On Friday, one day later, we all met up again at the Chinese restaurant Great Wall to begin celebrations for Daimiun’s 19th birthday (that day) and Dave’s 30th birthday (the next day). Becca did a pro job ordering enough dishes to feed twice our 15-person group, and I busted out some highly acclaimed (if I do say so myself) banana-nut birthday cake-bread. We stayed late, and by midnight were making our way to Noelle, Lakshmi and Francesca’s apartment in Mikocheni, my and Jeanie’s old neighborhood. They managed to find an amazing furnished apartment for $1700 a month. Split between the 3 of them, this 3-bedroom, 3-bathroom apartment even had a pool in the complex. This only reinforced my and Jeanie’s exasperation with Harvard’s terrible housing “suggestions” (a.k.a. telling us to stay in 5-star hotels for $200 a night…for three months). Of course, everything worked out well in the end!
Most of the group then went to Runway, a club on top of a shopping mall right down the street, but as it was already 2 a.m. and I was leaving for Zanzibar the next morning, I taxied home to pack. As usual, I was a slow and distracted packer, so I got to bed around 5 – but still got up at 8:15 with a start. I had to be at Becca’s house by 9 to get a ride with her and Lauren to the airport – Becca was heading home and her work had called the car.
I was clearly not mentally there with my late-night packing and sleep-deprived wake-up, because five minutes away from the airport, I realized I’d forgotten my passport. Forgotten, as in, it never even crossed my mind to bring it – even though Lauren and I had been trying for weeks to figure out how to get her into Zanzibar with her passport M.I.A. at the Nigerian embassy in America. She was prepared with other forms of ID and passport photocopies. I had nothing. (Though Zanzibar is part of Tanzania, you need a passport to travel there from the mainland).
I was panicking but knew we had about an hour to spare, so I hopped out of the car, said a hurried goodbye to Becca, and got on the first piki-piki (motorcycle cab) I saw. And that was how I ended up clutching the stomach of a random man as we zoomed all the way back across the city at high speed, my flip-flop-clad feet going numb from bike vibrations and my eyes thankfully shielded behind sunglasses. My driver was one of the few piki-piki operators who actually had a helmet for their passengers, so at least I felt safer in that regard. But there was no getting around the fact that I was swerving though Dar’s always congested and dangerous traffic on the back of a motorcycle for over an hour. I alternated closing my eyes in fear and opening them in excitement once I realized that I was riding a motorcycle (and then closing them again as we made tight turn after pothole jump after grinding stop). I luckily made it home and back with just enough time to catch our flight, passport in hand (or, down shirt). I certainly had woken up.
The rest of the day went, thank God, very smoothly. Lauren and I arrived at noon, put our bags down at Warere Hotel, and met up with Joyce and her friends, also on Zanzibar for the weekend, for lunch at the waterfront restaurant Monsoon. Half the group had food poisoning, some worse than others, but we still went to our planned Spice Tour fifteen minutes out of town. For three hours, we wandered through a large wooded spice plantation, somewhat disorganized but well cared for. Our charismatic and knowledgeable guide had more than a bit of sass about him – he made fun of one of our group member’s lisps and joked about nutmeg being a date rape drug (pretty sure it actually is). We learned a lot, sampled all the spices, and even tried some new foods, including a sour relative of the starfruit and rambutan, a lychee-like fruit. We bargained for coffees, spices, and perfumes, and then Lauren and I made our own way back to Stone Town while the rest continued to Nungwi beach up north. As it’s currently Ramadan, Stone Town came alive like nothing else at night. The night market was as wonderful as last time, and after loads of baby shark, Zanzibar pizza (roti), sugarcane juice, and dates, we went back to our hotel for a long night’s sleep.
We spent Sunday morning seeing parts of Stone Town we hadn’t gotten to last time. We first looked at an art market, which had some beautiful renderings of the ornate Zanzibar doors and large canvasses filled with colorful henna patterns. We then went to the Palace Museum, where we got a thorough tour of the historic home and ruling place of the sultans of Zanzibar, all the way back to the first Omani colonizers. The palace was vast and ornate, and we learned a lot about how influential the former self-governing Zanzibar was. We also wanted to check out the House of Wonders/National Museum, but it was closed for repairs, so we contented ourselves with a spendthrift walk down one of the tourist alleyways.
I’ll put up my last Crimson postcard before bidding the Tanzania tab of this blog kwaheri. Unlike when I left Kenya, I don’t have any big trips on the horizon. Wupdates is going into hibernation for a bit, but we’ll be back, whether in six months, a year, two years, or whenever my next adventure begins. Thanks, as always, for reading along! For those wondering what wisdom I’ve gained abroad, I can say only this: you can never have too many wet wipes or too much Dr. Bronner’s soap.