commissioned so that new routes could be discovered to the Far East so that people in the Western world could get their hands on more spices. Zanzibar was a great treasure in their quests, being an island in an ideal geographic location and climate to grow many spices. In fact, the spice harvest and trade in Zanzibar became so well known that it became known by some as Spice Island. The commissioned explorers of yestercentury have been replaced by backpacking explorers, but the spices remain. The way one accesses spices in their pure form nowadays is to go on the widely popular Spice Tour with any one of the many tour companies in town (or with a Street Boy if you don't mind the possible hassles). Willie at Grace Tours set me up on one, which was with a pooled group of other tour companies and led by Island Adventure Tours. When my guide for the day Kazim brought me to the office to wait for others, I bumped into a familiar face: Ed, my dormmate from Mayoka Village in Nkhata Bay, Malawi. Coincidentally, I was wearing the hand-painted Nkhata Bay shirt I got there and he recognized it right away. My reunion with Ed was brief since he was going on a tour of Prison Island to see the turtles. I on the other hand, went along in a chartered dalla-dalla with eleven others about 30 minutes north to a spice plantation, where about a dozen different spices and fruits were grown. Kazim and a local farmer took us around the fields to see each one in its pure form: lemongrass, lipstick fruit, cocoa, cassava, tangerine, papaya, taro, cardamom, cinnamon, cumin, ginger, coconut, tumeric, nutmeg, jackfruit, starfruit, breadfruit and cloves -- most of them were given away to us to collect in cones made out of big leaves. Walking by banana orchards, Kazim teased us by telling us how all the mzungus loved the coveted red bananas, but wouldn't let us have any off the tree since they were for market trade only. The only other American on tour, a 20-year-old named Jess and I tried to look for strays, but found none. One particularly interesting thing I learned on tour is that the five different kinds of peppercorns we know all come from the same plant. Green peppercorns (a prized spice for some) only have a window of a couple of days to be ground before it turns into black pepper. White pepper is actually a derivative of additional drying, yellow pepper is when the peppercorns are semi-ripe, and red pepper is when they are fully ripe. In a way, the pepper plant is a "magical" plant that produces many different spices, the way a pig is a "magical" animal that gives us pork chops, bacon and ham.
While touring, smelling and tasting the spice fields, local boys followed us around and wove each of us costume jewelry, bags, hats or neckties out of coconut tree leaves. There really was no choice in the matter. You're standing around a tree to listen to Kazim's lecture on a spice and then BAM! A kid places a newly woven hat on your head. You walk to the next area of the farm, and all of a sudden, BAM! someone is tying a bracelet around your wrist. There were about three young boys following us around doing this, and it seemed like all three of them were assigned a particular sub-grouping within the larger whole. The boy that was "assigned" me wasn't Emeril Lagasse but a 12-year-old kid named Ali, off from school. Over the course of the tour, he wove me a necktime, a ring and a bracelet, all of which I wore until the first part of our tour ended at a table where a guy sold spices in already packed gift sets that don't look too authentically "Zanzibari" (picture above). "I'd feel like such a tool if I bought any of those," Jess the American girl said at the table after taking my photo with all my coconut leaf gear on. She was traveling through Zanzibar for a week after having just finished a study abroad program in Nairobi, Kenya. We were both in the same situation where people we knew may or may not arrive in Stone Town, and debated whether or not to wait for them or head to other parts of the island without them. We decided to combine forces and split costs and head to the north coast the next day together.
The dunking donuts were just the appetizer for our next stop: lunch in a nearby village, prepared by the local women. Kazim led us into a big room where we had to take off our shoes and sandals and sit on straw mats on the floor where the Zanzibari specialty pilau rice was served. Pilau rice is basmati rice seasoned with cardamom, cinnamon, cumin, black pepper and ginger, and it was served with a sauce to be poured on top made of eggplant, okra, garlic, tomato, tumeric and coconut milk. Together it became a delicious and filling lunch on the floor. "Why can't Thanksgiving be like this?" Jess said to me. "No big tables, just everyone sitting on the floor." We chatted on the mat with our barefeet, eating our pilau rice next to a German couple; the man was more like a Japanese tourist, taking photos of his food.
After seeing such a dark the depressing site, Kazim brought us to a bright and cheery place to lift our spirits: the beach, where we swam in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean or just chilled out on the sand for a good hour. After that we started the journey back home to Stone Town, stopping once at a coconut stand to sample coconut juice and meat right out of the shell.
"Don't you love it when you just run into a fight?" Jess said. With the Street Boy gone, we set up the scooter rental and the feeling of excitement set in almost immediately. I didn't have my driver's license on me, so the three of us went back to the Jambo Guesthouse to get it. There, Jess ran into an Israeli couple she had met on the ferry that also had plans to go north, only in a taxi. Jess had a friend from her program in town staying with her godmother at the most posh hotel in Stone Town, the Serena Lodge. She was to meet them for drinks later that night, and invited me along to experience briefly what staying in Zanzibar like a Sultan felt like. In the meantime, we went looking for a Kenyan Airways office so she could get a flight out back to Nairobi -- it was closed so we couldn't get one, but in place of it, we picked up two friends: Jessica and Kate, the two other girls from her study program with the questionable arrival since they never sent an e-mail. It turns out they were staying at the same inn Jess was, and after stopping in there for a bit, the four of us, our new Zanzibar posse, headed off to the night markets to point and point at this and that, and bargain down seafood dinners. "Now, this is what Thanksgiving should be like," I said. Lobster, point. Crab, point. Tuna and octopus too. Under four bucks? Done. We ate out by the docks and gave our scraps to the stray cats loitering around, and then went off to the Serena Lodge to meet Ariana, who was celebrating her 21st birthday. Her godmother Gail graciously picked up the tab for the round of drinks we had out on the terrace that we had practically all to ourselves. I, the stranger, filled everyone in on my story so that I didn't appear like some random pick-up. After celebrating at Serena, we continued the festivities at the Buddha Lounge, a surreal experience for the four girls who hadn't had running water in four months: it was a trendy couch bar with electronic music and a step back into the First World again. Shots commemorated Ariana's 21st and when the clock struck midnight, more shots commemorated Jess' 21st. The birthday girls were happy, and toasted their drinks with the rest of us. The spices of Zanzibar may have spiced up life in an earlier era, but sometimes its the shots of Zanzibar that give it that extra BAM!
May 23, 2004The Things Up NorthDAY 212: When Kazim took us to the beach as part of the Spice Tour the day before, there were two British guys that refused to go in the water. Their reason: they had spent some days up at the beaches in the north and after that considered anything else inferior. I, along with Jess, the American girl I also met on the Spice Tour, was soon to find out what all this hype about the north was all about.
THE JOURNEY TO THE NORTH started in Stone Town, located in about the geographic center latitude-wise on Zanzibar's Unguja Island. At breakfast at the Jambo Guesthouse, I ran into the Israeli couple that Jess had met on the ferry. They too were headed up north (via taxi) and so we decided to meet up there at some point. The guy at the Jambo mentioned the Sunset Bungalows on the north coast and so that became our designated meeting place. Jess, whose twenty-first birthday it was, was wearing the Harley Davidson shirt she slept in. She was going to change it until she realized how fitting it would be for our transport up north: a little two-wheeled Vespa rental. However, when we went to Grace Tours to pick up our ride, Willie didn't say anything when I asked if the Vespa parked outside was ours. Inside the office, his boss Mr. Ali was waiting for me. "There is a problem," he told me. "You don't have a class on your license to drive a motorcycle." Apparently I was only qualified to drive a car and driving a Vespa wasn't permitted. Without proper class documentation, I only set myself up for many police bribes on the way. After sorting out the details, the only thing that could be done to fulfil the spirit of adventure and need for speed was to just go rent a car, even though Jess said it wouldn't be as fun as a Vespa. However, Mr. Ali showed us the car and it wasn't a boring little sedan -- it was a little Suzuki Sidekick-type jeep, a fun little number to zip around Zanzibar with. "Alright, it's fun again!" I told her. "Happy birthday!" With a temporary Zanzibari license to drive, I hopped behind the wheel on the right side of the car. We threw our bags in the back and followed Mr. Ali in his Vespa to the nearby gas station to gas up. After filling up the tank, it was time to fill up our wallets at the new Barclay's Bank just outside of town. To my surprise, the ATM there actually took MasterCard ATM cards.
"Do you remember how to drive?" Jess asked me. "Don't worry, it will all come back to me," I said. And it did all come back to me. Driving up on the paved road was a great experience and I felt like I was back in the game again. And since I had been so accustomed to being on the left side of the road in buses and minivans, that it didn't seem odd at all. "So you said you slaughtered a chicken once?" I asked Jess while staring out the windshield. She had mentioned to me before how, although she came to Africa a vegetarian, she respected the lcoal customs -- particularly the one where it was her honor to slaughter and prepare a chicken for a family she stayed with. I was intrigued because for some reason I'd always wanted to experience the slaughter of a chicken myself. As some vegetarians say, if you're man enough to kill it yourself, you're man enough to eat it. Jess described the expereience to me, how she stood on the chicken's wings to hold it down and then sawed the neck in a slow and gruesome manner with a small knife since a big cleaver wasn't available. Sawing the neck through its flesh and bone spewed blood all over her sandals and feet, but she managed to grin and bear it. "I figured I'd take one for the team," the vegetarian on hiatus told me. I continued driving and listening to Jess' anecdote -- after the neck wobbled around, she boiled the chicken to remove the feathers -- just as two chickens were crossing the road in front of me. I slowed down for them to scuttle away, but then we felt the tiny bump under the wheel. Outside the window I heard the crackle of bone and afterwards in the rear view mirror, I saw a half-flattened chicken twitching in the street. Some nearby villagers went to investigate and started pointing fingers after the accident. Oh why, oh why did the chicken cross the road?! "What do we do? Should we stop?" I asked. "Just keep going." "But isn't that someone's food source?" "Well, they have lunch now." "Okay. Runaway, runaway!" I sped off, leaving the half-dead chicken and the curious villagers behind. Jess said she wouldn't be surprised if on the way back, they'd set up a police checkpoint to stop us.
Our off-road adventure continued northbound about another 40 km. as we tried to give a nickname to a car -- "The Sultan," "Jafar" or my favorite, "The Magic Carpet" -- until we arrived at the northern tip of the island at Nungwi where we couldn't help but stop and admire the beauty of the north that the two British guys had told us about. They were right; once you've been in the north, everything else near Stone Town was inferior. We looked around for the Sunset Bungalows to meet up with the Israelis, and a nearby dive center directed us back the other way to the village of Kendwa. Getting there involved taking The Magic Carpet on a short, but extremely bad road -- so bad it's labeled "bad road" on the map -- the kind of road that you would even question riding a full-suspension mountain bike on. Our Suzuki Magic Carpet roughed it and brought us to the end of the road to find the Sunset Bungalows -- but not the Israelis. We parked to investigate. Jess walked the beach to see if she could spot them, while I investigated my options at Scuba Do, a local dive shop on the beach. I explained to Chris the owner how my diver certification card had been stolen in Cape Town, but that I still wished to do some sort of diving. He said he'd figure out something within the rules. In the meantime, his wife and partner Tammy was setting up two clients with scuba equipment to go on a dive in the next ten minutes. "Care to come for a snorkel?" she asked me. I was skeptical, only because Jess was out of sight and we hadn't exactly checked into the bungalows yet. "Come on, be spontaneous," Tammy egged. "Okay, let me go see if I can find my friend real quick. Jess wasn't far at all, just across the way. "There're some guys going snorkeling right now if you wanna go." "Okay!" said the Birthday Girl. Sooner than either of us had anticipated, we all of a sudden found ourselves in a boat with a young American named Emily and her mother Sarah from just north of San Francisco; Mike and Mark, two guys travelling from Holland; Skipper Ben, Divemaster Tammy and the captain of the vessel, a Captain Morgan named "after the rum," Tammy explained. Captain Morgan was lending his boat and services to Scuba Do because recently their own speedboat had been stolen.
The captain brought us on a wavy ride, passed stationery boats near shore (picture above) and dhows sailing across the waves, through the very salty sea spray to the dive site off the coast of Mwana-na-Mwana Island, where drivers Emily, Sarah and Tammy submerged their bodies, wetsuits and air tanks below. He took the rest of us near an island where we waited for them just below the surface of the ocean with snorkels. Excited to be out there on the water instead of in an angry mob arguing about a half-flattened chicken, I jumped right in -- only to land in a school of small jellyfish. Luckily their mild stings didn't last long. Visibility was fair but still good enough for Jess and I to see what the ocean had to offer: several tropical fish, some shrimp, and the highlight of the day, a brown speckled moray eel hiding under a rock.
"Hear that? We're going to have a party tonight," Chris told Tammy earlier in the day when Jess told him about her special day. Chris spread the word to all the other tourists in the area, which was only about ten or so since it was low season. (In the high season, the area becomes so crowded that every place requires reservations way in advance.) We went out to a restaurant on the beach just north of the Sunset Bungalows, which had a bar with the most incredible concept I've ever seen in the bar industry: swings instead of barstools. Before the drunken swinging, we had dinner at a table with the guests of the makeshift birthday party: Andrew and Anna, a Swedish couple that I noticed at the Jambo Guesthouse back in Stone Town, and Janice and Jordan, two friendly Americans on a round-the-world trip, going in the opposite direction as I was. Having the Americans around spawned reminiscence of things we missed from home -- mostly items concerning food -- and familiar conversations about Michael Moore and his upcoming Fahrenheit 9/11. Speaking about the guy on a crusade to provide the truth about Bush and the Republican regime, Chris told us a soon-to-be-related story about these two British teenage girls that he met a while ago. The two girls had been approached by an older man in Stone Town, who asked for their simple conversation and company since he had been in seclusion in some luxury safari lodge in the Serengeti and was on his way to seclusion on the private island on Mnemba off the northeast coast of Unguja. After analyzing his words and his situation, they all deduced that it was Kenneth Lay, the Enron guy who suddenly disappeared from America after the whole Enron scandal went crumbling down. The two British girls actually ended up passing an expensive massage bill to his tab.
Posted by Erik at 09:26 AM
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Kendwa'd Without KenDAY 213: The Mnemba Atoll, the coral reef and island pair off the northeast coast of Zanzibar's Unguja Island, is arguably one of the world's premiere scuba diving destinations, sporting an impressive display of tropical marine life. Most people have come to the atoll with scuba gear to see just what beauty lies beneath, although some privileged people -- i.e. "missing" Enron corporate criminal Kenneth Lay -- have been rumored to hide out at Mnemba Island, the privatized part of the Mnemba Atoll which costs $1200 per night (in embezzled money from government funds of course). Since I didn't exactly have all that money to stay on Mnemba Island myself, my only option was to see the atoll as a scuba diver. Doing so was up in the air since my SSI diver certification card had been stolen in Cape Town, but with the probable combination of my competent diving conversation, an e-mail from SSI saying they could verify my information over the phone if a divemaster didn't believe me, and the fact that I fixed a webpage for free using the dive shop's copy of Dreamweaver, Chris the divemaster at Scuba Do permit me to dive. (I had my SSI membership number handy anyway.) Since his company's speedboat had been stolen, he sent us to Mnemba with another diving operation he worked a deal with, East Africa Diving out of neighboring Nungwi. The East Africa Diving boat picked me up in Kendwa, along with divers Jordan and Janice, and Jess who was coming along as a snorkeler. "What are your names?" the woman asked us. "Jordan," Jordan said. "This is Janice and Jessica." "I'm Erik." "We just call him John," he joked. The three J's and I arrived at the diveshop where divemaster Mikhail sorted us out with wetsuits, masks and fin fittings. When we were all geared up and ready to go, we hopped back in the boat with other clients, a snorkeling French couple, and a German guy who was going for his 99th and 100th dives. The boat cruised around the northern tip of Unguja and down the east coast were turquoise waters ebbed and flowed underneath the muscle of our boat's motor. With the different depths of coral beneath, the water's indigo and turquoise hues ranged in a wide spectrum. Jess and I tried to figure out the Crayola color name equivalents, but couldn't quite place it. Jordan and I kept a watch out for Ken Lay, but that was a dead end too. The only thing that was found was a big trevally fish, which Mikhail caught with a fishing line and brought home for dinner that night. The full day of diving included two dives at two different sites, Kichwani and Wattabomi, each spectacular areas with 75 ft. visibility and 84°F water temperatures. Ten fathoms below were amazing fields of lettuce and bed coral where all the characters in Disney's Finding Nemo resided and interacted. Big grouper fish lazily dwelled under rock formations, camouflaged to their environment. Tubular garden eels stared at me as I hovered above them until they retracted into their holes like tape measures into their spools. Big sea turtles just chilled out on top of some of the corals without much resistance of us surrounding it. Like one fish piggy-backing and relaxing out on the shell of one of the big sea turtles, I had to piggy-back my dive budd Mikhail; when I ran out of air on both dives after the 35-minute mark. I breathed using his secondary air regulator and held onto the tank -- at arm's length to decrase the gay undertowns of the situation. (I mean, we were already wearing skin-tight outfits, let alone being in a lateral position that looked like I was mounting Mikhail from behind.)
The weather couldn't have been more perfect, but it didn't last long. On the way back from Mnemba -- still no sign of Ken Lay -- storm clound filled the sky ahead of us. In the distance we saw part of the grey cloud mass distort into funnel clouds, and on four occassions, the funnel touched down to the earth in a tornado with a tail like a cat (picture above). Each twister was brief though, only lasting no more than a minute before dissolving and retracting back into the heavens. The twisters stayed away when we left the calm weather in the east and into the rainstorm of the west. We waited out the storm for a big in Nungwi back at the diveshop, where the guy who had just completed his 100th dive celebrated with a snorkel beer funnel. We left him there to celebrate while we headed back down to Kendwa. The storm cleared out by the time we arrived.
Adam continued his lazy strek while James (the latest "J" name) joined Jess and i for a little informal beach volleyball with a local guy. But even that didn't last long and we were all Kendwa'd again at the bar with a couple of sunset cocktails. During the hazy sunset I walked alone up the beach to check out the out-of-place monstrocity that everyone agreeed was a total eyesore: a new luxury resort whose architecture made it look more like a stuffy corporate office rather than a beachfront paradise. Chris told me that it was all built on Italian mafia money to corner the new Russian millionaire market and that he had been approached by them to run their dive shop -- which scared him because they might as him to perform offers he couldn't refuse. "I want you to go diving with these six, but come back with five," I joked. Anyway, in less than a minute of snooping around the not-yet-complete facility, it wasn't an Italian mafia-type that kicked me out; it was a Maasai warrior working there as a guard. (The Maasai have gained a reputation of being the best security.)
Caught Up In Stone TownDAY 214: The north coast of Unguja Island, Zanzibar is the kind of place you go and sort of realize, "Hey, I think I might just live here and do nothing." While that idea was promising, it was detrimental to my plan of writing a blog around the world. Realizing that I couldn't stay forever in Kendwa, I figured the dread of leaving it all was as inevitable as being Kendwa'd, and that I might as well rip off Kendwa from my soul like a bandaid on a wound.
Jess had a flight out of Stone Town that afternoon, so we packed up our bungalow to head south in our rental car -- but not before spending one last morning on the beach. Jess took a nap lying out in the sun while I took advantage of the small window of time of the low tide to go for a stroll up north with Jordan and Janice. (When the high tide is in, there is no passageway between the ocean and rocks in some sections.) We walked up along the beach (picture above) to Nungwi, passed guys pulling starfish out of the water and Mikhail on a bike riding on his way to visit Chris at Scuba Do, until I ran into two more familiar faces: the Israeli couple from the Jambo Guesthouse in Stone Town that Jess and I were trying to track down the day we got to Kendwa. They couldn't find Sunset Bungalows that first day and just settled on somewhere else. I chatted with the pair for a bit but not for too long; we just made plans to catch up back in Stone Town the following day so they could give me pointers on travel through Ethiopia. I had to get back to Jess so we could drive back to Stone Town to catch her flight, so I said my temporary farewells to Jordan and Janice, making plans to see them the next day too for my last day in town, and then walked back down the beach to Kendwa. After saying my goodbyes to Chris and Tammy at Scuba Do, Jess and I rode back the bumpy road southbound, careful to not run over anymore chickens. I brought Jess straight to the airport and saw her off. "Nice meeting you!" she said. "Good luck with everything," I wished her. I reminded her that in a couple of days she'd be back in the reality of Boston, USA, which was a world away from anything surrounding me. Taking advantage of cruising alone through tropical Zanzibar with the windows open and radio blasting one last time, I drove to the hospital to see an eye specialist about my eye redness. He said it was no biggie and prescribed me some other eye drops.
There was one more task of catching up left for me to do that day: catching up on The Blog, which is what I attempted to do. I pretty much locked myself in my room (in the Manch Lodge since the Jambo Guesthouse was full) and typed away all afternoon while listening to No Doubt MP3s. However, I didn't get even halfway finished because I just didn't feel like working on it too much. Perhaps it was the lackluster vibe of Kendwa that had caught up with me in Stone Town that was to blame.
Closure In TanzaniaDAY 215: My plan for the day was to continue to stay in my room, chill out and work on the arduous task of writing, but little did I know when I woke up that morning that one event would send me off track, making it my last day in Tanzania.
AFTER HAVING BREAKFAST with one of the only other four guests staying at the Manch Lodge named Gabriel, a friendly Austrian-American who gave me tips on travel in Ethiopia, I went to the local Precision Air office to confirm my flights for the next day: Zanzibar to Dar-es-Salaam and then almost immediately, Dar to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital city. I should have known better with the way things go in Africa because the early flight to Dar had been canceled, and my only option to still get that connecting flight to Ethiopia was to leave Zanzibar that afternoon and overnight on the mainland. I took that only option, which put a damper on the plan to veg out all day on my computer and meet people all night to say goodbye before leaving. Yvonne was easy; she was the only one whose e-mail address I had, so I just dropped her a line to tell her my situation since she was away all day on a Spice Tour. But as far as Jordan, Janice and the Israelis, I'd have to leave them without any closure. Oh well, I thought. But I figured if there's anything that I have really come to believe on this trip so far is that nothing is coincidental; everything happens for a reason. If there was one consistent friend I could count on at least seeing and saying goodbye to in person, it was Willie at Grace Tours, who was still just as friendly as when I got there. He continued his extend his hospitality until the very end, bringing me through the narrow streets one more time to the local market so that I could buy a cheap duffel bag to use for storage. He directed me to the Dolphin Restaurant, where while eating biriyani, the traditional Zanzibari fish and rice dish (picture below), I made a new friend: a talking parrot named Billy. He wasn't much for words though other than "Mambo," "Jambo," "Poa" and "Hello."
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER with the way things go in Africa; as I learned in Zambia, everything just seems to work out in the end. Sitting with Willie in the Grace Tours office, I saw Jordan and Janice walk by. They had just gotten off the bus from up north and were in town running errands for their pictures and their blog at a nearby internet cafe. I got to swap e-mails, blog addresses and goodbyes with them, and almost immediately afterwards, I bumped into the Israelis and found my closure with them as well. I even bumped into Gabriel when I went back to the Manch Lodge to gather my laundry; I was hoping to say goodbye to him too. Willie picked me up at the lodge after work and came with me in a cab to the airport. Again, his presence served more than useful; usually a taxi driver charges TSh 10,000 for the 10-minute drive to the airport, but with the presence of Willie he was too embarrassed to ask for such a fee -- I only gave him 7,000. Willie walked me to the check-in desk and saw me off before I actually got on a flight one hour earlier than scheduled. "Thanks for everything," I told him, shaking his hand. It was the handshake of closure to a decent individual I'd recommend anyone going to Stone Town to meet.
Getting to the mainland was a straightforward -- and short -- affair; it was the shortest commercial flight I'd ever taken at just under fifteen minutes. I took a taxi back to the familiar Safari Inn in Central Dar, showered and called up my "blind date" for the evening on a borrowed cell phone. It went on like a series of Twenty Questions. "Are you still in Stone Town or safely in Dar?" the voice on the other end asked. "Safely in Dar." "What do you feel like eating?" "I'm easy. What did you have in mind?" "We could go for Indian? Are you vegetarian?" "I'm not vegetarian and Indian sounds lovely." Priya instructed me to meet her in an hour at the Sea Cliff hotel, "out on the peninsula." "What do you look like?" she asked me so that she might recognize me right away. "I'm a Filipino guy with short hair." "I sort of look Asian too." A friendly taxi driver from the Safari Inn took me out on the peninsula through the ultra-rich (even by American standards) neighborhood of Oysterbay. At the very end of the line of luxury hotels, a cinema and golf courses was Sea Cliff Village, a two-month-old outdoor shopping mall and hotel complex. I sat in the lobby while waiting for Priya, wondering if each person coming in the door was her. I recalled something that Cristina told me in Lusaka: "Priya's stunning, so be warned." With that in mind, it was easy to pick out the stunning Asian-looking girl that walked in and greeted me like we were long-time friends. With Priya was her friend Mari, another ex-pat from The States working at another project who had the timing, delivery and similar material as Korean-American comedienne Margaret Cho. The three of us went to the Sea Cliff Grill, an outdoor restaurant on a terrace overlooking the Oysterbay beach. The place was packed with Western tourists with a bit of money, ordering Western food -- which used to be a turn off to me being in "exotic" places, but had become one thing I craved the most. I ordered a familiar beer, burger and fries and ate it with the two girls, bringing them up to speed with my situation, from lay off to mugging to all the connections that brought me to having dinner with them in Dar-es-Salaam. Priya was a great host for the short time I spent with her and even picked up the tab for the whole table. Priya called her usual taxi driver to bring us home after a relatively short night; I had an early flight in the morning and Mari as just getting over a flu, or possible attack of malaria. The taxi dropped off Mari first, leaving Priya in the taxi for one last conversation. "So where exactly in New York are you from?" she asked. "Actually, I lived in Jersey City," I replied. Her face lit up. "Really, where?" "By the Grove Street PATH station. First Street." "I was on Varick and Mercer!" she said. "I knew that you looked a little familiar, but I thought nah, it couldn't be." Turned out Priya and I were long-lost neighbors after all, having lived during an overlapping period of about ten months in the same trendy New Jersey neighborhood, five-minutes from downtown Manhattan via train under the Hudson River. We used to go to all the same hangouts, from the local coffee lounge Ground, to the Korean grocery, to the Hard Grove Cafe, the famous Cuban diner in the area. We even commuted to the Manhattan everyday on the same train. "Funny that we're finding this all out now, right at the end," she said with her stunning smile. Although it would have been great to catch up with her for another day or two, the calendar was ticking and I had to move on if I were to make it to Spain by the beginning of July to meet other friends from home. Sooner than I thought, the taxi dropped off Priya at her house before bringing me back to the Safari Inn in the city. "Thanks for dinner," I said through the window. "Maybe I'll see you in Jersey again one day." In a day of unexpected closure, I suppose it was poetic justice: the end of the linear progression of American ex-pat connections I made since being mugged in Cape Town brought me right back to where I came from.
May 24, 2004A Long Way Since the EightiesDAY 216: Ethiopia has come a long way since the 1980s when a famine caused by political and economic struggle got worldwide attention, prompting American musicians to sing "We Are The World" as a benefit. The news of the famine also spread to the United Kingdom, prompting British musicians to band together in a similar collective known as Band Aid and ask in song, "Do they know it's Christmas time at all?" My thinking is that the Ethiopians did know it was Christmas; the majority of the population is Christian after all. (However, in Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, which uses the Gregorian calendar, Christmas is actually celebrated on January 7.) Ethiopia's Christianity -- in an area of the world where Islam is widespread -- is just one of the unique characteristics of the country that Ethiopians pride themselves on. That and the fact that during the mad scramble for territories by European nations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ethiopia was the only country in Africa that had been left uncolonized. (There was only a brief occupation by the Italians for five years between 1936 and 1941 under the regime of Mussolini.) What was left uncolonized by Europeans is slowly being discovered by Western travelers, although Ethiopia is far from being ruined by the backpacker set like other countries. (The usual backpacker trail in sub-Saharan Africa only goes as far north as Nairobi, Kenya.)
The driver took me to his suggestion of accommodation, the decent Debre Demo Hotel not mentioned in my guidebook, a reasonable "motel"-like place with clean and comfortable rooms for about eight bucks. After dropping off my things, the driver took me to Travel Ethiopia, the travel agency based out of the luxurious Ghion Hotel that Lonely Planet suggested. On the hotel grounds there were multiple Christian wedding receptions going on taking advantage of the sunny weather, with brides and grooms dancing in a crowd of rhythmically-clapping guests the way I had seen on an episode of Globe Trekker. Travel Ethiopia turned out to be not as helpful as Lonely Planet had raved, and their package tours of the northern highlights were way out of my budget. At their suggestion, I went to the office of National Tour Operations, a government-run travel agency with better options for me on my tight schedule. In a compromise of "doing Ethiopia independently" and going on a package tour, I could work out my own flights and buses to and from the main cities of interest, and meet up with NTO guides in each one.
The taxi driver zipped me around the streets of Addis Ababa (picture above) to the Ethiopian Airlines office where getting flights to the four major sites in the north wasn't as easy as either travel agency said it would be, mostly because of fully-booked flights. I should have known though; everywhere that I'd been reading told me that travel in Ethiopia wouldn't be as easy as in other countries since their travel infrastructure is fairly new -- English isn't even an official language. The first available northbound domestic flight out of Addis Ababa wouldn't depart for another five days, and after working out the details on paper, I toyed with the idea of going to the closest city via a two-day bus ride. My thinking was that if I had to wait five days to get out of the city, I might as well be on a bus and get to the first destination cheaper. I made a provisional booking on three flights to and from the last two of the four sites and left the office with a printout to sleep on it. (Literally, it was under my pillow.) I couldn't really set anything in stone just yet without first changing my Egypt Air flight out of Ethiopia to a later date, a flight from Addis to Cairo that I already booked with AirTreks.com back when I didn't know my exact schedule of traveling. It was a Saturday and Egypt Air wouldn't be open until Monday, so I had to wait out the weekend before making a move.
Steve Martin and Martin Short on the television screen? Yep, Ethiopia had truly made leaps since the desperation of the 1980s, even if there were still hurdles like getting a domestic flight when you want it.
Cradle of HumanityDAY 217: Ethiopia lies in a region known as the Cradle of Humanity, the corner of the globe where it is speculated that Mankind was born -- this speculation is supported by paleontological evidence. Many cultures derived from this Creation of Man in Ethiopia, the earliest written history of it recorded in the Bible. With such rich roots to explore in early Man and biblical civilization, Ethiopia's history blurs the line between reality and folklore and has become a gold mine for paleontologists, anthropologists and archaelogists alike. For tourists, it is also a gold mine; in fact, some consider Ethiopia to be "travel's best kept secret." The easiest way for me to explore Ethiopia's past was to visit the two main museums that were open presently on a Sunday. I decided to go to the first one, the National Museum on foot, walking the six odd kilometers from my hotel through the downtown area. Along the way I was followed by two shady guys that apprached me, one who thought I was Japanese and another who thought I was from Madagascar. I sternly ignored these guys until they got the hint and continued on my way to the museum, stopping for directions at the National Tour Operations office and the fancy Sheraton hotel.
A majority of the museum was dedicated to artifacts of Ethiopia's culture and historical past, but the star of the show was the more recently redesigned paleontological exhibition in the basement. The comprehensive presentation took me through rooms about the evolution of early African mammals, including elephants and giraffes, until I found myself in a room dedicated to the mammal known as Man. Inside were the remains of the most complete skeleton of what many considered the missing link between Monkey and Man -- a phenomenon that if it existed today, would probably end up doing a guest appearance on The Howard Stern Show. Discovered in 1974 by paleontogists and Beatles fans Donald Johanson and Tom Gray, the 3.2 million-year-old skeleton was dubbed "Lucy," after "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds." Only three and a half feet tall, Lucy was actually discovered in the ground with other minerals and is famous all over the world as the hominid that eventually evolved into the present day human race -- although more recent research suggests that perhaps she isn't the direct ancestor, but the "grand-aunt" of Man.
ONCE MANKIND HAD BEEN ESTABLISHED, culture had evolved from the different peoples, particularly the ones spread out across the Cradle of Humanity. The lifestyles of these people were best explained in the Ethnological Museum, found inside the Institute of Ethiopian Studies on the campus of Addis Ababa University, which was converted from the former palace and grounds of Emperor Haile Selassie. The beautifully-designed exhibition (picture above) led me through different tribes of Ethiopia, explaining unique aspects of their culture. For example, the Hamer people of the south have a ritual of passage for men in which one has to walk across the backs of about thirty bulls lined up all in a row, back and forth three times -- failing to do so gets him whipped and teased by the women. The Tsemay people of the south have strange wedding rituals, in which the bride and groom shave and butter each other's heads. As weird as that sounds, it's probably all worth it; after the marriage ceremony, the couple doesn't have to go to work for up to a year. And most noticeably, we can not forget the Suri, Karo and Nyangaton people in the west, people who make themselves "attractive" with plates inserted into elongated lips ripped off the face, or with raised markings made in patterns with razor blades. To each his own taste I suppose -- or rather, in this case, to each his own face. The exhibition continued with other aspects of Ethiopian life, from its three major religions -- Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, Ethiopian Judaism and Islam -- to its art gallery upstairs, showcasing the craftwork of local musical instruments and religious artifacts collected over the decades. The whole thing wet my appetite for seeing the actual religious sites up north in the coming week.
While some things differ between the Ethiopian things in Ethiopia and The States, some things are the same: on the Ethiopian television in my room ran the Oprah Winfrey farewell interview with the cast of Friends -- even in the Cradle of Humanity, there was no escape from the hype. Watching Oprah and Friends on the set of the coffeehouse Central Perk reminded me of one interesting tidbit I learned in the Ethnological Museum: not only was Ethiopia the birthplace of Man, but it was the birthplace of coffee, which was actually named after the southwestern Ethiopian region "Kaffa" where it was discovered. With that said, I suppose that means the Cradle of Humanity is also the Cradle of Starbucks.
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