Zanzibar
Apologies, but this is a long one. I haven’t had the opportunity to update in a while.
A warren of crumbling 19th century buildings bakes beneath the tropical sun, reminiscent of the scruffier parts of Venice, sans canal. Touts carrying everything from cashew nuts and ‘spice boats’ (bags of local spices arranged into the shape of a dhow) to football shirts and sunglasses vie for your attention as you skip between patches of bright sun and deep shadow. Shop owners cheerfully invite you too look at their wares, ‘guides’ constantly harass you, trying to pick up commissions from hotels, veiled girls giggle and scurry about, boys chase motorbike tyres, men sit about chewing the fat or shifting an seemingly endless amount of freight through the narrow street, and anonymous women trudge between places to mysterious purpose. All dodge the tooting scooters and ringing bicycles that dive recklessly through the narrow gaps and sharp, blind turns. This is Stonetown, and you need to contact your bank manager.
Everything here is expensive. Think England for price, but not quality. It seems that most of the mzeungu (white people) are either wealthy enough to be unconcerned, assembled into organised gangs of schoolchildren and super-annunated schoolchildren, or blinking backpackers as bewildered and impoverished as I. There are many tours to go on which will cost lots of money I don’t have, expensive restaurants and coffee houses, the odd bar, a port, and stretch of sand overlooking the bright blue sea (in the twilight, a group of boys incongruously practice Caipuera – not sure of the spell here – each night). Behind, like a hive that’s humming is felt rather than heard, are the shops and markets of the local population, accessible but dismissive of my pale conspicuousness.
Our introduction is not the best – the hotels are mostly full, and it takes us a hour or so carrying our bags through the heat to find one. Trying to find a cash machine that will accept our cards is another three-hour trial hiking beneath the blazing sun, but eventually, with a little assistance, we prevail. So we seek refreshment both alcoholic and more solid.
If there is one place I could recommend in Stonetown, it is the ‘Silk Route’, a curry house and bar that I attended on my first day (recommended by a fellow traveller), and where I sit now, writing this, the day before I leave. They mix a good daiquiri, and serve the most amazing curry I have ever tasted (which puts it pretty high on my list of all-time meals). Zanzibar’s strange history, with influences from Africa, colonial Europe, the Middle East and India, is reflected in all aspects of its culture, from the style of the buildings (weirdly piled upon one another are courtyard houses, colonial townhouses, villas, palaces and strange negotiations between all three) through the people and their beliefs, to the food, – and it all comes together in seafood and spice. Pick the right restaurant, and you will be treated to one of the finest combination of flavours it is possible to taste.
However – the hotels know what they can charge. The bars and restaurants know what they can charge. And in Stonetown, you cannot easily go native. We quietly tire of the constant pressure upon out wallets, and, failing to be able to afford the myriad tours that would otherwise occupy our time (to be frank, they have an uncomfortable feel anyway – programmed events that reek of awkwardly packaged, shabby and inauthentic ‘fun’), we are introduced by a man who attaches himself to us for a while (hoping to be paid, of course – he will eventually be disappointed with the meagre funds I have available to pay for unsolicited guides) to another man who hires us a car. His name is, apparently, ‘Ali Keys’ and according to his sign, he is ‘not as disreputable as he looks’. This oddly comic slogan warms me to a man whose strange cynical enthusiasm borders on insanity – Ali Keys would be well cast as the lead in a version of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ set in Stonetown. He hires me a car at a suspiciously cheap rate, and I insist on seeing it. It is a vast petrol-powered SUV that looks like it has crashed into – and possibly flattened – several hundred less robust objects, and has done more than two hundred thousand miles in the process. Fortunately, the four-wheel-drive system seems intact, the doors lock, the engine sounds good and there is tread on the tires; and it is a Toyota – and is therefore indestructible. We arrange a rendezvous for the following morning, and our real holiday here can begin.
The thirsty monster hauls us and our backpacks up to Kendwa at the north of the island, and as dilapidated town gives way to villages, tall palms and people who live by means other than ours, we relax. We find a lagoon where there is a turtle sanctuary, and we feed, pet and swim with these friendly, somewhat alien beasts. The eldest, nearly ready for release, is twenty-eight. His shell is as big across as the bonnet of a city car, but I am assured that the older ones can be twice that. The man who looks after them tries to discuss football with me, but he knows more about the English leagues than I do, so he begins to tell me jokes. My favourite was, ‘Do you know why turtles live for a hundred years? They don’t smoke, they don’t drink alcohol, and they only have sex once every forty years’. When they do, apparently, though, it lasts for a week. He also shows me a pair of pythons, only two meters long (he tells me that they will grow to six). One has recently had its dinner – we know because there are two rat-shaped lumps in it.
We hired a tiny, scruffy room near the beach, which is cheap and still not worth the money, and explore. We book a trip to go snorkelling at Mnemba nature reserve, and go off to explore. The water is an impossible blue, the ground coral sands white as good paper, but as Kendwa beach gives way to Nungwi, I am reminded of what I am. Piles of stinking Eurotrash in tans and shorts languish about hotel fronts, the strange palm-roofed faux-beachhouses they inhabit are an artifice too far. Like lizards they suck in the heat to toast bodies already ruined by excess and narcissism. Their breath seems to conjure bungalows with white walls and volleyball, pizzas and beverages to make them fat. The locals, many of them Rasta’s, fight off this strange incarnation of Babylon with unceasing reggae.
Some of the other locals (many of them flirty cheerful Maasai, who are sometimes artists selling their pictures and carvings, or more commonly, distributing a mass-produced equivalent) have surrounded the beachfront with shops, and though they are polite enough, I can’t help but feel crowded by their avaricious eyes and the hideousness of the white folks they attend.
At one point, away from the tourist’s areas, lost, driving amongst labyrinth of village streets, I hear mighty hammer blows ricocheting across the beach. A short walk away, there are groups of men building Dhows. They look at us grumpily from the corners of their eyes as I watch them work. One moment…
These men build boats by eye and feel. Not just small ones, either. The tools are basic, comprising a few chisels, the odd saw, hand-drills, hammers and large iron nails. Having found a suitable piece of wood to build the main ‘keel’ of the ship, they then find other pieces suitable for the rest of the frame, and the hull and so on. Each piece is measured by eye, cut at and chipped into shape and fitted according to the skill of the maker and nothing more. No plans are made nor measurements taken other than in the mind of the craftsman and the tradition he has inherited. It is a prodigious skill not easily acquired. Most ‘apprentices’ study – unpaid, mind you – for many years under a master boat-builder before they are presented with their own set of tools. It is a process of I admire immensely, a type of human activity, of artistry, long lost to us in the world of computer-aided design and precision manufacture. And it is not just some cute quirky thing I wish to patronise from three feet behind my Japanese fuel-injection system now romanticised into my Pentium-power box of wonder. These boats can last eighty years. Not so long ago, they used to make examples that weighed in at two hundred tonnes, unloaded. The skills they possess are wonderful.
Glorious sunset gives way to drinks and bed, and the morning brings a chill wind and rain for our nautical excursion. We are aboard the boat for an hour and a half before we reach our destination, and I weather the journey well, but some combination of the rolling of a Dhow sat in the choppy water and the ludicrous pantomime actions required to squeeze my portly body into a wetsuit do my stomach harm. By the time I’m in the water, and I have involuntarily swallowed a mouthful of the Indian Ocean, I am feeling like someone has tricked me into drinking a glass of oil and then repeatedly punched me in the gut. The reef is fascinating, but I am glad to return to the boat and whilst the others eat their lunch, I lie down and settle myself while everyone but me (I’m not sure why) shivers. We are lucky enough to see some dolphins, which cheers up everyone. The afternoon goes better. The profusion of sealife is astonishing, myriad scintillating colours and strange forms. Our guide points out moray eels, parrot fish, lionfish, angelfish. I spy giant clams, racing flatfish, schools of iridescent peculiar things hiding amidst the folds of coral, urchins, long, thin things that appear to swim backwards (just a disguise) and starfish of scarlet and blue – some are as big as me – and countless other examples of wondrous strangeness. The journey back is easier, and though we are disappointed not to have seen any octopus, rays or sharks, the day is declared a success. Next time we have the opportunity, we swear we will dive. We’ve done it before, but as I am far from being at home in the water, we are not yet qualified, and regardless, we couldn’t afford it here. The prices are ludicrous.
We swap sides of the island for the evening, and find a very agreeable place to stay for the evening. The next day brings the desire for the road, monkeys and mangrove. We see Colobus and Black monkeys (the former, we walk amongst and are surrounded by – they are disinterested by us, much more interested in eating, general frolicking and all other manner of monkey business; the second I only catch sight of from the car), and I nearly run over a giant elephant shrew (apparently, I was very lucky – to see it, not nearly run over it). Then we enter the mangrove swaps. I am at once stuck by a familiarity and comfortable discomfort I have only felt once before, in the jungles of the Amazon. It is peculiar, for I have no reason to be at home in such aggressive, unwelcoming environments, but I do. The mangrove has its own peculiarities. A profusion of crab species seem to occupy the niches that ground-dwelling insects occupy in more conventional arboreal environments, and there are only a few (four, actually) species of tree, their long, tough buttress roots providing an opportunity for me to demonstrate my own primate heritage. I must further examine my need for these densely packed, teeming, aggressive and thoroughly woody regions of the earth. For now, perhaps it will suffice to say that I left the mangrove with some regret, and we rejoined the road, heading to the southernmost point of the island.
Civilisation reasserted itself with the glee of capitalism as we were chased through Kizimkazi by people offering to chase down schools of dolphins on my behalf. I would honestly rather they left them alone. Encountering dolphins as I did, spontaneously, appeals to me far more than paying someone to chase them about with a motorboat. We don’t stop, for fear of being buried under a tidal wave of cheery dolphin-botherers, and carry on down a long path to the sea. What we find there – an exclusive resort for the rich – is a hideously pristine complex of infinity pools and beach houses bigger than the average British home. They charge us extortionate amounts for some refreshments, and we barely escape with our integrity intact.
We soon reassert it, however, with the help of some Rastafarians. Jambiani, Paje and Bwejuu on the eat coast have beaches that are common to my sight only from calendars. Long stretches of cobalt blue and aquamarine out to the horizon and white sand are interrupted only by fishing boats and the occasional beach hut. These are the places less frequented by bloated white tourists, and those who are present are in conspicuous. Local boys play an endless, boundless game of football upon the beach. It is unearthly, like someone has photoshopped the world. We stay in a place called Kimte, a inexpensive hotel run by Rastafarians. They are friendly, jovial lads who are fans of Paul Simon and UB40 in addition to the more expected reggae. A campfire and a very chilled evening later, we retire, and awake to watch the sun rise over the perfectly presented Indian Ocean. The best breakfast served on the island later, we plunge once more towards Stonetown where, quite clearly, we will run out of money.
I made up a game last night called ‘competitive tourism’. It is a card game where the object is to accrue bragging rights on the basis of where you have been and what you have done. I made it by ripping up a cheap notebook. It was a cheap evening’s entertainment – imagination and humour are free. Now, I’m sitting in the Silk Route, and I’ve just had another exquisite meal and a Hemmingway-load. Tomorrow we leave for Arusha, to go on Safari and poke a lion in the eye (ok, maybe I’m not actually going to do that).