Traveling in Tanzania

Kilimanjaro was a tough one… She beat me totally. I was unprepared for such a powerful attack of altitude sickness – had no idea it could be so bad… So I didn’t make it to the highest point Uhuru peak (5895 m) but had to stop at Stella Point (5756 m) after my guide had to catch me twice to prevent me from hitting myself on the ground when passing out. Still – most definitely I don’t regret the trek; I enjoyed the whole week of hiking in rough, beautiful terrains in a temperature more familiar to me than what I have been experiencing here these past five months… And we did some good on the way raising funds for girls dormitory in nearby city of Arusha 🙂

After getting down from the mountain I had to mount again – this time an aeroplane taking me from Arusha to Zanzibar. The plane was one of those propelled small aircrafts that you always wonder about whether they’re gonna stay in the air or not… Since having had my altitude trouble on Kili and having a long history of travel sickness both in cars and aeroplanes I asked the official at the desk to book me a seat as in front of the plane as possible. ‘Sure’, he said, ‘it is mandatory to have a co-pilot in these flights, so you can be the co-pilot.’ I guess my five months here in Africa must have toughened me quite a bit since I didn’t even flinch, just said ok. And I don’t know if it was the pill I took for the travel sickness or the excitement of sitting in the cockpit but I wasn’t sick one bit, just enjoying the scenery of the mountains (this time from above) and being childishly excited about all the gadgets I had in front of my seat – not allowed to touch them though…

On Zanzibar I rode with a bus to Jambiani beach and took a room in a somewhat dubious establishment run by a flock of rastafari. Then darkness. I slept 48 hours almost nonstop, I remeber at some point being kind of awake and a little annoyed that when the rastafaris played music outside my room really loud it wasn’t the sweet reggae music – as one could have expected from them – but some main stream crap – which one wouldn’t have expected – , but then passed out again… After my resurrection I decided to lift the quality of my accommodation a notch or two and took another bus ride in Jambiani – and found my dream house…

It is a little guest house on the beach, two stories high, the wonderful sea breeze always blowing through the upper floor. Here I spent some unforgettable days regressing back to my teen years being hippie and forgetting all about time and place… And here I met Tula. She is southafrican, born one of the triplets being identical with her sister but not her brother. I call her Crazy Cat Lady (and everybody who knows me including Tula knows that I use this term lovingly). One day one of the neighbours of our little hotel threw two kittens over the high concrete wall into our yard. Tula took the kittens under her wing, gave them a bath, took them to a vet to get some deworming medicine, made a little nest for them in one corner of the hotel and started to feed them. She named them Tiger and Ginger. Whenever we were walking out in the village Tula remarked that she should build a pond for the ducks strolling about since it was so dry and desolate there (she was going to rent a house on the beach and stay in Jambiani). Wherever we went she felt for the animals around and was always sorry to see them being treated badly. I told her I think she is picking a wrong country to settle in since here in this culture it is customary to treat animals cruelly; tanzanians have never had the luxury to treat them well since it is such a harsh life for everybody here – a struggle for the fittest… Zanzibar also has a history of being the centre of slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. I visited some sights where they used to keep the slaves that were going to be marketed and those gloomy places didn’t indicate much value for human life either…

I guess our little hotel was attracting somewhat different crowd from the ordinary since inspite of being enormously beautiful and serene place it was also one of the worst managed places I have ever visited. Our rasta manager would show up every couple of days, ask us, his guests, to pay for the nights we had spend there so far – and maybe even couple of nights to come if we could? – take the money and disappear again without giving any of it to his staff. So every day we would have some new drawbacks because of lack of money; no tea on breakfast, or no sugar, no chance ever being able to have lunch or dinner there (The first day I arrived there I innocently ordered a mango-avocado salad for lunch and after I had waited for it for half an hour the waiter came back and informed me they didn’t have avocados. When I inquired what they would possibly have I found out they had absolutely nothing to prepare a meal from. But still – they were kind enough to let me study the menu thoroughly…;-), One day there even was no toilet paper, I never saw one glimpse of the promised wifi on the premises. And during the electricity cuts that ocurred every evening the staff was desperately looking for the only candle in the house – usually the lights came back before they found it – and that doesen’t mean the lights came back quicly… So these circumstances required some extraordinarily strong nerves and an attitude to keep good spirits up… But they also gave me the advantage to negotiate the prize of my room lower than we originally had agreed with the manager – in Africa you negotiate constantly; there are no settled prizes ever.

After I finally managed to tear myself away from the magical beach house I still spent couple of days in Zanzibar’s Stone Town. It’s a little like Gamla Stan in Stockholm; a lot of tourists but still hasn’t lost it’s charm. All the houses date from the slave market times or way before – many of them look like there has been no maintenance of the building ever since – with arabic tinge which makes them ever more exotic and beautiful. The ‘streets’ are narrow allies with high walls on both sides which is convenient during the day time ’cause they give a little break from the fierce sun. The allies twist and turn across the city and there are no street signs so one gets lost constantly. But it doesen’t matter since Stone Town is actually quite a small area so at some point you always walk out of the maze into the sun anyway.

On one of my walks around the city I was stopped by a beautiful muslim woman who, after changing the usual greetings and compliments in swahili, asked me in English if I would be interested to see ladies’ soccer match that same evening. Of course I was up to it, so later on I met Layla again and we took a taxi to a sports field outside Stone Town. Zanzibar’s population is 95 % muslim and I learned from Layla that they’ve had some difficulties getting a team together since most of the fathers or husbands, who are the ones deciding about such things, don’t allow their daughters or wives to play because of the unproper outfit. But on this occassion I met the fortunate ones who had the permission to play. They had left their scarves and baibuis home and were wearing real soccer gear with shorts, knee high socks and all. And what a wonderful lot they were! So much talking, jokes, giggling – it was obvious that doing this sport gave a lot of energy and joy to these girls and women!

After the match I spent the rest of the evening with Layla exchanging our life stories. She had divorced her husband because her husband was spending all his days with his three other wives and visited Layla only night time. She told me she felt he was not taking proper care of her and she doesen’t want that kind of life. Now she has a boyfriend whom she would like to marry but the boyfriend is so afraid of his first wife that he doesen’t dare to take another wife. Even though all this sounds so totally foreign to a westerner’s ear I must say I admire greatly this woman with such a lust for life and a strong will!

The beauty of traveling alone is exactly in that that you get to meet a lot of people and learn different life stories… I met a Belgian girl looking like a fragile Isabel Huppert – whom I first estimated surely working timidly in some gloomy faceless office – who had climbed Kilimanjaro all by herself (except of course the guide and the porter) and who glided gracefully and comfortably amongst the rastafari the minute she arrived to their place, a Portuguese girl who had travelled around in Africa for two years but now was stuck in Jambiani beach for the past eight months since she ‘fell in love’, a jovial German gentleman who was kind enough to take us around the island with his rental car, a British woman suffering from broken heart (when I got to know her I found out that this heart of hers was made out of pure gold), another British woman who had been widowed 18 months earlier and now was doing on her own all the travels she had been dreaming about together with her husband, a French couple who spoke no English but was really easygoing and fun company and so on and on and on… I got to speak a little bit of English, Swedish, Swahili and French, felt very proud of my (still very rudimentary) language skills and was amusing myself with thoughts of the Tower of Babel – although we had no confusion there but a lot of connecting and undertsanding 🙂

The plane and it’s very happy co-pilot

The gadgets. I sneaked my hand there for the duration of quick shot…

We made some trips in daladala, minibus for locals. It was exciting and fun but I have to wonder where all these fairytales of constantly chatting africans with shared provisions come from… In all the daladalas I’ve traveled in the passengers keep to themselves, no chatting, no sharing of food.

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Sharing breakfast with Ginger and Tiger

In Stone Town

An Alley

An Entrance

Roofs of Stone Stone

An Arch

The monsoon season started on the day I left.