One Step At A Time

I made a list of vacation highlights, but have been informed that my lists are rather nonsensical, and highly uniformative. So for this past vacation i will compromise by making an annotated list. also, my camera was stolen, so this blag will be visually impaired for the rest of its tenure. unless i borrow pics from someone else, which is moderately likely.

HIGHLIGHTS

Zanzibar: Nungwe
(this was a beach town on the northern tip of the island)
1. turqoise waters (they were perfect! better than a computer desktop picture! and the water was so warm and clear and perfect. the ocean began approx. 10 ft past the door to our room)
2. we walked past this group of about 20 women on the beach one morning, wrapped from head to toe in beautiful colored fabric, all with cooking-pots no their heads like johnny appleseed, and they were smashing these octupi repeately into these rocks, to tenderize them i guess.
3. the air was like syrup there, it was so thick and humid and oxygenated! i'm used to the rarified air of lesotho. i had to spend some time gasping, like i couldn't fit this substance into my lungs
4. there were all these dhows (a style of wooden fishing boat) in the water, and one of them was called the For-Tuna and mad and i thought the pun involved in that name for a fishing boat was pretty much the best ever. then the fortuna sank while we watched, the proprietor was desperately trying to bail it out, to no avail. not very fortunate.
5. We went on a tour of a spice farm, and saw how a ton of different spices are grown, and ate many an odd fruit, our tour guide-type guy was a little intimidating, he was like the soup nazi but for spices. he'd hand us something and ask us what it was, and if we got it wrong he'd yell and say we were banished or soemthing. we'd get really nervous and just shout out like 5 spices and never commit to one answer out of fear. we got to see a boy climb a 50 ft tall coconut tree like nobody's business, and rambotrons are my new favourite fruit!

6. there was a bar on the beach, and at one point i dropped our room key in the sand (at night) and so mad and i were trying to find it without accidentally burying it, and this one girl next to us was like, oh hey i have a light, and then OSAMA BIN LADEN's face is staring at me from the sand! i found the keys quickly, and turned to find the origin of this miracle, and it was a lighter, with a little flashlight on the other end with osama's face projected out! so i traded my normal lighter for hers, and now i am the proud owner of osamaaaa. apparently these lighters are 'everywhere'. i looked and found some saddam hussein ones at a market, and i've heard tell of some obama and beyonce ones as well. i love capitalism, as long as it gives rise to things like this.

Zanzibar: Stone Town
1. A little known fact about Freddy Mercury, of the rock and roll band 'Queen'. he was born and spent the first 5 years of his life in zanzibar! we saw his house. and bought some mercury-themed souveneirs. and victoria bought an amazing canvas of a painting of freddy, that says 'we will rockyou stone town zanzibar' off the wall of some shop. we also had a lot of fodder for 'mercury-poisoning' themed puns.

2. there are mosquitos EVERYWHERE. and they all eat me. i was vic and mad's de facto mosquito net because they would all just bite me, and no one else. the mosquito nets on the beds are fun though, i felt like i was sleeping in a gauzy bubble.

3. i love chapattis

4. i love kangas (the traditional fabric) women wrapped in these are so so beautiful. i did not buy them. why? because i'm a idiot and need things to regret, i suppose.

5. seeing a small monkey drinking out of a straw out of a coconut while sitting in a rich woman's lap at a fancy restaurant. i guess they are like teh chihuahuas of zanzibar...

6. Top Chef Beachside: there's this nighttime seafood market in stone town, with all these stands with fresh fish on kebabs and chapattis and fried morsels of unknown wonder, and all the people are dressed in chef hats and jackets. delicious.

7. getting to watch indian boy band music videos on the ferry from zanzibar to dar es salaam


Dar Es Salaam
1. we managed to try to get our visas for moz on mozambiquan independence day, when all embassies were closed, poo! then the next day we went back and they had run out of the little stickers to put in the passport. they said we'd have to wait a couple weeks til they get in, so vic took our passports back to zanzibar, and used the full extent of her persuasive powers to get visas put in for each of us, all in one day! the mug shots we took for this are priceless, and hopefully will eventually make it onto this blag.

2. dar is a dirty yucky city. not enjoyable. but we did find a subway! it was creepily exactly like subway in america...

3. men selling water on the streets inexplicably make this incredible obnoxious kissy noise to advertise their wares

4. Dar and Zanzibar are both predominantly muslim places, so there was what seemed like a constant call to prayer being issued from the mosque loudspeakers, it's beautiful.

5. we stayed at the YMCA in dar, and got locked in, and so had to make a great escape by climbing over a wall and down a fence at like 3:30 in the morning

6. We rode this death trap bus with no shocks to speak of for 12 hours from dar all the way to mtwara, near the moz border, going like 120 km/hr over speed bumps and along incredibly bumpy dirt roads with everyone screaming and flying out of their seats, with the horn playing this fun arabian jig-tune all the while

Mikindani
1. So, they speak Swahili in Tanzania, and we were getting by ok with our stock phrases, and we thought we heard this one guy say something like "cashew" to us in greeting (kay-sho (or something) means tomorrow, but that also didn't make sense in the context) so we decided to adopt it. The next person to pass us on the path was an old man on a bicycle and we cheerily called out to him, habari! cashew! to which he shook his fist at us and exclaimed while riding off "YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE SWAHILI LAANNGUAAGE!"

2. I love baobabs

3. When baobabs are fruiting they look like christmas ornaments

4. i ate a baobab fruit. it was not very good.

5. We were supposed to get picked up by a rickshaw at 4 am to catch our bus in the next town over which left at 5 am, and it never showed up. at 4.30 we got a call from the driver saying "there is something wrong with my bah jah jee" i thought it sounded like a personal problem, but evidently this is what he called his rickshaw. So the man called his friend to come get us, and at 5.15 this little motorized rickshaw zooms past us, skids to a halt while making a 180 degree turn, and the guy shouts for us to get in.
So we hustled in, with our packs and squished into the little seat, and the man was off! He was crazy! and evidently really wanted to get us to our bus on time, it was like mr. toads wild ride, but waay scarier because it was real. we zoomed over this pitted dirt road through palm trees at breakneck speed flying out of our seats holding on for dear life, laughing because what else can you do if you're about to die? and then we got there and the bus was gone, but we found an old man with a pickup truck from 1796 that looked like it had been totalled and brought back to life at least 5 times, and he was driving to the border. the passenger door was not on hinges, and had no handle, it had to be removed entirely from the car for us to get in, and then wedged back into place after us. This man also had a need for speed, and the road to the moz border was also very crazy, 4 or so hours later, we're all dumped off at the shore of this river.
We agreed on a price for the crossing (2000 Tanzanian shillings, or 50 Metacais), and were hustled into a very leaky canoe with 6 other men, plus 2 polers, and one guy whose job was to continually bail out water during our passage. it was so beautiful! we basked in our surroundings, happy that things were going our way. the river is very wide and fraught with sand bars, so we meandered around and through them, and about halfway across the river the bail-out guy asked us for the money, so we gave him the amount we had agreed upon, and he said no no no that's not enough, and that the price was 50,000 shillings. we laughed at him and said that 2 was all he'd get, whereupon the man started to get angry, and demanded 50,000 Tsh from each of us, and we patiently explained that we do not have that much money, and even if we did we would not be giving it to him. He had stopped bailing out water during this whole exchange, and the water was up to my ankles, and all the other men in the boat were ganging up on us also, and we were all yelling and they wouldn't take us back to tanzania, or onward to mozambique without getting all our money. in non-hidden cash we had 60,000 Tsh total, and so they took all that, and finally poled us on to the other side of the river, where we were tossed onto the back of this truck with 20 other people and a crapton of luggage, and we miserably rode on for another 4 hours or so to Mocimboa de Praia, and the truck driver again tried to overcharge us and wouldn't accept what we gave him, and finally we had to just walk away from the man, we were so exhausted and sad and beaten down. we had no more money, and were so so tired of being cheated and harassed. This trip wore down my spirit considerably. The baobabs, however, made everything ok. I couldn't help but smile every time i saw one

Stay Tuned for The Rest Of Mozambique!