Languid Beach Days

April 26, Thursday. We headed north to Nungwi and the white sand clear blue cliche that so many people flock here for. Really, there’s not much to say that’s not already revealed on postcards of every beach paradise destination in the world. What I can say is that I’ve needed a vacation like this for a long time. No more backpacking across a country with clown-caliber infrastructure and crap buses while people constantly try to steal your stuff and rip you off, in the name of feeling like a hard-core independent traveler. That’s been everyday life for almost two years now, and I’ve stopped trying to be a hero because after awhile, being a hero starts to feel a lot like suffering.

For the next few days I did nothing productive and was harassed almost zero times, except for when Brady harassed me because I went back to our bungalow and took a nap after breakfast. Oh, wait. He didn’t do that, because he was taking a nap on the beach. WE ARE SO LAZY AND PROUD OF IT!!

The beaches are distinctly, if not lawfully, segregated on this part of the island. They’re the one part of Zanzibar that a mzungu can go and never really interact with locals beyond hotel staff and tour operators. Clean, silky white beaches are reserved for wazungu and anyone else who looks like they can afford to stay in one of the airy bungalows on stilts overlooking the ocean. Dirty beaches are open to anyone, meaning Zanzibaris, who don’t mind trudging barefoot through rotting seaweed and large carpets of crushed seashells cutting your feet and black, possibly-once-alive-goo and discarded timber from dhow builders and dead fish and rusty nails and glass bottles and impromptu choos created by kids.

April 27, Friday. Brady and I decided to take a break from napping and drinking cocktails, and managed to get ourselves onto a boat to go snorkeling off the coast of the neighboring island of Mnemba. On our tour was a group of animated Mennonite missionaries from the U.S. and a British couple whom we would continue to run into as we (and they) made our way around the island.

I wouldn’t rank the reef here among the world’s best, but if you can appreciate coral reef ecosystems for what they are instead of for how they don’t live up to the Great Barrier Reef, then it’s still an underwater wonderland with at least a hundred species of fish and other sea creatures, including the school of tiny stinging jellyfish and that inexplicably makes you realize that yesterday’s dinner is knocking to go out.

“Excuse me,” I yelled to our boat captain while I treaded water and let jellyfish feed on me. “I need to help myself.”

“Big or small?”

“Um, big.” I was speaking Swahili so the other tourists wouldn’t know that I had to poo. “Can you take me up to the beach?”

[Laughter.] “It’s a private beach, you can’t go there. Just wait.”

“Until when? I can’t wait.”

[More laughter and no sympathy.]

April 28, Saturday. We spent a day wandering through some of the villages around Nungwi, collecting shells on the beach, and following the sound of drums and boys reciting Islamic prayers. Late in the afternoon we found ourselves at an aquarium next to Mnarani Lighthouse, just east of Nungwi. The aquarium is actually a sea turtle conservation project. It’s small; just a man-made pond fed by the tide, where sea turtles are bred and raised until they’re old enough to be released. The babies are kept in plastic basins labeled with the batch’s date of birth, and there is a row of basins and small pools with young turtles of varying ages, from a few weeks old to three or four years. The pond is home to at least 20 adult turtles as well as several species of excitable fish. Included in the ticket price is as much fresh seaweed as you want, which you can feed to the turtles as you sit in a small alcove where they like to gather.

Adult sea turtles are rather large, with shells as big as 3 feet long. Brady has this ability to find wonder and beauty in things that would begin to bore people (well, me) after a short time, so he was totally geeking out on the turtles, repeatedly circling the pond with his camera, mesmerized by their deliberate, unruffled industriousness.

In contrast, this one here (me) decided that it would be entertaining to try to touch one in the eyeball. Needless to say, don’t try to poke a sea turtle in the eye. They may not move very fast and it may not hurt, but they’ll still snap at you with their toothless mouths, and for some reason this act of aggression makes you feel like a bigger jackass than, say, having to make the following phone call:

“Hi, Medical? Can you get rabies from a sea turtle?”

April 29, today. Well, three days of white sand laziness was enough for us. Brady wanted to see some monkeys on his last day of vacation, so we headed to Jozani Rainforest, home of the rare red colobus monkey. Rare indeed, but not shy. One minute into our hike, a troupe migrated right in front of us, leaping on low branches from tree to tree. It was pretty clear that they weren’t actually migrating, they were just checking us out, hoping to have their pictures taken. Our guide said that during the week when there are fewer tourists, the monkeys even make their way into the forest service offices, looking for company.

Our guide also took us into a mangrove forest at low tide, which is much less impressive and much more smelly than at high tide. There was a crumbling, half-renovated boardwalk winding through dark, stinky stands of red and black mangroves and their ground-dwelling crab and spider companions. I’m going to be one of those annoying comparative tourists now, and say that Jozani Forest is not the place to see a really cool mangrove forest if you’re a mangrove layperson. Try Bako National Park in Sarawak, Borneo.

What did impress us, though, was our guide’s ability to engage us in a lively conversation about witchcraft and other black magic practiced by local tribes, and then as soon as we started asking too many questions, becoming silent and ushering us quickly out of the forest. Was it for our own good? Was it to cover his own arse? This island has been plundered and exploited by foreigners for centuries now, but some mysteries will always remain deep in the African rainforest, carefully guarded against the prying eyes and moral judgments of outsiders.

(Photos by Brady Zieman, except for red colobus)