Dar-es-Salaam, office and home of the Peace Corps overlords and their hired goons, is to be avoided as much as possible, and so, after disembarking from the train late at night, we slumbered quickly at the hotel where most volunteers stay, greeted the volunteers who were there for medical reasons, of whom there are always a handful, and hied us hence to the docks and the ferry to bear us across the Indian Ocean where many a sultan has gone all the way to Zanzibar. Zanzibar! Based on the name alone, it must be one of the most fabulous places on earth. But wait! Before fabulosity, 2 hours on a choppy ferry in the sun!
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| One of the smaller islands in the Zanzibar archipelago that the ferry passed. |
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| Closeup of the tower thingie. |
On the ferry, we met a wonderful Kazakh-German med and PhD student named Jaro, who does strange things to mice in the name of curing diabetes (an excellent name to do things to mice in), and who asks good questions about living in Tanzania. Not the perennial "what is is like" but "what have you learned from this culture?" kind of good. We ended up adopting her because as it turned out, she had been robbed in Dar, and while glory to her courage for continuing to travel alone to Zanzibar, she was happy to join a group of people who know more or less how Tanzania works and speak the good Kiswahili. We were happy to have her join us because she is awesome.
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| Katie the Barbaric, who always does creative things to her hair, braids Jaro's hair in a traditional Tanzanian female bonding ritual. |
Now: Zanzibar! Specifically, Stone Town on Unguja. Unguja is the largest and most populated island of the archipelago and Stone Town is the traditional capital and former home of the sultans. It is, as the name suggests, largely a town with stone houses, multistory, with ornately carved wooden doors. There is a ridiculous number of white people, because it is winter in Europe and Italy has a direct flight to Zanzibar because the Italians know where to spend their winters. For someone who has lived on the mainland for a while the number of white people is weird. They show their knees and men and women hold hands! I felt that I ought to be scandalized. Being white ourselves in a very touristy area is weird. People are in our faces all the time waving touristy stuff to buy and keep saying "hakuna matata" to us. This is very strange. There are about 20 different ways to say 'no problem' or 'no worries' in Kiswahili, but hakuna matata is not one of them unless you are a Kenyan or a Disney character. And since one of the things I love about Tanzanians is that they are complete language snobs (they have a saying that Kiswahili was born in Tanzania, got sick in Kenya, and died in Uganda), it hurts to see them prostituting their grammatical superiority to amuse tourists who will therefore never learn to say hamna shida (which is what I usually say), haina shida, hakuna shida, haina tabu, hamna tatizo, hamna matatizo, bila shaka, usijali, usiwasiwasi, hamna noma, or any of the other ways of expressing that there is currently nothing to worry about and relaxation should happen.
Whatever, Stone Town has cannons by the port. Cannons are good.
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| I think the cannon are Portuguese but I couldn't swear to that. |
Besides which, Stone Town has a park area in which may be purchased cappuccinos and ice cream. In the evening, the young men of Zanzibar practice acrobatic dives over the park wall and on the small beach nearby they practice tumbling. It's entertaining and also sad that this is clearly a male-only sport because the young women of Zanzibar are too purdah'ed to jump into the water for fun. So I did. Because I can. I'm just one more white person in a touristy area, local gender roles don't necessarily apply to me.
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| I had to take this picture. For great meta-ness. |
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| Young men frolicking in the sunset. |
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| Tumbling passes don't always work so well. |
Coming soon: we buy things and take pictures!
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