Jambo ZANZIBAR

Sorry for the discombobulation of these two posts; Chris is working on the pictures and I am working on the words on adjacent computers simultaneously.

So, we took a Tazara train from Kasama (roughly in the middle of the blurb of Zambia that's showing on the map), to Dar es Salaam. We shared a closet-sized first class cabin with another volunteer from our province, Ricardo, and his friend visiting from the U.S. We were on the train for roughly 36 hours, but it wasn't horrible because there were cots to sleep on. We even passed through Mikumi National Park and saw giraffe, elephants, warthogs, zebras, baboons, and impala through the train windows.

We took a ferry from Dar to Stonetown, the capital of Zanzibar, where we stayed for four nights. Stonetown is drastically different from mainland Tanzania. The people are predominantly Muslim, and most wear traditional long, loose white shirts and hats for the men, and dark veils for the women. One of the things that immediately struck me was how friendly and welcoming the people were. We didn't get hassled once, a common occurence for us in Zambia, and everyone was SOBER. People would even come up and introduce themselves and ask where we were from ("Zambia! But you aren't black!" or "Zambia! Tell me, do the people there still drink too much?") The heat was almost unbearable; it was much more humid and stifling than Zambia even in hot season, but Chris and I took ice cold showers morning and night at the guesthouse. Stonetown is full of narrow, cobbled, winding alleys bustling with motorbikes and flanked by tall, regal buildings reminiscent of Morocco. Zanzibar has been influenced by Arabs, Persians, Indians, British, and Swahili people, so it's an interesting melting pot of different cultures. And the food is amazing-fried plantains and other mainland African foods like nshima; fresh seafood like octopus, tuna and prawns; Indian-inspired chipatis, curries and lentils; all seasoned with the homegrown cinnamon, cardamon, cloves, peri-peri peppers and tandoori spices that Zanzibar is known for.

One of my favorite days was when we arranged for Chris and I and four other volunteers to travel north for the day and take a dhow to go snorkeling among the coral reefs and dolphin-watching. The dolphins seemed quite unperturbed that our dhow kept following them, and regularly surfaced to give us glimpses of their dark snouts and smooth, silvery dorsal fins and backs. Watching them glide through these pristine, sky blue seas off white sand beaches, free and untroubled by our presence, was truly amazing. Later, we stopped at Jozani National Park and walked with a guide through the forest. There aren't any large, dangerous animals on the island, but we did see a lot of monkeys. There were both red colobus and blue Sikes monkeys high in coconut trees, swinging through the forest, chattering to eachother. Red colobus monkeys have small, black wrinkled faces set with wide brown eyes and a mane of white Einstein hair fading into a chestnut-colored back, gangly arms and legs, and a long tail. The monkeys are so habituated to people that we stood close enough to touch them, and they thoroughly ignored us, foraging for fruit with small, articulate hands. I've really gotten into primate classes I took for my anthropology major, so seeing the monkeys up close combined with our recent trip to see the chimps has been my favorite experience of the past year.

We spent two nights up north on beautiful beaches, and again got a chance to snorkel off a dhow in the open ocean. There were schools of hundreds of these tropical fish surrounding me in a cloud, as I floated lazily on my stomach letting the waves gently toss me around. The world was completely silent, and it was only me and the fish, and I felt like one of them. The coral formed ravines and small mountains on the ocean floor, prickly black sea urchins and bright blue starfish the mountains' inhabitants, as fish floated past like clouds.

Chris and I, being somewhat proficient in Bemba, can often understand Nyanja (spoken in the Eastern province of Zambia and Malawi), and bits of Kaonde (Northwestern province) and Mambwe (far North of Northern province in Zambia), so we expected to be able to decode parts of Swahili, the Bantu language spoken in Tanzania. Other than numbers being nearly identical, the word sana (meaning very much), and Bemba words that were adopted from Swahili (Odi and Kalibu, musungu, ubwali) we were disappointed. I heard someone say "Kabiyeni" ('please go away' in Bemba) and excitably told Chris it was the same in Swahili; when I asked a friendly waiter at a restaraunt to test my theory, he looked mildly distressed, and said "That is a bad, bad word. It means tough guys with guns." When in doubt, I reverted to the basic greetings we learned and names from The Lion King (some of the characters' names have meanings; Simba (the lion cub) means lion in Swahili, Rafiki (the spiritual baboon leader) means friend). Also, Swahili-speakers do love to say "Hakuna matata."

Zanzibar was beautiful, amazing, incredible, but mainland Tanzania, apart from the beautiful mountains and scenery from the train, didn't impress me. This was probably compounded by the fact that transport out of Tanzania was arduous and quite frankly, hellish. The people at Tazara on the Tanzanian end didn't record our train reservations and the train left an hour earlier than scheduled (unheard of in Africa), so we missed the train. We pleaded with the woman at the ticket desk for a good twenty minutes until she agreed to let us board the train in the crowded third class and wait until compartments opened in first class. By the time we rushed upstairs to get our bags and board the train, the employees had actually conspired against us and were barring the doors shut so we couldn't enter and yelling at us. They wouldn't even let us into the holding area, where one member of our group was sitting terrified and watching all of our bags, until the train left the station. They were pretty unprofessional, and it was unspoken but obvious that they were lording their positions of authority over us because we're white. So, we ended up stranded in Dar, because the next train wouldn't leave for another five days. We considered renting a car, but it turned out to be too expensive. We finally got tickets for a bus that left the next morning, but the ticket seller lied and we reached the border at 10pm, after it had closed, rather than 6pm as promised. The bus ride was 16 hours long, made worse by the fact that the driver and conductor pretended not to know English or any of the three local Zambian languages we collectively knew, and wouldn't answer our questions. So it was the longest bus ride of my life, but luckily we didn't have to sleep on the bus, and found a decent guesthouse. The following day was an 8-hour journey on an agonizingly slow petrol truck from the border town Nakonde to Mpika. We arrived at dark in Mpika, paid way too much for a crappy room in a guesthouse (ZMK 60,000 or around $11; ridiculous) and started off the next day for the 3-hour ride to Kasama in the cab of a cement truck.

I didn't even mention the music festival, the main reason we went to Zanzibar, but I think Chris will fill you in with pictures. I've been at this computer way too long and am craving a hot shwarma from Superlye!