Musings from Zanzibar
Personal journal and photographs, Day 1
Friday, 24/08/2018
I’ve become somewhat of an expert traveler when it comes to extremely long haul flights, jet setting to exotic locales with white sandy beaches, turquoise waters, coconut leaf hats, dirt poor residents, rusty corrugated metal rooftops, and dusty roads lined with vendors fruit to passerby. I suspect I’ll write more about the contrast of local life here, where some folks earn an average of a dollar a day versus the influx of tourism, one half self-righteous savior, the other half blight and plague.
But, anyway, I digress. One thing about being on a plane for more than 7 hours at a time is you start judging the quality of the little things. Those little things add up. Like, for example, if they give you not only a blanket and pillow but also a small kit with socks, a mini toothbrush and single service toothpaste. Before I go sounding like Tyler Durden, there’s also the matter of in-flight touch screens.
As a matter of tradition, these suck. It’s like going back in time to the early days of touchscreen technology, before iPhones and that whole revolution. Like when UPS wanted you to sign for a package with a stylus—that bad. For this trip, we took Oman Air, which meant stopping for a brief layover in Muscat before catching the connecting flight to Zanzibar, And I must say, this time I found myself not ready to completely throw the chair out in front of me in frustration.
The other thing I’d be remiss to mention is airplane food. Like Forrest Gump once philosophized about boxes of chocolate, you never know what you’re gonna get. On the first leg, I was split between seared chicken with mash(ed) potatoes served with a creamy dijon mustard sauce. There was also lamb kofta that intrigued D. before she remembered having ordered a gluten-free meal before the flight. The third choice was listed as tagliatelle with a creamy sun-dried tomato sauce. I overheard one of the flight attendants say they were out of the chicken, making my choice rather simple in the end.
When it arrived, I immediately noted the pasta was not tagliatelle as mentioned on the menu but rather tortiglione. Not that it makes much of a difference but I’m the type to notice these types of things. And what’s up with every sauce being described as creamy? Beware of creamy sauces.
Still, it wasn’t so bad. Better than the “breakfast egg omelet” that was supposed to be a chicken meal. I’m not sure why I ate it. D asked me if I was starving. I wasn’t. I guess when you spend so much money on plane tickets you want to make sure you get your money’s worth.
The flights themselves were not noteworthy. No super buff flight attendants like the Montenegro trip, no severely crying babies, etc. Just a lot of sitting, napping, and movies. Normally, I read a lot during air travel but this time felt like saving the reading experience for the beach.
We landed around 1:20 pm the following day, having departed around 10 pm from Paris. We had a bet while waiting in line for our visas if we would be controlled for the yellow fever vaccination. There was a moment of doubt on Sunday if I would be allowed to enter the country without the vaccine, so as a precautionary measure I went to the hospital on Monday to get poked in the arm. The bet was if I get controlled, I’d buy her a fresh juice. And if not? I asked. Well, nothing.
So, anyway, the control didn’t happen. We had our pictures taken, gave some fingerprints, then they printed out our visas and stuck them on fresh pages in our passports and then we were on our merry way. After exchanging 20 euros for 50,000 Tanzanian shillings, we stepped out into the equatorial sun to look for our pre-arranged taxi driver. Except we didn’t see anyone holding a sign with our names on it. I stood by the luggage while D. asked around.
Another cab driver said, “Hakuna matata,” which anyone who’s seen The Lion King knows means no worries. Indeed, after a 15 minute wait, the driver appeared, and then we spent the next hour and a half on the road to Promised Land Lodge near the southern tip of the island.
It’s very calm and quiet in these parts. The last section of the road before we arrived was some of the bumpiest I’ve ever experience. We were welcomed to the place with a glass of orange juice and the WiFi password. Good juice, terrible internet access. I don’t suspect we’ll be online much, which suits me just fine. I’m happy to be off the grid for awhile.
Dinner was nice, with a fried hot chicken salad and prawns and calamari with red curry and rice. Kilimanjaro beer served as an accompaniment. Now, rest until a new day.
For those of you wishing to join me on this journey, new entries will be published each Wednesday. As such, the next will be online on my birthday, October 3rd. Yes, there will be cat pictures—and monkeys. Thanks for stopping by.
