Tanzanian Vacation

Zanzibar, Tanzania. It's the closest beach vacation a Rwandan PCV can get, made infinitely better by the fact that they're a PCV. This is where a few friends and I chose to spend our first leave days since we arrived in Rwanda 10 months ago and I had to say, transportation complications completely aside, it was perhaps my most appreciated vacation yet.

Tanzania and Rwanda share a border, as well as a membership in the East African Union, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. Just across Rusomo Falls, the landscape transforms from lush, green Rwanda hills to Tanzanian savannah. The excess of houses and children that makes Rwanda Africa's most densely populated country fades away and you can look out the bus window without seeing a single sign up human life. That is, until you hit a bus stop where Arabs, Indians, Rastafarians, and Masai warriors mingle freely without a second glance towards the abazungu because, frankly, difference isn't nearly so uncommon here as it is in Rwanda.Street food, illegal in Rwanda, is everywhere. You can even buy a potato omelet and have it bagged with a toothpick to eat it on the road.  And you might as well get a couple because it's going to be a long ride.

The bus ride from Kigali to Dar es Salaam is 36 hours. 36 hours of watching your feet, but mostly your stomach, swell to twice the usual size while you do nothing but sit and eat as you cross an entire country.  By the time we reached the ferry office to cross over to Zanzibar, we were sick of traveling and more than willing to pay the ridiculous $170 round trip fee to just get to the hotel waiting for us on the other side. It's a good thing we did too. Just behind us was a ferry full of people who couldn't afford the $170 on a ship unauthorized to go as far as Zanzibar and well over capacity. Somewhere halfway across the Zanzibar Channel, the people on our ferry started panicking. At first, I thought someone had fallen overboard. I turned to see a tiny, white speck in the distance and the man standing next to me mimed something breaking in two. We would soon find out that that speck was a capsized ferry and that our boat would go to rescue them only after they had taken us safely ashore. By the time all of the passengers had been rushed off the boat, military personnel had been able to board, and the ferry was able to fight the current that makes going back to the mainland take approximately twice as long, almost 200 people had drowned, unable to make it until a rescue was attempted. The Minister of Transportation resigned a week later and most of the Tanzanians we talked to on our trip seemed to believe it had something to do with lax monitoring of the ships going out from Dar es Salaam. Either way, it didn't prevent the unnecessary deaths of those too poor to pay for a nicer ferry or to go to swim lessons like so many middle-class children in the developed world. What can you do?

We arrived at Baby Bush Lodge on Kiwengwa beach with a nasty reminder of how lucky we were to be there literally ringing in our ears as we took a phone call from the Peace Corps Country Director of Tanzania called to make sure we were all accounted for. We spent a few days on the beach, not exactly sunbathing, but just enjoying and making friends with a few locals. Just down the beach, we found Obama Bar. The owner, Peter, was a Masai who had studied tourism in Italy (which coincidentally bought up most of the beach property in Zanzibar while it was still cheap) and loved Americans. We got the local price for Happy Hour and met a crew of Masai who all of whom had learned several romantic words and sayings in Italian and how to say “I love you," "yes," and "no" in English, which had apparently been enough for them up until that point.  During the day, we met merchants who, for the most part tried to charge us infinitely too much and Dida, who invited us into her home to cook for us during Ramadan (all the restaurants not connected to a hotel were closed during the day) and introduced us to her baby girl, Leila, over delicious coconut curry.

Just south of the beach was the true highlight of the trip, the Stonetown night market. The best way too describe the happiness this experience brought me is to recall a night nine months ago when I sat under the mosquito net of my bed, lifted just a few inches off the floor of my host family's home, waiting for yet another meal of rice and beans that wouldn't be ready until 10:30 pm and decided to watch Ratatouille. Five minutes into the movie, Benny starts describing seeing flavors in color and I started to cry over food. Zanzibar was just like the movie, but with all of the food right there at my fingertips. There was cane juice, pressed in a machine and mixed with ginger and lemon. There were battered potatoes in a tomato-based soup with lemon and chilli sauce. There were delicious chapattis; there was tea full of spices; there was ice-cream and brownies and milkshakes! There was the Zanzibar Pizza. The Zanzibar Pizza, by the way, is God's gift to Rwandan PCVs who make the 36 hour journey to Zanzibar. Wonton dough filled with all of the delicious savory toppings of a regular pizza and then fried to perfection, you would think that the Zanzibar Pizza could not possibly be any more amazing....until they make it with nutella.

Fully satisfied with our trip, it was time to make our way home. We spent the night in Dar es Salaam, which we discovered had a Subway in a strip mall. Foot long sandwich and milkshake successfully polished off, I headed to the grocery store and stocked up on snacks. On the island, eating in public is forbidden during Ramadan just the same as it is year round in Rwanda. However, in the rest of Tanzania, it was still perfectly acceptable and I was not going to lose any precious munching time. In fact, I polished off half of my snacks before we even boarded the bus the following morning and proceeded to buy more as soon as possible. Destination: Moshi, the base of Mount Kilimanjaro.

In Moshi, we stayed at Twiga Home, a sweet little hotel just outside of town with a free shuttle service and honestly the best customer service out of anywhere I have been since I left America. They helped to arrange a tour of some nearby rice fields, which just might have been one of the most beautiful places on Earth and a little venture to some waterfalls at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. But I'm not going to lie to you, the highlight was still the food. Twiga Home made delicious grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches that we well stocked up on, but they also introduced us to a coffee shop in town full of American food we don't get to have too often and, you guessed it, really good coffee.

As our glorious days of eating came to a close, we realized one, rather unfortunate, thing. Moshi had no bus to Rwanda. We had to go to Arusha to catch a bus, where we spent the night in the Seven Eleven Hotel literally right in front of the bus park. From here, we spent half a day traveling on bumpy roads and at high speeds to Kahama, about four hours from the Rwandan border. Our bus tickets said we were going straight to Kigali so we assumed that we would make some kind of connection here. We had not assumed that we would be making it the next day because buses refused to risk heading towards the border as evening was approaching. It was three in the afternoon when we found this out. One more night in Tanzania spent sharing what was supposed to be a room for two people between five girls at a cheap truckers' hotel later, we were on our way home.

The delay just so happened to work in my favor! I was able to spend the weekend in Kigali to take care of some last minute errands and to go to Guma Guma Superstar, a huge concert featuring Jason Derulo, who I saw play live for 5,000 Rwandan franks or $8. It's good to be back!