What? I can't sneak at least one Lord of the Rings reference into a post during this trip?
It wasn't my intention to go the entire trip and only post twice. However, because there wasn't a lot of travel during this trip, the posts I wrote about my day-to-day here often led to talking about the current political state in Tanzania and the status of the education. It underpins much of what we do and why we do it.
And given the current political state in Tanzania, I don't want to post those blogs until I am out of the country.
I know that I am a nobody in the grand scheme of items being written online about Tanzania, but I'm on a private Internet tower Jifundishe installed. Better safe than sorry.
I have two posts that I'll post shortly after I leave - perhaps even during my 5-hour layover in Amsterdam - but in the meantime...
Looking at Mt. Meru from the main street of Ngongongare Village
It's my last night in Tanzania and it's hitting me harder than it has in previous trips. Previous trips have always included travel at the end, but this time I'm leaving Jifundishe and Tanzania on the same day. Also, I've been working at the front desk which means I've met more people and made more friends.
Emmanuel and Juma, best friends who always bring a smile to everyone's faces
My emotions started to get the best of me when Frida, my cook and cleaner who refused my request for a photo in 2016, started crying when she saw me in a kitenge dress today and asked me for a picture. When I asked for one in return, she obliged. I ended up teaching her how to take a selfie.
My Tanzanian mama. She might be paid to cook and clean for me, but the laughing at my jokes she does out of the goodness of her heart.
It was down hill from there. My last time checking and tracking who was overdue. My last time closing the library. My last time telling Anande not to stay too late. My last time chatting with our night guard, Kelvin, on his rounds. My last time watching the sunset on the porch. My last time...
Anande and Amalia came to visit me one Sunday to make mandazi.
It also doesn't help that everytime Anande and I do prep-work for upcoming events, she laments that I won't be here. I won't be here for the "End of Exams" Ceremony at the end of November. I make a note that maybe next time I can plan around being here for that. I won't be here for the Houston Scholarship selection in January. Maybe I can plan around that. I won't be here for the start of school in February, official graduation in March, the start of the A-Level program in May, so many things I will never be here for.
The Independent Study Project students who are writing exams every Monday this month.
Here's hopefully making it through Wednesday without crying; 10,000 Tanzanian shillings says I fail.
When Anande reached out about me coming back to Tanzania this year, I
picked October as the month because it gave me enough to prepare AND it was the
end of the dry season with the jacaranda in bloom.
The most important part of that sentence are the words “dry season”.
The sky should be bright and the ground should be dry!
It is supposed to be the dry season. The short rainy season shouldn’t
start until the week after I leave, with the occasional short shower leading up
to it. However, Mother Nature had other plans. Maybe it’s the cabin fever or
maybe it’s because I just think it’s hilarious and I can’t stop laughing about
it, but I began to compose those fake Civil War letter tweets to myself.
Dearest Martha,
It has been five days, 13 hours,
and 26 minutes since I last saw the sun. The solar power is getting low, and I
am now resigned to taking cold showers as a result. It would be warmer to run
naked through the rain but apparently my neighbours have a problem with that.
Dearest Martha,
Due to circumstances, I am forced
to wear proper shoes instead of my beloved flip-flops. My only hope is that I
grow webbing between my toes to make the 20-meter commute easier. No one tells
you about the out-of-season rain, Martha, and I feel that I have been lied to…
despite this not being the first time I have experienced out-of-season rain.
Dearest Martha,
Today, I told the locals that
even the mzungu was cold. They laughed. Then they told me to drink more kahawa
and chai to warm up. But drinking so much I pee on my leg every 10 minutes
isn’t going to solve the problem which is that everything is cold and damp.
Even with the downpours, patrons and students still found their way to the library.
Part of this is of my own making. Playing the odds and making room for
all the donation items I was bringing, I cut out pretty much all my warm
clothes options. Heck, it was just a last-minute decision that I’d want jeans
on when I got off the plane coming home that means I even have a pair of pants
to wear during these cold days. My jeans that I left in my knapsack because I
wasn’t going to need them until my trip home.
On the upside, while it was still lightly raining when I woke up, it
has stopped since and the sky is bright. There is still a cloud cover, but it’s
not the dark clouds we’ve had for the last week. I am optimistically hopeful
that the sun forecasted for Sunday might arrive a little early. Goodness knows,
we could all use it.
UPDATE: When I wrote this, we were without power and Internet. Since then, both have returned along with the sun! Sing it with me, folks!
The other downer is that I had to cancel my weekend trip to Kigali.
Well, didn’t have to, but it made
sense. In my jetlagged state upon arrival, I forgot to ask for a multi-entry
visa. It’s an extra $50US, but that’s what would allow me to leave for a
weekend and come back. Instead, I got a single-entry visa which means that if I
leave Tanzania, I must reapply for a whole new visa upon re-entry. That’s
$250US because I need to have a Business visa even for unpaid volunteer work.
The staff get a delivery of hot tea (chai) every morning. The milk comes straight from the cow. Luckily, the tea is brewed in the milk as the milk is heated so my stomach doesn't rebel as result.
Every time I come here, I think that maybe this is the time I just do
the paper work for a Class C Residents Permit. That would mean 5 years of being
able to come and go without getting a visa every time, but the paper work to get
a Class C Residents Permit is a pain in the rear and I’d have to go to Dar es
Salaam for part of it because I’m not actually living here for those years, and
if I have to leave before the process is done – highly likely – then the whole
thing gets scuttled and I’m back to square one on my next trip anyway.
Went for a walk today (Sunday) around Ngongongare and ran into two of my coworkers, Rena and Liz, as they were coming from from church.
At any rate, I spoke with people who know the visa situation in
Tanzania better than I do and reviewed all the options. When time and money was
factored in, they were all too much: too much time going in and out of Arusha
in the hopes they might change my
visa to multiple entry, too much money to get a new business visa for only a
week and a half of volunteer time left.
Unfortunately, power outages have been playing with my "scheduled" blog times. This is happening, no doubt, because I had just finished telling a few friends that the power outages haven't been that bad this time.
BOOM!
Eleven hour power outage on Sunday.
No power means no internet.
*sigh*
Time to start writing posts offline and just posting them when I have power! Until then, enjoy this picture of the jacaranda from my trip into Arusha on Saturday.
I can say with certainty that running up the escalator in your stocking feet is not something that should be on anyone's to-do list. I know this because that's exactly what I ended up doing on Saturday morning. I had such a short layover in Seattle that I got it into my head I must being going through US Customs before boarding in Victoria, like some of my previous trips.
I was wrong.
Between construction at the airport and what felt like eleventy billion flights arriving within 30 minutes of each other, my short connection time got even shorter. Which meant I spent my time in line guilting the people in front of me for security into letting me cut before running up two flights of escalators and across a SEA-TAC terminal in the aforementioned stocking feet.
Those little ridges on the escalator HURT!
On the upside, I learned that US Customs now has an app called "Mobile Passport" which means I pretty much skipped 90% of the customs queue. Highly recommend getting it if you're flying to the States, have a smart phone, and are eligible for it (US citizens, US permanent resident, or Canadian citizen).
Sunrise over the North Sea
I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived at Kilimanjaro to find a renovated immigration area. Part of the renovation included ropes to help create lines of people instead of the traditional clusterf*** they had employed for so many decades. Of course, the ropes only went back far enough for about 20 people so getting to the nicely roped off areas was still a free-for-all.
Despite these improvements, I still failed to get out in under an hour. At the rate they are improving the airport, I expect to get through customs in less than 30 mins by 2035.
On the upside, I walked out to find both Paulo and Anande waiting for me. It was a nice treat to catch up with Anande as Paulo drove. Once we turned off the paved road, the rest of the drive was like this.
I arrived to find that Frida had cooked me chipsi mayai (French fry omelette) for a pre-bed snack, and I devoured it before falling asleep for 10 wonderful, uninterrupted hours.
I was visited by Big Mama and Wee Jimmy, two wild dogs that call our compound home during the day. Big Mama has been a fixture on the campus for a few years. She's part of a pack of wild dogs that roam the area, but our compound is her space and she chases off any other dogs who dare enter. Or she did until Wee Jimmy showed up shortly before my last visit. He was a very young puppy of questionable intelligence, and I think she tolerated him more because he was just too stupid to realise she was trying to chase him away.
In the two years since, Big Mama appears to have mellow and is friendlier. Where she would once move the minute you got within 10 meters of her, she happily trotted to the patio to give me a quick sniff before heading on her way. Wee Jimmy, on the other hand, tried to say hello and ended up running into the patio wall. Like I said, not the smartest dog in the village.
I headed to the library early Tuesday morning for my first day there. I'll talk more about that in a later post, but I was pleasantly surprised when one of the patrons smiled at me and said "I remember you." It was Amret who I used as my guinea pig for RACHEL-Pi training!
After a full day of work at the library and a quick meeting with Anande to discuss our focus for the grant writing, I ended today how I imagine I'm going to be ending a lot of my days: siting on the patio, eating my fresh fruit dessert, drinking tea, and watching the sunset on Mt. Meru.
Our return to Stone Town on Wednesday marked the beginning of the end, so to speak. TC would head to Dar on Thursday before flying home on Friday. I was staying in Stone Town until Saturday when I would commence a couple of marathon travel days. (I'm writing this during one of my layovers. By the time I get home, it will have been 36 hours of travel from departing from Zanzibar airport to arriving at the Victoria airport.) To celebrate our last night together, TC and I headed to Traveller's Cafe for beautiful views of the sunset.
Once it was dark, we wandered around Stone Town to work up an appetite and then headed to a little Indian restaurant that TC liked. We were the only people in there and the proprietor sat down with us and chatted about what it was like to live in Zanzibar Town. Still a little sore from our Tuesday night at Gerry's Bar in Nungwi, we called it an early night. It was a low-key but very enjoyable last night together.
The next morning, TC and I said our goodbyes and I headed out on a tour of Stone Town. Through the magic of Instagram, I had befriended a local tour company a few years ago. It just seemed rude to not hire them for something while I was in Zanzibar. Despite repeated visits to Stone Town, I ended up being really happy with my choice to do a tour. Because the streets of Stone Town are so twisting and confusing, you get into the habit of only walking the ones you know. With a guide, they know all the shortcuts so you end up seeing a lot of smaller side streets you wouldn't normally take.
We visited the Anglican Church and the site of the old Slave Market. Always an uplifting way to start the day.
These were believed to be the holding cells for slaves before being shown at market.
(There are a few historians who dispute this.)
This memorial stands roughly where the market was located.
We then headed to the Fish, Spice, and Chicken markets for a wander.
One section of the fish market is an auction. This was fish waiting to be auctioned.
Fish Market auction: all the pride of showing the fish you caught without actually having to catch it.
The other section of the market was vendors with their fish to sell.
There may have been a few cats hanging around. I can't think why!
Thanks to an overly aggressive tout, I got distracted in the Spice Market and realised after that I didn't get any pictures. (Just a reason to go back... again.)
Every street in Stone Town is picture worthy.
Cats the world over are exactly the same when it comes to sunbeams!
The spikes on a Zanzibari door. Once upon a time, these helped repel invaders.
Now they're just pretty.
An Indian-style Zanzibari door.
(The persian style ones have a rectangle instead of arch at the top.)
All the doors on this street were being refurbished. (You can see
water damage on the lower left of the door.) The worker was trying
to clean up the doorway for me. He became part of my pictures.
Like any good tour of Stone Town, we ended up at Mercury House. Freddy Mercury was born in Stone Town to Indian parents. Freddy didn't live in Mercury House - it's pretty much just a cash grab on the name because it was built on or near the site of his home which was demolished - but when standing in front of Mercury House...
Friday was souvenir shopping and lazy day. After I picked up a few items for the few people on the list (the handy thing about almost all of your family have visited at one point or another is that you don't need to get them squat!), and headed to a waterfront cafe I liked for one last fruit smoothie and the gorgeous view.
The last time I left Tanzania, the morning started with a massive downpour and Justin, our gatekeeper at Cradle of Love said that it was Mother Africa crying because I was leaving and she didn't want me to go. Well, she cried this time as well. In fact, she cried for over 2 hours and with thunder and lightening, I started to get a little worried about flight cancellations. Instead, I spent three hours hanging out in Traveller's Cafe drinking coffee and chatting with Suleiman about life, politics, and religion in Zanzibar. If you have to wait out a storm, it's the way to do it.
This little guy decided that my table and chair was the perfect spot to hide from the rain.
I arrived in Stone Town to a downpour to which I ended up having to sacrificing my runners.
*sigh*
I really should have stayed on Pemba!
Also, so many white people! More than I had seen the entire trip and it freaked me out a little.
TC and I reunited with overpriced non-alcoholic drinks at Mercury's (where the picture above was taken) before heading back to the hotel, avoiding two more downpours, and then heading out for dinner, drinks, and English Premier League soccer.
Obviously, we have our priorities straight on this trip,
We headed to Forodhani Gardens for dinner. It did not disappoint.
The next morning, we headed to Nungwi for a couple of days of beach time.
That's our bungalow on the right, hotel restaurant on the left. This did not suck at all.
I had stayed in Kendwa (5km south) and Nungwi on my previous trip. To say things had changed was an understatement. What used to be a backpackers hide-away with cheap accommodation has become overrun with resorts. I ran into a guy that I knew from my last trip and we ran through the list of changes. It was long. Like, we're-still-texting-each-other-the-changes long.
Don't get me wrong, I still loved my time in Nungwi (and as long as Jambo Brother's doesn't change too much, I'd gladly go back there because the village is lovely), but every once and awhile I'd trip over a memory from last time and marvel at how different it now was.
Still, it hadn't gone so upscale Mr. Moo and his family couldn't enjoy a day at the beach
But enough about my nostalgia.
We stayed in Nungwi for three nights and did almost nothing. It was glorious. We'd get up, eat breakfast looking at the Indian Ocean and then... one of us might wander down the beach, one of us might read, one of us might go for a swim, one of us might sleep an entire day away. Not me on that last one, by the way.
Morning traffic in Nungwi is crazy!
We did wander to Kendwa one day - a walk that can only be down at low-tide - for lunch and we walked to Gerry's Bar and back twice which was a bit of a jaunt, so it's not like we never moved. We were just very, very selective about when we did.
I mentioned that I ran into a guy I knew from my last trip, King. (Yes, that's actually his name. It was his mother's maiden name.) At that time, he was a tout who I found annoying, to be honest. (I didn't remind him of this, but I distinctly remember him annoying me to the point of swearing.) Now, older and wiser, he's a fisherman, and we had a couple of good chats about his trips up and down the coast following the fish amongst many other topics.
If these were the waters I got to sail in every day, I'd probably become a fisherman too
On Wednesday morning, we packed up our bags and headed back to Stone Town.
*sigh* At least I'll always have the memories... and about 400 pictures.
Prepping the fishing net for easy casting
Dhow at sunset
Helping the fishermen bring in their supplies after a day at sea
Pemba had been on my list of places I'd like to visit in Tanzania since my last trip here, but it's not an easy destination to get to. I even contemplated including it when I was drafting up some tentative travel plans before leaving Canada this time, but getting there was either long or expensive. If it hadn't been for a poster in my Tanga hotel showing a $65US price to fly from Tanga to Pemba, I would never have gone.
What a mistake that would have been.
The plane ride over was worth every penny, for starters.
There's a dhow (traditional wooden boat) hanging out by this sand bank.
I wouldn't mind hanging out with them.
My first view of Pemba Island was actually the smaller islands on what
I guess you could call 'the outer bank' before the sea floor drops away.
I arrived at the airport on the east side of the island and caught a taxi to the capital city of Chake Chake. The city is built on a hill above Chake Chake Bay and I could walk from one end to the other in about 20 minutes. Two other wazungu got off the plane in Pemba, but they were picked up by a resort car. After that, I saw one white person my entire trip and he was a Peace Corp volunteer, not a tourist.
The view from my first hotel. It was closed my second night so I had to move to another one.
Pemba is beautiful but very poor. While both Zanzibar and Pemba feel that they are forgotten by the mainland government, Pemba is also forgotten by the semi-autonomous Zanzibari government. Unemployment is high and salaries, even for government jobs, are below what they are worth elsewhere. Politics is a big topic in Pemba, and I was a willing participant. "What do you think of CCM?" I'd ask feigning innocence, then I'd sit back and let them ramble.
I booked a guide, Nassor, for a full day tour of the island for Friday. We started by heading out the peninsula Ras Mkumbuu to the Qanbalu Ruins. The ruins are believed to be Africa's oldest Muslim town and a large portion of the Friday mosque remains.
The mihrab wall (the niche that points towards Mecca) from the outside.
The round structure is where the Iman would stand to call people to prayer.
After we were done checking out the ruins, we walked back to Nassor's car which was parked by the hut used by the anti-smuggling police. They were sitting down to breakfast and invited us to join them for some chai (tea), tuna, and cassava. Sometimes the best parts of travel are the parts you could never plan.
Have breakfast here? Well, if you insist!
We drove up to Wete, the second largest city, where I saw Pemba's Flying Foxes, fruit bats which are endemic to the island of Pemba. I've received a few odd looks over the years when I say this but I think bats are beautiful so I was delighted that we spied some in a tree.
Washing day near Wete
When we returned to Chake Chake, I headed to a little hut I had discovered earlier for some mishkaki na chipsi (beef skewers and chips). It was run by the delightful Hatim (at least, I think it was. My swahili is limited, and so is his English.) They were elated when I returned a second night in a row, although Kilo - their friend who spoke very decent English - wasn't there so the conversation was a bit more a struggle without someone to translate. As I was leaving, they asked if they'd see me the next day. In Swahili, I explained that I was going to Unguja (Zanzibar) the next morning, but that I hoped to return to Pemba some day and spend more time there. Hatim nodded, smiled, and then said in English, "I know you will be back." I hope you're right, Hatim.
Hatim's wife, Hatim, and the cook. If you ever go to Pemba, I'll give you directions.
You will not find friendlier service in Chake Chake.
The boat to Zanzibar leaves from Mtoani at the south end of the island but there isn't a hotel there (well, there is but none of the reviews sounded too positive), so I was up before the sun for one last car ride with Nassor. After he dropped me off, I walked the length of the pier while people swam in the water on one side and fishermen prepped their boats as they returned from a night of fishing on the other.
The fishing dhows winding down after a night of fishing
I boarded the ferry (which was also a cargo ship), found someone sitting in my seat who refused to move, ended up sitting a few rows over after climbing over a sleeping family on the floor, moved my bags so someone else could also store their chickens there, and settled in for the five hour ferry ride to Stone Town.
