view of our beach from cholo's bar. not too bad....
i asked the desk guy at the baghani hotel to point me in the direction of a restaurant where i could grab a quick bite and he led me down a labyrinth of dark, narrow alleyways filled with the noise of beggars and street dealers trying to sell you everything from sex to a straw hat. i opted for neither. at the restaurant i ordered spring rolls which resembled, at least visually, fried cat turds. i promptly asked for a beer and the check.
on the way home i of course got lost and remembered the sign in my room that said do not walk alone at night in dark alleyways and streets. great, im going to die on night one. i was lost for about 5 minutes when a man started to yell at me with the familiar 'my friend, my friend'. fearing a robbery or the purchase of a souvenir t-shirt i hurried along and ignored him. after 25 more minutes of winding around i finally asked an armed police man where my hotel was and he pointed just around the corner. i again came across the man that yelled at me and it turned out that he was just trying to tell me that i was walking right past the front door of my hotel. i felt like an ass, but still trusted no one.
the next morning i awoke and tried to retrieve my passport, wallet and camera from the safe only find it wasnt working. the desk guy said that it had been broken (thanks for telling me) eventhough it was working when i tested it earlier, and that he would have to call someone. i told him i needed it right now, so he simply handed me a hammer and screwdriver. 20 minutes later i had my stuff, which left me with no faith in hotel safes.
after a dive off stone town with a japanese guy that fulfilled the stereotype to a 't' (he took no less than 147 pictures underwater and had all the grace of a beached whale) and two kids about my age from the states, i headed back to my hotel for a quick shower. i knew i wanted to go to nungwi, a beach town up north, but had no idea how to get there. upon emerging from the shower in the lobby, i noticed a slew of american looking backpacks and began to look at the name tags; they were all from jersey, awesome.
billy was the first guy i met and after a bit of small talk he invited me to join the dalla-dalla (sort of minibus) crew and head up to nungwi with him, 3 college buddies and a german couple that he knew from a year abroad. i happily accepted the invitation and this turned out to be the best decision i made all trip. i hopped into the bus and for the the first time in africa i was a passenger to a crazed african minibus driver, the motorists that i had come to fear so much from my time spent driving on the deadly roads of kenya. i passed the time with music conversation with my new friend greg and tried not to focus on the insanity of the drive, all 1.5hrs of it.
nungwi was beautiful with a great, young party scene and i knew immediately that i would like it. i had sort of picked a place to stay from my lonely planet book but before i knew it, billy informed me that i would be rooming with him and greg in a triple, with the rest of the crew staying in bungalows nestled around our little baraka beach hotel.
most of our time was spent at cholo's, our beachside bar (pictured above, note the door which we insisted on walking through everytime) and swimming in the ocean. octopus curry, the title of my small email from earlier, came from the bar where on the first night we ate the bbq buffet by the fire, and it was awesome. even the octopus curry.
night two: greg and i decided that it would be cheaper (we were paying about 3.50 for a drink
and less than 2 for a beer) to grab a bottle of rum to mix with juice from the bar. we wandered around the dirt courtyard that was the town of nungwi only to find grocery stores and street hawkers. we finally asked a man where the liquor store was and after he told us, he insisted on leading us there against our strong opposition. it was about a 35 second walk and he of course followed us in, demanding a tip from the owner for finding and bringing him business. we assured the owner that we would have found the store regardless but the man hung around. after our purchase he looked at us with twisted, glazed and bloodshot eyes and asked 'tipsi for me?' greg responded in fantastic fashion; 'my friend, you already are tipsy' whcih was indeed the case. he stumbled no less than twice on our short walk and looked as if he had fallen headlong off the wagon and had no intention, ever, of getting back on.
we were up playing kings til about sunrise with our new friends, 3 candian girls and one american (jenny). sadly, billy, greg, scott, adam and the germans had to leave that day, which meant that i was stuck with three candian girls. at first they seemed very normal and lots of fun....i could not have been more wrong.
kate (pictured here with greg around 230am) and teresa were my age, or somewhere close to it
, and when they found out my friends were leaving they invited me to join them, split the room and continue travelling. kate was nice, cute and seemed a little quiet. teresa, a very interesting character, seemed fun enough for me to tag along with. turns out she did enough talking in one hour for the whole of china. now i can talk with the best of them, but this girl out me to shame and she was always so 'oh my god! im so excited, i love my life.' after a day of this, i prayed to be shot. i enjoyed kates company but she was always overshadowed by the dominating teresa.
then came their 30yr old friend tracy, with whom they had volunteered at an orphanage with in arusha. again, frist impression told me she was nice enough...until i realized that she, a single woman returning to school to finish her undergrad at age 30 with no real income was trying to take home a tanzanian infant. she met him at the orphanage and about 5 days before i met her, decided to adopt and was convinced that she could have him on the plane home with her next saturday. i think she was on crack, or at least her mother smoked it while she was preggers.
from what ive heard, most adoptions, especially intl ones, can take years but she seemed to think that she could get it all done. while the tanzania side of the issue may be easy, i asked her about the canadian side. being socialist in many ways, im sure they are wont to simply let in foreign babies with single, immature and insane mothers. she responded; 'oh yeah, i just thought of that yesterday, my mom is working on it for me.' what did she expect. i can see the situation now in toronto:
around the same time that most of you were lighting your bbq pits, or running for cover from the rains in texas, i arrived in zanzibar, tanzania alone, with not a clue as to what i was doing. i had a place to stay for one night and knew that i was diving the next day, but other than that i was just going to see where the island took me.
i asked the desk guy at the baghani hotel to point me in the direction of a restaurant where i could grab a quick bite and he led me down a labyrinth of dark, narrow alleyways filled with the noise of beggars and street dealers trying to sell you everything from sex to a straw hat. i opted for neither. at the restaurant i ordered spring rolls which resembled, at least visually, fried cat turds. i promptly asked for a beer and the check.
on the way home i of course got lost and remembered the sign in my room that said do not walk alone at night in dark alleyways and streets. great, im going to die on night one. i was lost for about 5 minutes when a man started to yell at me with the familiar 'my friend, my friend'. fearing a robbery or the purchase of a souvenir t-shirt i hurried along and ignored him. after 25 more minutes of winding around i finally asked an armed police man where my hotel was and he pointed just around the corner. i again came across the man that yelled at me and it turned out that he was just trying to tell me that i was walking right past the front door of my hotel. i felt like an ass, but still trusted no one.
the next morning i awoke and tried to retrieve my passport, wallet and camera from the safe only find it wasnt working. the desk guy said that it had been broken (thanks for telling me) eventhough it was working when i tested it earlier, and that he would have to call someone. i told him i needed it right now, so he simply handed me a hammer and screwdriver. 20 minutes later i had my stuff, which left me with no faith in hotel safes.
after a dive off stone town with a japanese guy that fulfilled the stereotype to a 't' (he took no less than 147 pictures underwater and had all the grace of a beached whale) and two kids about my age from the states, i headed back to my hotel for a quick shower. i knew i wanted to go to nungwi, a beach town up north, but had no idea how to get there. upon emerging from the shower in the lobby, i noticed a slew of american looking backpacks and began to look at the name tags; they were all from jersey, awesome.
billy was the first guy i met and after a bit of small talk he invited me to join the dalla-dalla (sort of minibus) crew and head up to nungwi with him, 3 college buddies and a german couple that he knew from a year abroad. i happily accepted the invitation and this turned out to be the best decision i made all trip. i hopped into the bus and for the the first time in africa i was a passenger to a crazed african minibus driver, the motorists that i had come to fear so much from my time spent driving on the deadly roads of kenya. i passed the time with music conversation with my new friend greg and tried not to focus on the insanity of the drive, all 1.5hrs of it.
nungwi was beautiful with a great, young party scene and i knew immediately that i would like it. i had sort of picked a place to stay from my lonely planet book but before i knew it, billy informed me that i would be rooming with him and greg in a triple, with the rest of the crew staying in bungalows nestled around our little baraka beach hotel.
most of our time was spent at cholo's, our beachside bar (pictured above, note the door which we insisted on walking through everytime) and swimming in the ocean. octopus curry, the title of my small email from earlier, came from the bar where on the first night we ate the bbq buffet by the fire, and it was awesome. even the octopus curry.
night two: greg and i decided that it would be cheaper (we were paying about 3.50 for a drink
and less than 2 for a beer) to grab a bottle of rum to mix with juice from the bar. we wandered around the dirt courtyard that was the town of nungwi only to find grocery stores and street hawkers. we finally asked a man where the liquor store was and after he told us, he insisted on leading us there against our strong opposition. it was about a 35 second walk and he of course followed us in, demanding a tip from the owner for finding and bringing him business. we assured the owner that we would have found the store regardless but the man hung around. after our purchase he looked at us with twisted, glazed and bloodshot eyes and asked 'tipsi for me?' greg responded in fantastic fashion; 'my friend, you already are tipsy' whcih was indeed the case. he stumbled no less than twice on our short walk and looked as if he had fallen headlong off the wagon and had no intention, ever, of getting back on.we were up playing kings til about sunrise with our new friends, 3 candian girls and one american (jenny). sadly, billy, greg, scott, adam and the germans had to leave that day, which meant that i was stuck with three candian girls. at first they seemed very normal and lots of fun....i could not have been more wrong.
kate (pictured here with greg around 230am) and teresa were my age, or somewhere close to it
, and when they found out my friends were leaving they invited me to join them, split the room and continue travelling. kate was nice, cute and seemed a little quiet. teresa, a very interesting character, seemed fun enough for me to tag along with. turns out she did enough talking in one hour for the whole of china. now i can talk with the best of them, but this girl out me to shame and she was always so 'oh my god! im so excited, i love my life.' after a day of this, i prayed to be shot. i enjoyed kates company but she was always overshadowed by the dominating teresa.then came their 30yr old friend tracy, with whom they had volunteered at an orphanage with in arusha. again, frist impression told me she was nice enough...until i realized that she, a single woman returning to school to finish her undergrad at age 30 with no real income was trying to take home a tanzanian infant. she met him at the orphanage and about 5 days before i met her, decided to adopt and was convinced that she could have him on the plane home with her next saturday. i think she was on crack, or at least her mother smoked it while she was preggers.
from what ive heard, most adoptions, especially intl ones, can take years but she seemed to think that she could get it all done. while the tanzania side of the issue may be easy, i asked her about the canadian side. being socialist in many ways, im sure they are wont to simply let in foreign babies with single, immature and insane mothers. she responded; 'oh yeah, i just thought of that yesterday, my mom is working on it for me.' what did she expect. i can see the situation now in toronto:
- customs: do you have anything to declare?
- crazy tracy: yes. some t-shirts, a scarf and a 23 month old tanzanian boy.
- customs: excuse me?
- crazy tracy: you mean i cant just take him in and declare him?
not only this, the boy was more of an infatuation to her. she sounded like a child brining home a puppy from the pound with no idea of the responsibility that a human being, solely dependent on herself, would entail. all she could talk about was wanting to pinch his cheeks on the plane ride home. whatever happens to the boy, i feel terrible for him.
(a very excited me after the spice tour and the departure of the two crazy candians. kate could have stayed on with us, but she was worth the sacrifice to lose the other two)
so around the time i realized that canada was insane, i also realized that jenny (here with billy), my american
friend, was also travelling alone and her friends had just left her as well. we agreed to room together for the night to cut costs and have company. she was one of the most interesting and fun people i have ever had the privilege of talking to and spending time with.
friend, was also travelling alone and her friends had just left her as well. we agreed to room together for the night to cut costs and have company. she was one of the most interesting and fun people i have ever had the privilege of talking to and spending time with. she had been in africa for the past two years and her experiences were incredible, me writing about them would not do any justice. we ended up travelling together for the next three nights, with one more at the beach and two in stone town. its weird when you meet people in far off places and travel with them; you develop a connection so fast and it feels like youre old college friends after just a day. when you have no one else to talk to, pretty much everything, from the very personal to the extremely trivial, is discussed in the first 24hrs.
i spent the next day around the beach and jenny went diving, which left me with the candians, so i drank to numb the pang of irritating company. by the time we were ready to head to stone town, i was about to shoot myself and welcomed the sight of jenny walking up the beach. we grabbed out bags, hopped in the bus (canadians and all) and headed back to the main town.
back in stone town, we checked out the fish markets (see picture) which were amazing; you could pick whatever you wanted and have it grilled up right in front of you for just a few bucks, and it was good, very good. no, im not sick...yet. after our spice tour on monday the candians took off only to realize that crazy teresa had run out of money. they ended up in stone town for one more night but jenny and i steered clear. our last night and day was spent wandering around the markets with the occasional beer (or twelve) and then a day on the beach.
on our final day we met an amazing 19yr old candian/swedish girl who had been travelling africa since school let out. she was looking for company and asked me to come with her to climb some volcanoes in rwanda in august. at first i thought she was insane but the more i talked to her, the more i wanted to go. so plans could be in the works for early august.
i said goodbye to jenny around 3 yesterday and headed for nairobi. i asked lincoln, the driver that came to collect me, if anything had happened while i was gone. he said no, but then i asked about the mungiki. he told me that 11 people had been shot dead by the police. they claimed they were all suspects, but no one ever knows for sure who is and who isnt. a surreal feeling washed over me as i realized i was starting to become numb to this sort of occurence; this is simply the was things are in nairobi. strange, i thought, but im back, and for now at least, this is home.
