(Typical day, playing cards here..)
Disappointing bribery. While I suspect it has happened in other vehicles, Zanzibar was the first place I saw first hand the bribes demanded by local cops. It is very disheartening. The fact that it is done right in front of us, when we could work for the State department or something, and that it was done for very little money (as little as $0.30) indicates that they do it all the time and that they have no fear whatsoever of getting caught. Because there is no one to catch them, their bosses must do it on an even greater level.
Amazing Indian Ocean tide. The Indian Ocean is not only turquoise and a very comfortable temperature, in certain areas, like Jiambiani on the southeast coast of Zanzibar island, the beach is so shallow that low tide means boats sitting in dry sand because the water receded maybe three football fields away.. And when the tide comes in 6 hours later, the water gushes back to shore.. It is such an interesting sight, we set up our camera and took interval photos to mark the changes between tides.. Here is a photo at low tide and one at high tide, about 5 hours apart..
Ridiculous prices. For our nice, honeymoon feeling, we stayed in a resort called Blue Bay in Kiwengwa, along the east coast where there are a string of Italian-owned places. Our place was like the price of most places, $190 per night which included breakfast and dinner, but not lunch or drinks. Expensive, we thought.. Boy was it, the first night we saw that the beers, which were about 2/3 the size of regular bottles we had seen elsewhere, were 7,000 Tanzanian shillings - the price on the bottle cap is 1400 shillings.. we were outraged! So the next day, we excited the resort, which is kind of weird for guests to do on foot, there are two gates to go through and about 200 yards to walk to get to the main road, and sought out some cheap beer. We quickly came upon a bar where the resort-workers hang out - well, at least where the non-Muslims hung out. We came back to this bar several times, buying a couple of bottles of beers and promising to return the next day with the bottles (in many non-America places, the establishment returns the bottles to the manufacturer who reuses the glass bottles). We then went to dinner each night in our nice resort with a backpack full of beer and a leatherman to open the beer... Take that, over charging Italians!
The Maasai. The Maasai are a large tribe of herders in northern Tanzania and Kenya. They wear bright colored robes and historically (reportedly) were very fierce warriors who fought off other tribes and colonialists to maintain (a dwindling amount of their) grazing land for their cows and goats. We saw them from afar in Ngorogoro Crater, typically one or two men walking in their robes, with a stick, surrounded by a herd, they looked very.. other, is the only way to put it.. With their distinctive robes, piercings, and traditional dances, they are a favorite among the tourists... We began to notice that the Tanzanians and Zanzabarians refer to them as "the Maasai" or "a Maasai" as in, We brought a Maasai to watch our land rover.
At the resorts in Kiwengwa, they have a Maasai who stood at the spot that the resort intersected the public beach as security - he would walk slowly towards the trinket-selling person who was too aggressive with the tourists and the salesman would scurry away.. My impression of The Maasai changed when we hung out at the bar with our cheap beer - there we encountered many Maasai men, they were imported from 10 hours away (Arusha) to work security at the resorts.. They asked us about America, how much things cost there, why no Americans like football, what Americans thought when the embassy was bombed in Dar Es Salaam, etc. They had their cell phones inside their robes and one was in school (in the resort, low season) for computer programming..
No comments:
Post a Comment