We spent three days there exploring the city, walking on the beaches where the dhows (old-style wooden boats) are docked, shopping for pretty fabrics and art, and even taking a boat ride to a nearby island to hang out with some giant turtles.
The best and most exciting meal that we had on our three week trip was in Stone Town. We went one night to the Forandani Market which is usually set up in a garden along the water but it was closed for renovations, so instead it was a dark, hot, crowded alley filled with stall after stall selling seafood, different types of skewered meat, vegetable-filled chapattis and sugar cane juice. We found a stall selling delicious naan bread, potatoes and falafel with a spicy, lemon-y sauce. Our meal cost 1600 Tanzanian shillings, or about $1.50. We looked around for a place to sit and found two seats open at a picnic table nearby. As soon as we sat down, we were approached by an old man who informed us that our seats were reserved for tea drinkers. Not feeling like finding another place to sit in the crowded alley, we each ordered a cup of tea and were soon handed one of the most delicious drinks I have ever tasted. The old man (who told us that his name was Chai Baba or basically, “Chai-Daddy”) explained that the tea was made with Zanzibari spices including cinnamon, cardamom, lemongrass, and vanilla. It was amazing. Crammed on a bench with other tea drinkers, next to blazing barbeques in the insane Tanzanian heat (that does not get any cooler when the sun goes down), we each ordered another cup of steaming tea and drank every drop.
The next day, Sid and I took a trip out to a spice plantation where we were treated to an array of fruits and spices picked right off the trees and vines. First we sat down for a “fruit tasting” that included star fruit, papaya, pineapple, jackfruit, breadfruit, and mango. Then our very knowledgeable guide walked us through a forest and showed us how to identify different spices including several varieties of basil, cloves, cinnamon, turmeric, nutmeg, cardamom, coffee, cocoa, vanilla, ginger, and many others that I can’t remember! After an hour of crumbling leaves, cracking open pods and picking flowers, my hands smelled like a pot of some kind of exotic curry and I was starving! We were taken to a local woman’s home where we were served a lunch of spiced rice, curried potatoes and matoke (green bananas).
That afternoon we headed about an hour north to the beach, where we spent Christmas in a banda overlooking the ocean. The place where we were staying was a small resort about a 45 minute walk from the nearest town, so we mainly spent our days lounging on the beach and in the evenings, we had dinner at the hotel bar with the other guests. In addition to a very eccentric and constantly drunk British man who owned the resort, we got to know an older American couple who were working for a year in Ethiopia and a chatty and hilarious gymnast/ex-fashion designer from the UK and his very quiet French boyfriend.
After our time at the beach, we headed back to Stone Town, where we took a rocky, nauseating two hour ferry ride to Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania. We only spent one night in Dar, but from what we could tell, there was no reason to spend any more. Dar seemed to be the opposite of Nairobi, a city we have come to love in our almost 6 months in Africa. Despite its dangerous reputation, Nairobi is wonderful—it’s bustling and exciting and colorful with trees and flowers and lots of great cafes and bars and restaurants. Dar es Salaam was just gray and dull and strangely, kind of reminded me of downtown Pittsburgh…in the section without all the theaters and new restaurants…at night.
The next morning we took off on the first bus out of town. After a day of bumping across Tanzania while watching violent Bollywood movies and a Jean Claude Van Damme thriller on the static-y overhead TV (seriously—was that mullet ever in style, and do African people really enjoy Jean Claude Van Damme?) we were thrilled to arrive in Moshi, a small town at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Our feelings for Moshi were exactly the opposite of Dar es Salaam…Many towns in Africa tend to be brown, dusty places where the only color comes from the Technicolor-painted shops advertising Safaricom mobile network and Tusker beer. Aside from being lush, green and colorful, with flame trees, banana trees and bougainvillea flowering on every corner, there was the amazing mountain looming as a backdrop in the distance.
Our hotel was the perfect combination of charming and cheap, and we spent a few days sitting at the roof top bar looking at the mountain, or on the pretty little balcony outside of our room making our way through all the books we haven’t had time to read. On New Years Eve, we decided to get out and explore, so we booked a guide named Robert to take us on a hike to a waterfall at the base of the mountain.
We were really fortunate to find a guide who also happened to be from the village where we were hiking, and after lunch by the waterfall, Robert invited us to his family’s home for coffee. His family owns about 10 acres of land where they grow coffee under the shade of banana trees (it turns out that coffee prefers shade to sunlight so bananas and coffee are the perfect combination). For anyone who is a coffee-lover, this would have been a pretty amazing experience, because it was about as pure a cup of coffee as you could ever have. Robert introduced us to his grandmother, an amazing old lady who was still working on the farm and had the strength of three Americans. (The Kiswahili word for grandmother is the same word as tomato—nyanya. Not really relevant to the story…just a fun fact!) She brought out a bowl of coffee beans picked from her own farm and dried in the sun. They didn’t look much like what you find at Starbucks—light brown in color and covered with a thin outer shell. She poured the beans into a wooden bowl and spent about 5 or 10 minutes grinding them with a stick to separate the beans from the shell. Then they were poured back into a bowl and tossed into the air, where the wind picked up the shell and blew it away, leaving just the beans behind in the bowl. The beans were then roasted until they were almost black and then poured back into the wooden bowl where they were ground for another 10 minutes into an espresso-like powder. Robert scooped up the powder into a strainer and held it over our cups while we poured steaming water over it. It was a pretty amazing way to experience a cup of coffee.
The next day, we hopped another bus (no Jean Claude Van Damme this time – just bad, bad African music videos, one of which featured an African midget wearing gangster-gear and doing the booty-shake). Heading northwest toward Nairobi, the trees and flowers slowly faded into hot, dry Tanzanian desert. We drove for miles without seeing anything except dried outlines of riverbeds, dust storms and a few acacia trees growing out of the scrubby desert brush. Occasionally we would pass a herd of cattle grazing on the small patches of grass that managed to make it despite the hot sun and lack of rain. Watching over the cattle were young boys carrying sticks and dressed in purple and red patterned wraps that are the traditional dress of the Maasai people. We made it to this part of Tanzania right as the sun began to set, just as the sky was turning red.
A few weeks ago, I realized that I have gotten used to being here. I forget that I’m in Africa and I just think that this is my life. My world looks like an edition of National Geographic come to life, and yet it all just looks sort of normal to me now. But driving across the desert watching young Maasai boys herding their cattle as the desert glowed pink, I was once again amazed that I am here in Africa, seeing so much of the world in person that I had previously only been able to imagine through photographs. It's really an amazing adventure...
