Zanzibar: A month in paradise

Mambo boys and girls!

After countless (or, more precisely, three) requests, I have succumbed and decided to start a blog to keep everybody back home informed of my travels. I'll add some photos as well, to give you a feel for the sights I've seen. Hopefully it won't make you too jealous! As the title says, Zanzibar is a little piece of paradise, with glorious weather, incredibly friendly people and beautiful beaches and scenery. If you are interested, you can sign up for e-mail alerts when new posts are added to the blog, as I doubt that I will be posting very regularly (especially during my stay here).

The early days 

The four flights needed to get to Zanzibar passed by without any real incident, although the excess luggage is something I will have to think about before the return trip (diving gear is quite heavy, especially with all the training books) as I don't want to get stung again. For the first week of my stay on the island, I was based in the Princess Salme B&B, near the ferry dock. The B&B was fairly basic, but it was clean and had air-conditioning and free wifi, so was a good base. At $40 a night, though, it would have been an expensive place to stay for my entire stay, even with breakfast included.

Fortunately, my dive master course includes free accommodation, so at the end of the first week I moved in with Rich, the dive instructor, and Esther, one of the other dive master trainees at the dive school. It costs 40,000 Tanzanian Shillings a month (about £16) for electricity and a cleaner twice a week who does all the laundry too - almost as good as my Mum's rates! The house doesn't have wifi or air conditioning, but there are fans in each room and hot water in the shower (thanks to Ruben the fundi) and is ideal for my stay here. The view from the terrace isn't shabby either.

The view from home

As well as Rich and Esther (who returned to Spain early in September), the house comes with two cats - Scruff and Kathoey. Luckily, they are both tomcats, so we won't end up with a house full of kittens. Getting cat food for the two can be a bit of a problem at times. During the four day festival at the start of September, our local "cash and carry" (you won't believe how much of a stretch of the imagination that name is!) was closed for the duration, so the cats were living on a diet of rice and bread for a while. I eventually gave in and gave them my prized tin of corned beef - I knew I had a soft spot for cats, but I didn't realise just how much!

I have also realised just how much I hate mosquitos. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite feelings for me and my arms and legs seem to be the new place to be seen around town for them. For the first few days, I was being bitten ten or twenty times a night and some of the bites turned into pretty unsightly red blotches. I think I am still being bitten as much, especially if I forget to put on the insect repellent, but my body seems to be better at fighting them, so they are now just a bit irritating. I soon stopped taking the anti-malarial tablets (like most people here, as malaria is rare on the island), although I will start again when I need to go to the mainland.

The house I share with Rich and Esther is about a 5-minute taxi ride from town, but whenever the dala-dalas are running, I tend to use these. They are like a shared taxi, using small mini-buses or pick-up trucks to take as many people as they can possibly carry. Sometimes they are very overcrowded, but they are extremely convenient and for 300 shillings (about 12p) will take you anywhere in Stone Town. They do have a destination on the front, but they all head to the same place (coming into town) and if you just ask for a specific place, they change their route to drop you off. They stop running in the evening, so I need to get a taxi home and the taxi drivers already know who I am - it is nice to get into a taxi and just say "home, please"!

Stone Town

When I arrived in Zanzibar, the island was in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan (95% of Zanzibaris are muslim), so Stone Town wasn't its usual vibrant self and the evenings were quite quiet. Ramadan must be very difficult for those observing it - not being able to eat or drink (even water) or smoke from sunrise to sunset. The lack of energy that this results in means that "pole, pole" (Swahili for "slowly, slowly") becomes even more of an accurate description for life here. On top of the fasting during the day, live music is also banned and several restaurants simply close down for the month. For a religion which is as deity-focussed as Islam, it seems rather pagan-like to wait for the sight of the moon before the end of Ramadan is declared. But, once Ramadan ends, the locals really let their hair down and the four day Eid festival is a sight to behold. The roads are closed as everybody gets together with their families in one of the squares or fields around town. All the young girls get four new party frocks (probably the only time of year when they do) and everybody is dressed up to the nines.  Forodhani (the sea-front market) becomes a swarming mass of people and food stalls and the sights, sounds and smells of the evenings are something to experience.

Despite the general lack of nightlife during Ramadan, within a couple of weeks I had membership at the local bars like Tatu and Livingstones and was a regular visitor at a few others like the Dhow Palace, Africa House and Al Johari. Most of the bars have free wifi and at just over a £1 a drink in most places, it is easy to head to a bar after work and then stay out for the night. There is something about the climate here that means you can drink all night without really getting drunk and, better still, have no hangover in the morning, so I think it only right and proper that I take advantage of this!

Stone Town itself is small and I quickly knew my way around. The exception is the labyrinth of streets between the coast and Darajani (the main market in town). I always thought I had a half decent sense of direction, but I'm not convinced that the usual laws of geometry work here. In this non-Euclidean maze, it seemed that the most effective means of navigation was to pick the direction you thought you wanted to go and then head the opposite way. It worked nine times out of ten! However, within a couple of weeks I knew a few of the main routes through the streets and, although I can still get lost down some of the smaller alleys, I can pretty much get around easily.

There are some beautiful buildings dotted around the town - the old fort, the House of Wonders, the cathedral, the mosques - and I still need to spend a day wandering around to take some photos. The majority of other buildings are in need of some repair. The coral stone (which most of the buildings are made from) is exposed in quite a few buildings and the outside walls are covered in a black mould. The doors, though, are very impressive and it is easy to see why they are such a famous feature of the town. Intricate carvings and arabic inscriptions decorate many doors - a legacy of the Omani and Persian links of the past - and I'm sure I will bore some of you with photos of these when I am back home!

At the start of September, there was a three day Jazz festival in town. After a few weeks of quiet night life, Eid and the jazz festival really livened the place up. I got to know one of the main organisers and I knew the manager at the bar where some of the gigs were played, and it was good fun; especially the after show parties, which went on until 4.00 or 5.00 in the morning (my memory is a bit hazy on some of this!).

Away from Stone Town

I have not spent much time exploring the rest of the island yet. In fact, I've only been out of Stone Town twice: once to Kendwa in the north with a friend I met diving and once to Matemwe on the east coast with Esther.

Kendwa (and nearby Nungwi) have idyllic beaches and Nungwi is the place where they make the traditional dhows, which can be seen carrying fishermen to sea day and night. Kendwa is, though, a bit of a party town and even in one day, some of the tourists there pissed me off (I still can't believe there was a girl sunbathing topless in the middle of Ramadan). I almost decided to do my dive master training in Nungwi, but I'm glad I stayed in Stone Town - three months on a beach may sound ideal, but I think I would have been bored before very long.

The trip to Matemwe was a diving trip, taking the opportunity to dive at the Mnemba Atoll (where I visited before, about six years ago). The diving here is different to Stone Town - with less coral, but more large fish - but I enjoyed the two dives there and saw some interesting marine life. The middle of the island is very flat and green, with villages dotted along the main road. The driving here is a bit crazy, not quite as bad as India, but it is understandable that the most important thing that they check in an MOT is that the horn works!

The people

Before I came, I wondered how difficult it would be for me to meet new people at the start of the trip, but virtually everybody in Princess Salme was travelling around Africa solo and so I was able to go out for dinner with a few people.

I also get to meet travellers and tourists on the dive boat and I've spent some time out drinking with these. Some, like Tom, are probably going to be in the same places as me during the rest of six months travelling, so hopefully we will get to meet up again. Dorothée, the girl I went to see Kendwa with, Jessica and Kim were only in Zanzibar for a few days or a couple of weeks, but it's nice to meet people from all over the world and everybody you meet has some kind of interesting story to tell. 

There is also a good, but small, expatriate community from all corners of the globe (British, Irish, Aussies, Finns, Germans, Belgians, Kiwis, Dutch, South Africans, Kenyans, Americans and Swiss, so far!). They will be staying here for varying periods, some for a few months and others are long term residents, and have been a great source of help for learning the local ways (and, importantly, ways around all the every day problems that you face here). Some work in the tourism industry (as bar managers or managing tour operators), others are working as volunteers or in NGOs, some are working on environmental projects and some are working on secondments in the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar - such a great name for a government. They have all been welcoming and although the group is quite small, there is always somebody around to meet in the evenings. Because of its size, it has been easy to get to know everybody and I've made some good friends, and I already feel part of this group.

As I said before, the locals are very friendly. Most of the people at the dive school are from here or nearby Pemba and they are helping me get to grips with some basic swahili. One guy, Abdul, was the dive master when Clare and I dived in Zanzibar six years ago and it was good to see him again. The beach boys and touts around town quickly recognise who is a tourist passing through (and so will be hassled to buy CDs or other stuff) and who is going to be around for a while (and so are left hassle-free). They do, though, still want to talk and I've had some good conversations with them learning about their lives here (and one, Fahim, is even my main source of news of world events when the internet is down!)

Underwater adventures

As for the diving, the main purpose of this part of the trip, it is all going well. I finished my Rescue Diver course in the first week. There were another two dive master trainees, Ruben and Esther, who were nearing the end of their course when I arrived and they helped show me the ropes. I'm now half way through the dive master course, most of the skills and knowledge reviews have been fine (I did, though, drink half the swimming pool when demonstrating the equipment exchange - swapping all your diving gear with another diver while underwater and sharing one regulator - the hardest part of the course so far).

The undoubted highlights of the dives have been seeing dolphins underwater and passing an enormous green sea turtle about two meters away. At Stone Town, there is also a great variety of reef fish and I love all the small invertebrates, like nudibranchs and sea slugs, and crustaceans.

If you're still reading, congratulations for making it this far! Pictures are a far better way of describing the amazing things I have seen so, as your reward, here are some of my best photos from the dive sites around Zanzibar.

If you want to see more, I have a website: http://zanzibardiving.shutterfly.com/ which contains the best of the rest (some of you may have already seen a few of these on Facebook).

That's it for now. Until next time, lala salama.

The Zanzibar Ferry Disaster: A Mzungu View

On Wednesday evening, I sat in the waterfront bar across the road from the dive shop having a cold beer watching the sun set over the Zanzibar Channel. A couple of ferries were moored on the beach by the palm trees. A dhow slowly sailed by taking fishermen out for the night shift. The nearest ferry was named the Spice Islander, such a romantic name with links to an exotic past, and the scene was near picture-postcard perfect. Two days later, the Spice Islander sank between Unjuga and Pemba, taking the lives of hundreds - mainly women and children. 

I don't know the details of what led to the disaster; I'm not sure that anybody knows the full story. The following summary has been pieced together from various internet and newspaper reports and word-of-mouth tales. The ferry left Dar Es Salaam, already overloaded. At Stone Town, more passengers and cargo were loaded and the ferry set sail for Pemba late on Friday evening. At about 1.00 in the morning, in strong currents with a failing engine, the ferry started to take in water, keeled over and started to sink about half way between Unjuga and Pemba - 20km from either shore. Some of those who could escape managed to cling to whatever was floating. The 200 life jackets were hopelessly inadequate, so foam mattresses were turned into impromptu rafts and refrigerators converted into makeshift canoes. Hundreds of people drifted in the dark, waiting to be rescued. Many others either could not escape the ferry or were left at the mercy of the ocean. 

The figures make for some horrific reading:

Number of passengers the ferry was authorised to carry: nil; 

Number of people on the “official” passenger list: 500; 

Number of people actually on board: unknown, but it is likely to be more than 1,000. 

The initial reports stated that there were 610 people on board. There is, though, deep mistrust of official bodies and nobody believed that this was the true figure. The latest official death toll now stands at 197, with 619 rescued. At 200 meters (the depth of the ocean where the ferry sank), there will be no survivors inside the ferry and I do not envy the South African divers whose job it will be to recover the bodies. There are reports of some survivors reaching Pemba on the strong currents. Bodies, bloated and probably half eaten by fish and crabs, will be washed up on the coast of the mainland and islands for months to come and reports have already started to come in of bodies being washed up in Mombassa. The government is likely to want to keep the numbers and stories under wraps - nothing spoils the images of pristine white beaches, and the tourism that they bring, like a corpse or two being washed ashore.  The final official figures will be the sum of the bodies, the survivors and, possibly, those reported missing but not found. The true number of those drowned will never be known. 

How was this allowed to happen? In truth, it was an accident waiting to happen. Every day at the beach by the dive shop, lines of up to five ferries are regularly stationed, with everything you can possibly imagine being loaded on board. There are no port duties here and the loading of the ferries is organised chaos, only without the organisation. There are reports that the boat owners had bribed the authorities three million shillings (around £1,200) to pass a safety test on the failing engine. The accident happened at the end of the Eid festival and many of those on board were children returning to Pemba following the festival to go back to school on Monday. The cargo ferries are the cheapest way of travelling between the islands and bribing crew members to gain passage is commonplace.

These are not isolated incidents and similar, though more fortunate, journeys will not have been uncommon. In this case, at the port in Stone Town, people were trying to get off the boat as it listed in the port, but the crew pulled up the ladder and set sail. As anybody who has travelled on a dala-dala will know, if Zanzibaris think that it is too crowded, then you can only imagine how dangerous it was and it seems to have been a distinct failing of the captain and port authorities to let the ferry start its trip.

I have only been on these islands for a short time, but the population is so small that everybody knows somebody who has been affected. I have friends that helped with the rescue efforts in Nungwi – the dive boats based there were some of the first on the scene and saved hundreds of lives. Others have been helping co-ordinate the disaster response and identification points in Stone Town. Friends at the dive school had family on the ferry. One had a younger brother who was among the survivors; his cousin wasn't so lucky. Another had several family members aboard and although he was working the day after the accident, he planned to head to Nungwi in search of news. One of the beach boys I know had neighbours and family on board - his family survived; his neighbours didn't. People are expecting bodies now, rather than survivors. In fact, I think people are now hoping for bodies, otherwise the remains of their friends and loved ones will remain in their watery graves.

The local TV stations (when not broadcasting Miss Tanzania, which itself shows a shocking lack of sensitivity and prioritisation from the network) provided on-the-spot reports. The reports were harrowing: close up shots of the dead, some having their eyelids closed on screen, and then a number placed over the covered body to help identification. This approach and use of the media in this way epitomises the matter-of-fact response to the disaster that is evident everywhere. Pole sana (Swahili for “I’m very sorry”) has become a staple of conversation everywhere you go. It seems so inadequate, but it is accepted as intended and everybody is responding to the tragedy with remarkable stoicism.

Many are finding comfort in their faith and, generally speaking, there has been very little anger (and fewer tears, at least in public). The Muslims take solace in that the events of the past few days are what “Allah has written”. I come from a scientific background and I don’t know how healthy such a view is, but it is clear that it helps relieve the pain of the tragedy and provides answers where there are none. However, if believing in a pre-determined future means that there is no challenge to the authorities, the ship owners, the captain and everybody who has a degree of responsibility for the disaster, then it may mean that more tragedies will happen in the future – tragedies that would be preventable if some changes take place.

The disaster has brought the community of Zanzibar even closer together. It is heart-warming to see the response of everybody pulling together, people put the collective good before individual needs. (Although, it has to be said, there are exceptions to this and tales of 

looters sailing past people stranded on mattresses to salvage anything that can be used or sold is an act of inhumanity that I still find difficult to believe.) There has been a three-day period of mourning declared on the island, after which everything will return to normal. Life goes on. My fear is that it will go on without any real change in attitude and I expect that, within a month, chaos will be the norm and ferries will continue to be overloaded with people taking advantage of the slack regulations for a cheap journey


.

“T.I.A.” is a frequent response from mzungu and expats to the challenges and problems of daily life here, from daily power cuts to bartering for everything at the markets. TIA: This is Africa. This is Africa and I hope it retains its identity without trying to mirror the (materially) wealthier continents. More often than not, western societies display a distorted sense of values and the sense of community and togetherness on view in Zanzibar (which was evident before the tragedy, but even more so now) is something that should be cherished.

TIA: where regulations are little more than guidelines to be followed if they are not too inconvenient. There is a one-way system in Stone Town, but everybody knows which of those one-way streets are used in both directions. A beep of the horn or flash of headlights is enough to tell oncoming traffic that you are coming around the blind bend. In many ways, being unshackled from the red tape and health and safety madness back home is liberating, but there are some areas which need safety to be a priority (or at least a consideration) and I hope that this tragedy instils some awareness of this. TIA: but when this means that the lives of innocents are lost, some things have to change.