Christmas in Tanzania -
Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV
I woke the next morning to the call of prayer. The call to prayer is seemingly constant, but comes only five times a day. Each mosque usually has it’s own call, however, and because they don’t all start calling at the same moment, often you’ll find some mosques which start very early, and others which are late. This morning the muezzin coughed a couple times into the microphone before he started. Breakfast was the classic East African small hotel breakfast: a slice of bread, a fried egg, and a banana, along with one glob of Blue Band margarine, and one glob of “mixed fruit” Simba jam. Most of my clothes were stank with dirt and grime, and I needed to get them washed. The hotel charged insane prices for doing laundry, so I grabbed one of the guys who worked there, and hired him to wash all my clothes for 1/10 the price.
The remainder of the day was spent wandering around Mombasa, especially the older district of town, which is a cousin city to Stone Town in Zanzibar. There were very few tourists around, and while I got lost a few times, I rather enjoyed the maze of streets which were somehow more easily managed compared to Zanzibar. I avoided everything that has an entrance cost, and everyone who called out to me, “Hey, my friend, jambo!” which usually indicates that you’re about to get hustled. As I had found in Uganda, the touts (people who solicit you to buy something or go somewhere) were in general much more relaxed. Stone Town, and Dar es Salaam are by far the worst I’ve experienced in my travels.
In the midst of my wandering I had three particular goals. One was to exchange some of my Tanzanian shillings for Kenyan. Not being in a hurry, I had time to shop around the exchange bureaus and find the best rate. The second was to purchase a bus ticket to take me back to Dar es Salaam the next day. I was on a tight schedule to get back into country, because “illegal” travel with Peace Corps(meaning traveling during times for which you haven’t been granted approval) can lead to anything between a slap on the wrist and a ticket home. I find it best policy to avoid Peace Corps admin whenever possible in the general region of official discipline.
I made friends with a group of Kenyans in a small tourist information office, and they ended up running out and doing the legwork for me without a fee. I had gone in the morning and by the afternoon, I had the ticket in hand. I was also running low on funds, and so getting the bus ticket out of the way opened up the rest of my cash for fun later that night. My third goal was to buy a Kenyan flag to stick onto my backpack, but once again, as in Uganda, I was unable to find one small enough.
Some time around mid afternoon, I realized that I didn’t really know anyone in town. That is, I didn’t know anyone who would do more than drink their tea out of small ceramic cups while sitting on the side of the road, for New Years Eve. My friends at the tourist info place recommended one of two different clubs, where there was going to be a party. One was called the Mamba(which means crocodile) and the other was called the Tembo Club(which means elephant). It seemed that both were going to have “special” guests, and that it was where everyone was going to go. Sounded good to me, and so I headed back out for one last spin around town, and then went back to the hotel. I decided I was going to give Collins a call – my drinking friend from the other night. Finding a phone to call him from turned out to be a major hassle, however.
I’m not sure if it was the time of day, or what, but there wasn’t an open duka anywhere from which I could use a phone. I finally found one place that was just closing, and the woman who worked there told me if I waited for her, she could help me. I waited outside the shop as she closed up, and night started to creep through the streets. She said she would take me to her other shop, where I could use a phone. We chatted in Kiswahili as we walked along, and she laughed, saying that I spoke Kiswahili better than her, which then made me laugh. Once we got to her shop, the phones weren’t working. It was a small restaurant, and she decided to just gave me her phone to use, and I gave her some money to pay for the credit. Collins was hard to understand on the phone, but I gathered quickly enough that he was trying to say he would call me back. After hanging up, I had a bad feeling, knowing that “call you later” with an East African could mean several hours of waiting. I gave it 40 minutes, sipping on some juice that I had been offered, and then called him again. I told him I would go to Baron’s bar, where we met, at 8 pm, and that we could meet there. He said ok and hung up. I thanked the woman and she wished me a happy journey.
Heading back to the hotel, I found all my clothes clean and dry, which at that moment made me giddily happy. I had some time to kill before going to the bar, where I planned to eat, and so did some writing in my journal and glanced over some flashcards I had made to study vocabulary for the GRE. Finally, having grown tired of waiting, I headed for the bar, which was already full of people. Collins wasn’t there, and I pulled up a chair at a table facing the front door so I wouldn’t miss him if he came in. Time passed, and eventually I ordered a beer, tired of waiting. With that beer out of the way, and Collins still not visible, I ordered another together with a vegetable pizza. The pizza was good, but was no Chicago-style deep dish, which was what I kept trying to imagine it as. I was despairing that Collins wouldn’t come. If he didn’t show, I was going to have find my own way around, which wasn’t a problem, but wasn’t what I preferred. I decided to give him one last chance, so I ordered a final beer. It was nearly 10 at this point. He finally rolled in with one mouthful of brew left in the bottle, and I greeted him with a huge, grateful smile. He said sorry for being late, and I waved it off with a no problem(he was now over 2 hours late). We chatted for a while, then headed out to meet up with his girlfriend, who was getting ready in her hotel room.
The hotel was fairly sleazy, and something about the dark stairway that led up to the rooms and the roof made it especially daunting. She came to the door in a towel, and once she saw me, quickly disappeared again behind the door, except for the top of her head and her eyes. I said hello awkwardly, set off-kilter by her embarrassment, and stood a bit more to the side of the doorway. Collins slipped inside and after a few moments of quiet discussion behind the door, came back out and said we could go upstairs while we waited for her.
The roof was more a jungle than a rooftop. At some point the owners had decided that the roof would be a good place to experience the wildness of Kenya, and so stuck up a plethora of green growing things and strings of small tacky plastic lanterns. The half-liter beers were starting to get to me, and my first stop was the restroom to admire the phone numbers above the urinal. Coming back to the bar, I found that Collins had ordered two more beers, and we sat down for a quick chat. As with all new friendships, there was plenty to talk about, but the pool table standing in the middle of the bar provided a nice matrix for conversation. As we chatted about everything and nothing interchangeably, I was getting whooped pretty bad. After he had finished me off, he went down to supervise the preparations of his girlfriend.
I pulled up to the bar and said hello to Abas and his girl who were sitting there, the only other people in the place. The bar had a roof on it, but was supported only on poles, and a metal grating covered the spaces in between. I sipped on my beer and looked out over the Mombasa skyline – passing the time – until Abas asked me to a game of pool. I told him that we’d play normal Swahili style, that is, loser pays. He agreed, but had to bum the cash off of his “lady”. She wasn’t happy about the arrangement and shook her finger at him telling him that he better not lose her money. At first I thought it would be a game, but overestimated my ability to focus clearly, and ended up being beaten, much to the clappy-cheering of the lady-friend, the smug smirking of the pimp (Abas gave himself away by motioning suggestively at the girl, and by wearing a ridiculous outfit, complete with hat), and my head-scratching. I wasn’t sure where Collins was – it was 11:45 – and in the grand scheme of things, I didn’t much care. Being here with Abas was entertainment enough: he and his lady were the only ones here, and here I was together with them. We started up another game, and about halfway through it, things started exploding. For some reason, I had assumed that fireworks were illegal here, and so jumped at the first few, but apparently they weren’t, and they were being launched not far from the hotel. I was dazzled. Abas reached a hand over the table, holding it midair for me to take, saying “Hey, happy new year brutha.” I checked my watch; it was 12:01. I laughed, slapped his hand, and promptly lost the game.
Collins finally showed up with his girlfriend and we grabbed a dala out to the Tembo club. We passed by a few packed joints on the way out there, and each time I saw a huge crowd of people, I expected Collins to shuffle me out, but each time we kept on our way. Finally we got out at a place that at first glance appeared to be a water park; it was huge and had large spiraling structures. The outside looked dark and dead; there was no line. We paid the big man out front and descended down some sort of tunnel, which lead only to loud pounding music as far as I could tell. Once we made it down into the disco, I could see that the place was packed. There was a large lowered dance floor to the right, a bunch of billiard tables to the left where people were leaning against everything and anything, and a bar just in front that curved around behind the dance floor. We made a circle of the place at first, checking out all the sites and locations, then settled down by the billiards with a drink. Collin’s girlfriend turned out to be concerned with only one thing the whole night: looking good. She walked out with us at first when we decided to dance, but soon disappeared back where she could be more composed.
Collins and I danced for a while, in typical guys-dancing-together fashion, which basically involves minimal eye-contact, and plenty of space in between. This doesn’t always works with East Africans, however, because often they’re accustomed to same-sex dancing. I had never seen so many men grinding on so many other men before I came here. This is one cultural experience which I have yet to entertain, and don’t see any need to hasten it. I maintained the space. Eventually Collins wandered off to find his girlfriend – so I assumed – and left me to the dance-floor vultures. The place was thick with prostitutes, but that’s fairly common in those sorts of places. As long as I didn’t find hands in the wrong places, it was all good in my book. I made my way around the place dodging hands reaching for butt cheeks while shaking them with all the skill I could muster.
I broke up the rounds on the sweaty-stinky dance floor by playing pool. I maintained my losing streak with style, and at one point decided I wasn’t playing the game again. At that same moment I found a foosball table that had somehow passed my vision until now. Some South African had apparently been humiliating all his friends and was gloating over them when I came up, fingered the handles, and wondered if he might like to play a game? Guy time officially started. It turned into a battle perhaps never seen before in the Tembo Club. The games and drinks kept coming, and it’s not easy to say whether I out-drank him or out-played him, but by the end I came out on top and smiled sweetly, offering him a “good-game” and a handshake.
A Kenyan musician by the name of Nameless was the star for the night, and burst onto the dance floor after a few hours, to the screams and shouts of everyone there. He and his two dancing supporters put on what turned out to be a great show, and I even liked the music. He played a type of music called bongo-flava, which I don’t typically like, but that night it was right on. Most everyone went nuts and his thrown sweat towel caused not a few minor cuts and bruises amongst those who scrambled after it. The whole of the night in the club seemed to culminate with his performance, and after it was all over, people seemed a little less into the dancing and a little more into the going home thing. I made another circuit of the dance floor and then found Collins and his pristine girlfriend waiting by the pool tables. They were ready to go. We hopped on a dala headed to town, and basked in the buzzing blue neon glow especially lit up around the ceiling on the inside until getting out in downtown Mombasa. We exchanged email addresses, but later I couldn’t find the paper I had written it down on. We said goodbye and that we’d see each other around sometime. I invited them to Zanzibar and they invited me to Nairobi. Considering all the waiting to meet up in the first place, the departure was finished in a moment. I went back to the hotel ruing the fact that I had to get up in a few hours to catch my bus to Dar.
I got to the bus on time, which translates as ridiculously early in Kenyan. Hours later we started to head out of Mombasa on a ferry, which carried the bus across to the mainland. You can’t travel East African in a bus, however, without some sort of trouble. Our trouble started the moment we were on the mainland. The bus pulled into a station and waited. No one said anything – we just stopped moving. It turned out that this particular bus didn’t have the speed regulator, which had just become a part of Kenyan law that very day. It was a device that was supposed to keep the bus from going over a certain speed. Since the bus had none, and had to pass by police checkpoints, they said we weren’t going anywhere. It was just my luck and I decided to deal with it by going outside (the bus was sweltering), leaning against the trunk of a tree, and trying to sleep. I don’t know what deal they struck, but after a few hours of assuming I was stuck in Kenya for a while, they rushed everyone onboard and off we went. We were headed to Dar via Tanga, and for the first part of the trip, I was completely comatose. That is, until we hit the dirt road. Little did I know that many hailed this stretch of road as the worst in Tanzania.
The road had never been paved, and had been only slightly tended to in its lifetime. The bus flew down it at white-knuckle speeds and came amazingly close to passing petroleum tankers heading the opposite way. The bus shook so bad I couldn’t hear the guy who kept talking to me in the seat next to mine. I was annoyed by him – interrupting my attempts at sleep – and he was trying to be way too cool by using what he thought was American slang. My left armrest came off in all the shaking and slid down the aisle. Eventually the shaking was so bad I had to hold myself up off the seat because it hurt my butt and other various body parts below. The teeth in my head literally started to hurt, and all the expressions I’d heard my whole life and thought were simple hyperbole became real and painful.
At the border we all had to get out and walk across the checkpoint while the bus was inspected. It was in the middle of nowhere, and there was nothing but dusty plain everywhere else, besides the few ramshackle buildings that made up the crossing. I found a bottle of water and a patch of shade to keep me company while I waited for the bus to jiggle by. While I sat there I heard a loud psssting sound, which is a the common way of calling someone here (nobody yells “hey” to get someone else’s attention, it’s always either psssting or smooching sounds made with the lips). I ignored it at first, assuming it was someone who just wanted to yell “jambo!” at me, but they were persistent and eventually I turned around to see who it was. It was my “cool” bus buddy, and he was calling me over to sit with him and some other people. They were all young, about my age, and grudgingly I went over. They chatted with me for a while, trying to use as much slang as possible to impress me, and I zoned out, watching people wander around. A policeman walked through the small maze of houses behind us, and blue plastic bags rambled down the road aimlessly. They didn’t know I spoke Kiswahili, and switched languages so that they could talk about me. I stayed quiet and tried to keep my head from trying to disconnect from the rest of my body, which it was working hard at doing.
They were apparently doing a drug run: buying weed in Tanzania and taking it back to Kenya. I thought that they would keep it quiet, thinking I didn’t understand, but then they tried to sell me some. I sort of laughed, remembered the cop who I just saw walk by, and said that I was going to check on the bus. I was dead beat because of the night before and I didn’t have the energy even to fool on these chumps for being so stupid. I found my patch of shade still unoccupied and soon the bus was ready to go. Lunch had been included in my ticket in Tanga, and since we had found a decent road I didn’t last long with my eyes open, and almost missed it. Some girl got on somewhere after the border and for whatever reason had decided that the best place to sit was on the lap of the Mr. Cool pothead, next to me. He kept trying to whisper sweet nothings in her ear, and she kept playing along by giggling and squirming. He decided to do me a big favor and moved to the back, leaving her with me, giving me a thumbs up and pointing towards her. He found infinite reasons for moving back and forth, asking me how things were going each time. He annoyed me. I just wanted to sleep. Eventually he came and took her to the back with him where they stayed for he rest of the time. I slept until Dar.
We arrived in Dar at night, and I slipped easily into a dala heading for town. Of course it was a dala that wasn’t actually going all the way into town(though it was marked as one that would) and so let me out early, after having taken my money. I told them a few new English phrases that I thought they should know, and waited for another. Eventually I made it and got a room at the Safari Inn, which is where most volunteers stay when passing through. The next day I went to Peace Corps main office to use the computer before the ferry back to Zanzibar. I entered in the wrong password for the computers(it had been changed) and promptly locked myself out of the system for the rest of the day. While I was sitting there spinning around in the swivel chairs, the Country Director came in. She asked me how my trip was – I said it was fine. She then told me that they had been looking for me. She told me that my father had contacted Washington after he hadn’t heard from me for a week, and that they had called her, setting them in motion to track me down. I hadn’t stayed at the hotel I had thought I would stay at in Uganda, but when they checked the places the other volunteers had been, they found my name. I had no cellular service in Uganda or Kenya, and so had been out of reach the whole time. I apologized to her, telling her that my father was a little jumpy. She laughed and said it wasn’t too big of a problem, she was just glad I was ok. I laughed too; I was glad I wasn’t in trouble because my plans had been different that what I had told them.
Considering everything, I would have expected the ferry to sink. It didn’t, however, and at the port on Zanzibar, I wasn’t even annoyed by the taxi drivers. They all seemed kind and just said hello instead of chasing me to get into their cabs. I got on a dala to my house easily enough and everyone seemed happy to see me as if they were expecting my return and were pleased to have that expectation fulfilled. My grumpy neighbor was still grumpy when I greeted her, and with some amount of certainty, I believed everything would probably be ok after all.