Day 34. Dar Reality Bike Ride

The reality here is: I am not any good at riding a bike.

Day 33, part 2, holy ****, bush plane

"I booked you a flight from Zanzi to Dar," says Greg. He gives me a time and an airline, and tells me to be prepared to throw an elbow, or step on small children, or whatever else it takes to secure the co-pilot seat. "Trust me," he says.

I get to the airport and am not exactly sure of the procedure- my boarding pass says CA DAR 14:00. My boarding pass is handwritten, on the back of a napkin. In the waiting area, nobody is calling flights, no information is posted- 10 minutes before takeoff I give in and ask. Late flight- but not very. I needn't have worried. A guy with a clipboard walks up to one of the gates and mumbles, "Dar passengers." There are two of us. We approach the plane, packed with six other people. Empty co-pilot seat. "May I sit up front?" I ask. The guy loading us raises an eyebrow and says sure, throw your bags in the back, and climb up the ladder.

I do this- and am sitting, as promised, in the co-pilot seat, controls literally between my knees. It is an antique bush plane, I swear, an actual prop plane, with old-fashioned details and a scotch-taped-on label that says, "GPS not suitable for navigation."

The teenaged Dutch pilot says, "Twenty minutes to Dar, please do not unfasten your seat belts."

As if.

We take off, shoulder first: I have never seen this manoeuver in an airplane. But then, this is no ordinary airplane. It is the approximate age, size, and condition of my parents' 1968 Volkswagon Beetle, on which I learned to drive.

It is light enough that you feel, no kidding, every puff of wind. The payoff, of course, is looking down into that spectacular blue water. Zanzibar is surrounded by shifting sandbars, and the changing depths create every shade of blue, from bright turquoise on up through cobalt. You can even see the directon of the currents, little rivers of water skimming across the Indian Ocean in fingers, since they're more reflective and shimmery than the rest.

Twice during the flight, there is a series of piercing warning beeps. I stopped breathing, particularly as there were controls between my knees. I had the worst, I mean the worst vision of a scene from "Airplane," in which the pilot keeled over and I, because I was sitting in the front, would have to land the plane, while translating radio-tower instructions in Swahili. I questioned, seriously, every single decision that had led me to this point. Turned out not to be a big deal; out of my peripheral vision (I was pretending to be a statue) I could see that the beeps didn't make my pilot flinch, so I relaxed.

To round out my day of adventuresome transport, I also got to take a tuk-tuk and a dala-dala. The tuk-tuk was on the way to a beachfront restaurant. Greg was leading the way, and Greg is tall, and fast. I'm tall, sort of, but I had to trot to keep up. Before I know it has has flagged down a tuk-tuk on the street and the three of us wedge in. It is slightly smaller than my bush plane- kind of like a moped with a shell and a bucket seat in back. "Did you see my bargaining skills?" Greg asks. "No, how'd it go?" I said. "He wanted 3 thousand," said Greg, but I got him all the way down to 3 thousand." I was in the middle so I had the safety seat- Greg and Kate were hanging on to the rails to keep from getting bounced out from either side. The turn we took across 3 lanes of onrushing traffic, in what is essentially a glorified Big Wheel, was exhilarating.

Coming home, two beachfront beers and a large dinner later, I am again trotting behind Greg when he swerves and jumps, without hesitation, onto a half-stopped minibus, or dala-dala. Kate, used to these sorts of transitions, steps in gracefully, fitting herself neatly into the closely nested crowd. As I step in the people-packer, actually serving as a safety net because the door won't close, yells up to the driver, not unkindly, "Mzungi!" It's one of the 4 Swahili words I know, and it means something like (I hope I'm not offending anyone here,) "Whitey." I am half on one step, half on another, and it gets to be even more fun at the next stop when a few more people pile in. I know a lot, I mean a lot, about my fellow passengers now. We hop off and make it the rest of the way home on foot. I feel like I have done some things today.

Tomorrow: I am booked on the Dar Reality Bike Tour- 6 hours, a bike, the streets of Dar. Have mercy.

Day 33: Stone Town Snipe Hunt, success

After I wrote about Cairo being a less-than-pleasant place for a female traveler, I got a couple of great messages. My friend Lyndsay was on a trip once where some Israeli men tried to trade camels for the women in the group. I thought that was great, because who among us knows our worth in camels? (Lyndsay does- but really, she's priceless.) Kristin, who won a huge travel grant and spent 10 weeks traveling last summer, commented that great experiences always follow the bad ones while you're traveling- to the extent that, when she had a small misfortune, she's immediately starts anticipating a great surprise.

And it's been true for me, too- when you start looking around, all kinds of great things will fall into your lap. Zanzibar has been even better than I wanted it to be- and I was afraid I was overly excited and I knew my expectations were high. Zanzibar in the dark? A really surprising gift, as it just added to the allure and mystique of Stone Town. Stone Town itself? So lively, so colorful, so diverse. The thrill of starting to find my own way, though I stayed lost about 50% of the time- so satisfying.

So while Greg and Kate were here, I kept almost finding my project site from studio. I can find it on Google Earth in about 4 seconds, or on a detailed map in 10, but I had no detailed map with me, and I can't get high enough for the right rooftop view. And my landmark- a huge interior courtyard- is all but invisible from the street. And of course, on the ground, everything looks remarkably similar. I kept saying, "Oh wait! Maybe...no, we're too close to the water. Oh there's a ...wait, which way is north? Isn't the fort over there?" And I felt like I was on a snipe hunt, and dragging very patient Kate around with me. And lordy, it's hot here for extraneous movement.

In the House of Wonders, the old sultan's palace so named because it was one of the first places in East Africa to have electricity, there's a great museum and a giant wall-sized aerial map. Another gift- I figured out every turn and landmark and went for it.

My site, is has to be said, was lacking in on-the-ground information beyond building footprints. I knew there was a mosque, but had to guess at everything other than the roof lines. In my presentation, I used photos of a sample Zanzibar mosque, unidentifed in photos, and a typical floor plan from another source. Because Stone Town is so, so small, although it looks big on the map, it was less than 5 minutes from the palace to my site. Wonders never cease- the typical unidentified mosque I'd been using- was actually my mosque. I peeked in- same with the random floor plan. It looks, but exactly, like the itty bitty model I made. I decided, as I knew I would when I got there, that my project is all wrong and I want to start again- but it was really great to stand in front if it. For the record, the buildings I hypothetically demolished to make room for my building are new and awful and out of place, so I no longer feel hypothetical guilt. I could see beautiful almond trees peeking out over a makeshift corrugated scrap fence, which would be perfect for the small courtyard I designed. I practically ran to the internet shop to e-mail my professor.

One other little bit of travel magic I've already shared with a few of you: I have been waking up every morning to the sound of school children singing chanting songs. I love this. I do not miss being a teacher, but I wouldn't mind a roomfull of these precious little Zanzibaris. The are beautiful children, happy and running about in the streets after school, in full robes and head coverings, no matter how tiny. I want to scoop them all up and read them picture books and buy them all ice cream. My Zanzibar studio project was an Islamic school for girls. When I located the source of the singing this morning, it's an Islamic school, for girls, right underneath my bedroom window.