Well folks here we are at the grand finale of our Tanzania adventure. We awoke for our last morning in Stone Town and asked the hotel to hold our bags as we wandered around one more time. Here for the first time in our entire end-of-the-rainy-season safari did we see rain and for a while there it came down in absolute buckets. That was a lovely time though as we spent it in a café looking out through the open windows at the downpour, warmed by Zanzibar tea and coffee. It lightened up just in time for us to try to get Lanzhou noodles again, only to be thwarted by a lack of electricity. Instead we lunched at a different Chinese place I had been to before, my last full circle moment before we left Stone Town for the beach.

Going to the beach is of course inevitable in Zanzibar and we embraced it as a last few days of calm and tranquility before making the long journey back home and back to work. We stayed at Sharazad in Jambiani, and after a serpentine car ride around various road constructions we arrived in the midst of another torrential downpour. It was at the beach that we saw the most rain but even then it was mostly sunshine. The hotel was very nice. There were I think four pools if I counted correctly, including a secluded one conveniently right outside our room.

Besides lounging poolside we could also lounge next to a forest which came with monkeys. They had the run of the place though they mostly kept to themselves. The waiters never had to shoo them away from breakfast. Now that I am thinking of all the hotels we stayed at monkeys were only a slightly less standard accoutrement than juice. Very fun to see though mostly we only heard them as they rustled through the treetops.

When not lounging there were yoga classes my super amazing wife took advantage of. When she was doing that I instead took advantage of the hammocks to do some reading. We both got a lot of reading it, making this vacation one of the rare instances of me successfully reading all the books I had brought along. Usually my eyes are too big for my stomach.

We barely left the hotel. We had meant to and were very much looking forward to a seaweed tour we had pre-booked. But after our arrival and much conversation with the hotel desk we mutually discovered that the tides would not support a seaweed tour. Tragic but I was very understanding as tides are notoriously unpredictable. As far as we got were some long walks up and down the beach. The entertainment these provided were several fold. One, we could admire the menus of nearby hotels and imagine that we might eat there instead of our own hotel what with the subtle menu changes we could have experienced. Another were the Maasai warriors with their mobile souvenir stands offering to show us their wares. And then third were the kite surfers. I think most of the ones we saw were the guys who worked at the resorts and tried to sell you kitesurfing lessons and by golly they were very good and very impressive.

When not out and about we did manage to get lunch and a show when some kids put on their best acrobatic acts in order to draw us to their wares, a smaller pile than those of the Maasai warriors but the warriors never gave us a show. No matter, we bought from neither. Also, charmingly, a family of elephant shrews was promised to be living next to the dining area, though I wasn’t honored with the presence as far as I ever noticed. And yeah. It was the beach. Lounging, relaxing, bliss. Eventually though it did have to end. We left in the wee hours of the morning to make the drive back to the airport. The Zanzibar airport was much more polished when heading out via the international terminal than when arriving via the domestic terminal. We spent the last of our shillings and looked forward to lunch in Nairobi. I may chase some of the same experiences these British travelers did a century and a half ago but even I admit air conditioning can be nice sometimes. I can’t wait to come back.

I went with a Queen song title for the first Zanzibar post and it has become much harder to keep it up than I thought so I am sorry. After a glorious night of sleep in a hotel we actually wanted to be at we woke up the next day to the sun streaming into our window. We enjoyed yet another marvelous breakfast on the room of the Emerson Spice Hotel and just hung out until it was time for the day’s adventure, a spice tour and cooking class.

Our guide picked us up in the hotel lobby and after an in-briefing when we picked the meal we were going to cook he led us on foot over to the Darajani Bazaar to do some shopping. That was a lot of fun going through the bazaar with someone who knew what they were doing and also knew what they needed to get. To give us the full experience he went through a routine where he chatted with the sellers and then told us the word in Swahili to say and then gave us the money to pay for the vegetable or spice we were buying. It was all very thrilling.

Then we found a taxi and we were off to the spice farm. In a throwback we were first served passionfruit juice but then it was time to cook.  They were in the midst of rebuilding the kitchen so we were under a pavilion on a mat which was a much cozier experience anyway. Our teachers were Hariun and Hazilah, two lovely women with tons of cooking experience. We sliced us some vegetables and started making the sauce, which unsurprisingly involved a lot of spices. We also made rice and a fish “soupu,” where they pre-boiled the fish and then used the fishy soup for other bits of the recipe. I say rice but it was a pilaf; we fried up some onions and other vegetables and then eventually put the fish in the middle of it and the whole thing was baked with coals on top of the pot.

For dessert we made a banana and coconut milk dish with cardamom and cinnamon. The most interesting part of this was making the coconut milk ourselves. I had never quite considered how coconut milk was actually made, I always figured it was maybe condensed coconut water or something? Clearly though that was wrong because what we did was spend time scraping out the coconut meat. During this process you are supposed to sing, they told us, though Hairun and Hazilah were generally too shy to sing in front of us. We all eventually did do some singing as we worked, that was fun. Then the coconut milk was made by adding some water to the meat shreds and then squeezing out the milk. The first squeeze gave “strong milk” for one part of the recipe and the second pressing a lighter milk. With lunch merrily boiling away we went out on the spice tour.

I dunno man I am a little disappointed by both spice tours I have been on. Very cool to see the different plants and stuff. But deep down maybe I am an infrastructure guy and what I want to see if the mass growing and harvesting of spices. Or maybe they don’t do it that way, maybe both the spice farms I have been to have in fact been intensive examples. We did both enjoy the tour for what it was but it was early afternoon and we were fading a bit. So, too, were the spice tour guys I guess. The guy that normally would have gone up the coconut tree, singing all the way, told us that the clouds were wrong and he couldn’t do it. I think he had just done it for some other guests 10 minutes before and didn’t want to do it again. We didn’t really want him to do it either so good thing about the clouds. We also got hats made for us out of leaves but mine was taken away because apparently I got the design for women; gender essentialism much? I thought I rocked it.

Anyways then we sat down to our lunch which was phenomenal if I do say so myself. I mean we couldn’t have done it without Hairun and Hazilah but still I did some good vegetable slicing and coconut squeezing there. After this we took the ride back to Stone Town. After relaxing a bit in the room we head out to get some shopping in for gifts for various relatives. Our big plans for the evening were also food-based, going to the Forodhani Night Market. With all the people hustling us to come to their stands the one we picked was the least hassle-y one. Our goal was a Zanzibar pizza and we went with the most classic option available. While we were waiting I got some fresh-squeezed sugar cane juice which was way better than I was expecting; it was great and I regret not getting more. As we sat down we gathered a small crowd of feline admirers which we very much enjoyed. For dessert we got a Nutella pizza, also very good, and then decided to go someplace quieter. We eventually concluded we could use a second dessert and had some drinks and sweets at The Secret Garden. It did in fact feel secret and garden-y and was a great way to wrap up the night.

Reading this week:

• Status and Identity in West Africa edited by David C. Conrad and Barbara E. Frank

It only occurred to me after posting the last one that this should really be Zanzibar III. But alas. I left you off last time after we had finally made to Zanzibar and wandered both into and out of the Freddie Mercury Museum. My whole thing with Stone Town is that it is not very big. You can, if you are determined, and don’t get caught up in too many shops, see pretty much everything in a day I think. It was easy to go directly from museum to museum. So off we were to the slavery exhibition at the Christ Church Anglican Cathedral.

I went to the same exhibition last time I was in Zanzibar and found it very impressive. This time a tour guide took us around the church which is an experience I don’t remember from before. We must not have gone in. It was indeed pretty interesting to see the inside of the church and in there our guide gave us a history of the east African slave trade. My most significant takeaway is the particular way the guide said Bagamoyo (“bwaaaga, bwaga moyyy-yo”) to emphasize the etymology which apparently means “to lay down your heart” in Swahili. Inside the church there is also a cross made from the wood of the tree under which Livingstone’s heart was buried. I don’t actually think the list of objects made from that tree is too long, but here is a chunk of it and here is another chunk of it (different from the chunk of a the tree under which he met Stanley) and I reminded of all the pieces of George Washington’s house that I’ve seen in various museums and things and you wonder how any of it could be left. To be clear none of the original Livingstone tree is left but you get my point.

After the interior of the church we visited the holding cell/dungeon where the enslaved persons were imprisoned to await being sold. Then we were left on our own to visit the exhibit itself. Here the lack of sleep from the night before was starting to hit us, so we did not have the wherewithal to read every portion of all the signs. As I have done much more reading on the slave trade in the years between my visits I now understand there is more nuance than I had thought in the story that is displayed, but I still think the exhibit is very good. My super amazing wife and I learned most significantly that Connecticut was a major center of the ivory industry. Next time we are up there we will have to figure out a way to explore that subject more deeply.

From here we were drawn closer to the orbit of our hotel, Emerson Spice. We managed to run into a new Zanzibari museum for me, the Princess Salme Museum. A slightly surreal experience; we thought it was closed, but someone was in there and took our fee, and then promptly disappeared. Later the museum’s proprietor showed up, also surprised about the lack of his colleague. One of the two mentioned that it was “the smallest museum in the world” though having been to the Freddie Mercury museum I’m not sure it’s the smallest museum in Stone Town. There is quite a bit of scholarship in there and we learned a lot about Princess Salme, aka Emily Ruete. She had quite the life and certainly had to scrap for herself. We both fought the urge to buy a copy of her memoirs, each thinking about our large stacks of unread books at home. Before we departed the museum the proprietor took our pictures at the museum for us and put rose water on our hands as he wished us on our way. Then, if I am recalling the series of events correctly, we ducked into an art exhibit being put on by Emerson themselves, which was fairly moving.

Three-ish museums and we hadn’t even had lunch yet, which we rectified by going to a Lanzhou noodle place. This is noteworthy because my super amazing wife had the eponymous noodles in Lanzhou and really enjoys them and now here we were in Zanzibar of all places having the noodles. We tried to go back the next day but they did not have electricity so we were glad we got to go at least once. It also fueled us up adequately to do some Tanzanite shopping, which we were doing at the behest of some relatives. This was less intimidating than anticipated; all the salespeople were very nice and not pushy. But this was after visiting Tippu Tip’s house. I had thought I had done this the first time I was in Zanzibar because back in those days I only had a paper map to go off of and misinterpreted the building, but now I could be sure. Plus the sign was a good indication I was in the right spot this time.

From there the day wound down until we were enjoying cocktails and then an astounding multi-course meal on the room of the Emerson Spice Hotel. The courses were all creative and delicious and produced somehow in the tiny open-air kitchen, also on the roof. In my last post I commented how it was nice to be in a medina and linked to our trip to Fez, but over dinner that night my super amazing wife pointed out that Stone Town was more like Tangier, both in seaside color scheme and in being an international entrepôt. Wherever it is I was glad we were there.

Reading this week:

• Back to the Future: the Ultimate Visual History by Michael Klastorin with Randal Atamaniuk

A strange sensation, going back to a place. When I return to a spot I always think in physics terms. I imagine the paths I have taken in the intervening moments, winding across continents and over oceans and through grad school and marriage and career changes, and that in physics terms if I have wound up in the same spot then in net terms nothing has changed. I know a man cannot step in the same river twice, but we weren’t visiting a river, we were visiting Zanzibar.

To shift from melancholy into despair, I am now two for two having trouble getting to Zanzibar and arriving a day late. After a lovely morning hanging out in Kigoma we had arrived at the airport only to watch our departure time slip farther and farther away. The airport itself though (as discussed) is not much more than a shack with a metal detector in it does also feature a gift shop (more of a gift counter) of sorts selling jars of local honey and bags of dagaa, which is charming, along with a snack bar on the inside. But our boarding time came and went with no communication, no airplane landing on the tarmac, and conflicting information via our phones. Eventually though we did board only to sit there waiting, the flight attendant said, on “paperwork” as I slowly failed to come to terms that we would miss our connecting flight to Zanzibar. The final blow to my hopes and dreams was the announcement that instead of flying direct to Dar we would be going through Burundi which would have sounded fun except that I didn’t want to go to Burundi. So we arrived in Dar late at night, quickly gave up on the very lackadaisical (in our opinion) customer service guy on the ground, and got a taxi to the nearest hotel where we got maybe four hours of sleep.

Four hours of sleep because we were taking the first available flight the next day, which we had booked for surprisingly cheap. We had pondered taking the ferry, which I had enjoyed last time, but logistically it was easier to fly which is fairly wild. As we shuffled into the airport at five in the morning we thought maybe we could have taken a later flight, but it all worked out in the end when we arrived at our hotel still in time for the breakfast that came with the room we hadn’t gotten to use the night before.

And what a breakfast. Last time I visited Zanzibar I only wrote the one blog post about it because honestly I didn’t enjoy it all that much. It was interesting, and it was pretty, but for reasons I could never quite put my finger on it wasn’t that enjoyable. Now I think the reason was money, which we had more of this time around. That meant things like we could stay at the Emerson Spice Hotel, which was gorgeous and you got to eat a breakfast of fresh fruits and new Zanzibari pastries daily up on the rooftop overlooking the dense streets in the medina leading to the ever-beautiful Zanzibar Channel. Fortified, and with the trials of travel shedding from our shoulders, we were off to the races.

The races being the streets of Stone Town. It was a much more pleasant experience than I remember. As we poked around the shops and the Old Fort I felt less hassled. It very quickly got very hot though. Coming from the highlands of Tanzania we hadn’t expected such a significant temperature increase. Fortunately though there were places you could duck into with air conditioning, like the Freddie Mercury Museum. That was a fun visit. I hadn’t gone last time and it is very well done. It is like all namesake museums hagiography in that I question the scholarship, but it does have a whole bunch of artifacts and some very interesting stuff on Zanzibar. It is smaller than I expected and they really missed an opportunity for a gift shop but it was very fun to listen to his music and see his handwritten lyrics and find out about the history of Zoroastrianism on Zanzibar.

And um I will leave it at that for the first blog post. It was good to be in Zanzibar and it was good to be back in Zanzibar. It was fun to be in the shops and it was fun to be with the love of my life and it was fun to be in a medina again after our trip to Morocco. More adventures await.

Reading this week:

• American Serengeti by Dan Flores

Our final formal event of our very fun day with Kigoma Eco-Cultural Tourism was the one nearest and dearest to Elizabeth’s (the owner’s) heart: learning to embroider traditional mashuka ya Kigoma. But first, lunch. This was very exciting because I finally got some ugali on this trip. It’s called nsima in Mambwe, and I ate it every day in Zambia, and I had been missing it. All the places we had been to so far catered a little too much to tourists to serve any ugali with dinner but now here we were at the very nice Juke Fast Food where they will serve you your goat stew with ugali and it was very good.

My super amazing wife and I did not know about mashuka ya Kigoma until we came to Kigoma, though the artform is purportedly known throughout Tanzania. What they are is bedsheets embroidered with fancy designs (“mashuka” being “sheets”). My super amazing wife and I had initially thought they might be something like taatit rugs, special sorta newlywed gifts, but they do not seem to be so narrowly employed. Instead, as far as well could tell, they are just fancy “good” sheets.

Although we were going to embroider some ourselves, first we did some market research by stopping by the market and researching the wares. This was extremely impressive. The women all unfolded the many, many examples they had. Some of the designs were very complex and very wild. A number had embroidered animals, like large zebras or peacocks. Others took more inspiration from pop culture, like one that had a swirling repeated Coca-Cola logo motif. Others were more geometric.

At the back of the market we saw some of the division of labor in the mashuka economy. Although Elizabeth assured me that there are women that do the same, we saw a setup where men were first creating the bedsheets themselves by sewing together two strips of fabric to create a single bedsheet (hey, again like taatit). I was tempted to think that meant the craft started with ‘merikani but that would be some irresponsible speculation. Neither Elizabeth nor Peter (our guide) could report when mashuka ya Kigoma started, except that it was apparently long ago. After the men create the bedsheet they then also draw the designs (again Elizabeth says some women do their own patterns). From these the women do the embroidery to decorate the sheet.

For most women who do this work it is a supplemental income method. When we visited the market on our walking tour all the women who were selling vegetables were also embroidering sheets as they waited for customers. The women we were going to be learning from do it in the afternoons. They are part of a co-op that Elizabeth helped organize. In the mornings the women work in their gardens and then after lunch all gather to hang out and embroider sheets. When we arrived they had already gotten started, so we all said our hellos and settled down to do some needlework.

Instead of starting in on a whole sheet my super amazing wife and I both had basically samplers. Elizabeth’s co-op focuses on more traditional geometric designs, executed with some basic stitches. By “basic” here I mean there is a set of standard ones they use and not “simple,” because the women tried to teach me and I just did not get it. Having tried my hand at it the most stunning thing about these sheets is how cheap they are. Each of these women fully embroiders a whole sheet in about two weeks and despite all that work we bought a sheet and pillowcase set (our samplers were really meant to be half a pillowcase each) from them for I think about $30. Having tried it this is bonkers to me. After a very short amount of time (it can’t have been an hour) sitting on a mat trying to embroider I was a broken man. My back ached and my legs were falling asleep and I just got progressively worse and worse at this M design this woman tutoring me tried to impart upon me. Quite the learning experience and a valuable and concrete lesson on the value of women’s work; I think those sheets should really be like $1000 each.

Eventually our backs and our egos were taken pity upon and Peter took us on a walk to “show us the environment.” This meant going down the hill to the little fishing village nestled in a cove. This was very pretty but also hot and long and in the end we had to walk back uphill which finished us off. But the village was very interesting to see. Of all the spots where we witnessed the rising lake levels this was the starkest. Out in the water was standing by itself the minaret of a former mosque. I guess the tower was made of concrete but the rest of the mosque had been made of mud brick so with the lake washing away the foundations the bricks had returned to just mud. The most fun part of it all was when one of the fishermen who were bringing in their boats greeted us with a “Bonjour!” I trawled up every ounce of high school French I could in an exercise of us mostly not understanding each other, but in the end I learned he was Congolese (if the French didn’t give it away) and lived in the village. He invited us (as a joke) to go fishing with him which I deferred until “maybe tomorrow.”

Environment seen, we then hiked back up the hill which finally did in my super amazing wife and I. Elizabeth rescued us in the car and brought us, after our very long and very interesting day, back to our hotel. Just to put a point on how great Elizbeth and Kigoma Eco-Cultural Tourism is, she finished overnight our samplers and brought them to the hotel the next day so we could take the finished product home. So one last time, if you are in Kigoma you have got to hit them up. Meanwhile though we pulled ourselves to the hotel restaurant where we watched another amazing Tanganyika sunset go down over Congo while enjoying the company of each other and some cold Stoney Tangawizis.