If traveling through Africa was a contact sport, my travel group relay team would win. There were so many different modes of transportation all back to back to back to back that went into the epic adventure that led us to the island of Zanzibar in Tanzania The first leg of the travels meant hitch hiking as a group of 4 to a completely separate country, very unpredictable and requires us to be at the complete mercy to whoever passes by. This first stop was to Zambia. After getting a ride with a nice man from Uganda who brought us all the way to the Zambian border, we hopped on a 10 hour overnight bus, which was a piece of cake compared to the next part. This is not the opinion of the one person in our travel group responsible for demanding the bus to stop for a bathroom emergency. Next was the 48 hour train ride, where water ran out in the first 12 hours. The train compartment fit 6 people with 3 beds stacked on top of each other. It turned into a test of how comfortable you can be with your own odor and 5 other people's odor when crammed into a room right in the middle of African summer. It was a tough call, but I had to choose hydrating myself instead of proper teeth hygiene with the limited water I brought on-board (as again, the train was out of water!). I was approximately 5 hours off from putting a bag over my head out of pure disgust with myself, I will not even get into the questionable rashes all of us picked up from the train beds. After all this we arrived in Dar Se Lam, the capital of Tanzania, and paid our ferry fee for the last mode of transport before paradise. Even after living my entire life 10 minutes from the ocean, I still got sea sickness on this ferry. But it didn't matter at that point because after 6 straight days of travel, we had arrived in ZANZIBAR.
The travels were not actually all that bad, I would say 80% of it was pure adventure and fun times. Each day on the train we were woken up by little Zambian/Tanzanian kids (depending on which country we were in at that moment) saying "mango, mango, mango" through our train window and us just buying breakfast like it was a fast food take out window...from our beds. All the ridiculousness of getting lost, constantly switching and exchanging 4 different currencies (yes, 4!), being so deliriously tired that everything is hilarious and feeling like I really traveled and saw southern/central Africa made getting to Zanzibar a trip all in itself.
I have never been to a tropical destination where I can spend the afternoon buying fruity drinks on the beach while a nice woman decorates my hand with henna tattoo, and then when I feel hungry I go to a hut right up from the beach with a sign "Mama Africa" and order my food of choice, the traditional porridge of course. Our very first night in Zanzibar we ran into people who invited us out on their boat and we were like..."um...let me think about that...OK YES". All of a sudden we find ourselves right out in the Indian ocean, far off the shore where a small boat brought us to a bigger boat where clearly people had been partying all afternoon. I think I caught a little glimpse of how P. Diddy lives. It was fabulous and we even were on the boat with other Peace Corps Volunteers from Zambia. We were served tasty Tanzanian beer and goat testicles, which were surprisingly phenomenal...would eat again for sure. I rang in the New Year with Peace Corps friends.
Oh, and we saw Victoria Falls in Zambia on the way! One of the 7 Wonder of the World:
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The rest of the trip was spent eating fantastic seafood, laying out by the beach, snorkeling, seeing all the sights and more or less living the complete opposite life of a Peace Corps Volunteer. This vast difference makes the return back to the village all the more difficult. I have said this and felt this way since being here, any amount more than 2 days spent outside the village makes it so hard to come back. Not because I don’t like Kayanga and the people here, but because I am only human and I prefer things like...drinking cold water, not peeing in a bucket, and blah blah blah. Also, I normally come back to situation that a Namibian would think of as normal but I initially perceive as an extreme dilemma; flooding, termites, snakes, new big holes, and blah blah blah. After getting both bombarded and blessed by too so many meme's (what we call older women in the village), formal greetings to all the elder men, and fun hugs to the little kids, I was informed that the roof to my new classroom came off in a storm. This is a..problem...but fixable, and not to sound selfish but I am glad it wasn’t my own hut. I know I would have started crying right then and there if my own hut was destroyed. I have become very attached to my hut. It's the first place I have been able to take full ownership of. The more relevant problem they informed me of pertained to my clean water source, which was no more. Borehole:broken. This means walking the extra 40 minutes walking to and from the river, and technically after lugging that water back I have to wait 2 days before I can drink it in order for the parasites to die. Slap in the face from going from luxurious private bungalow with fresh papaya and pineapple served to us every morning, to trying to avoid the schistosomiasis parasite. I am a creature of habit and got way too used to living it up with my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, who I will still be friends with when I'm 80, but now it's back to reality. It will take a couple weeks to adjust again but I got this, I am almost half done with my service and feel strong!
