Thursday, August 27, 2009
Zanzibar - part 2
.
..and the fauna. This old guy sleeping is one of a
colony of rare Colobus monkeys which only live in Zanzibar. They are
endangered, and the forest conservation society have worked out a deal with
local farmers so that they get compensated for the damage the monkeys do to the
crops.
Walking through the mangrove swamps, we learned all
about the trade in mangrove trees (did you know that the wood is highly prized
for house building because it is resistant to termites?)
After a week of attempting to put my feet in the
Indian Ocean, I finally got to a beach, only to find the ocean had disappeared!
Only temporarily though - but it was fun watching this guy fishing, and women
harvesting the seaweed.
We were quite happy that we were in a rental car when driving through these beach villages. It seems the local rock is coral which is jagged and juts up all over the place and i imagine is deadly on tires!
We were looking for somewhere to have a drink (coke!)
and these guys led us here to this "Rock Restaurant". There seemed to
be only one problem... the tide was fast coming in, and already we would have
had to wade out there. But what a place!
This is the type of coral that it appears the entire
country of Tanzania is built on....
A beach at sunset with a dugout outrigger canoe, which
are used widely here for fishing.
And so we ended out little sojourn in romantic Zanzibar. Our trip home was a little exciting - a sickmaking ferry ride followed by a wild taxi ride through rush hour Dar es Salaam. The thing we hadn't quite realized is that Dar is a city of about 3 million people, and has infrastructure for about 300,000.... There is one 2 lane road leading north out of central Dar,
and everyone was on it. Our taxi driver was bound by no known rules of the
road, and pulled some amazing stunts, for which I should be grateful, but which
made my hair stand on end! The really astounding thing is how good natured
everyone is; the lack of horns blasting and rude gestures was remarkable. As it
was, it took us about 1 1/2 hours to get home from the ferry terminal - but
when we did, it felt like home!
Zanzibar - Part 1
Our first six days in Tanzania were a bit like the
creation of the earth - our house is a work in progress, and each day we
accomplished something major. The first day it was acquiring food, and the
implements for cooking and eating it. The second day was bedding, and cleaning
materials, the third day a bank account etc. So on the seventh day, we felt the
need for a bit of a rest, and without a car (at least one that we could drive)
we decided to take off on the ferry for Zanzibar....
Here
is a bit of the greenery by the ferry terminal in Dar. It doesn't really give
the flavour of the place - the bustling, jostling people, the smells of diesel
and fish, but we did get to enjoy it for quite a while waiting in line...
Entering Zanzibar harbour - the view out the very
misty window. There were many fishing boats like this as well as dhows - the
traditional Arab vessel. In the background is the "House of Wonders"
- home of the National Museum of Zanzibar which we visited the last day. It's
most interesting exhibit was about Princess Salme, the daughter of the Sultan
in the 1800's who shocked everyone by getting pregnant and running off to
Europe to marry a German businessman. She lived to write a book about her
experiences and about growing up as an Arabian princess...
We stayed in a very nice, kind of colonial style hotel
with traditional Zanzibari furniture.
So, we actually did have gin and tonics on a balcony
overlooking the sea for our birthdays...just not in Tanga as we had hoped. This
place was a very good substitute. We were actually lucky to find anywhere
serving alcohol at all, as we neatly timed our arrival with the first day of
Ramadan. As Zanzibar is 98% Muslim, most restaurants and bars were closed for
the month, with the exception of a few who opened in the evenings. Luckily our
hotel bar, being solidly British colonial, was open all the time, and even knew
what a gin and tonic was!
Stonetown, the heart of Zanzibar Town, is famous for
its carved doors. Many are of Indian origin, and this type, with the spikes,
is apparently to discourage elephants from breaking in.
While eating breakfast, we had the chance to watch the
comings and goings in this Islamic school. It appeared that girls were on the
top floor and boys underneath, although there was a lot of running back and forth!
The second day, we rented a car - an amazingly casual
experience once we had been driven all over the city so that Lars could get a
Zanzibari license for a month (it cost $10 and took about an hour). Once that
was taken care of we drove out of town, and visited this National Forest
preserve (Jozana Forest) where mahogany trees and mangrove swamps flourish and
are protected. We had a guide, Shambani, who was amazingly knowledgeable about
the medicinal uses of all sorts of plants...
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Lars' First Impressions
August 22
Events are conspiring to provide lots of diary-writing and blogging
time – and perhaps also to smooth the edges of transition from
Canadian to Tanzanian rhythms. It's now almost exactly one week since
we took off from Halifax, connecting through the gargantuan mess of
terminals and planes and people called JFK, then landing at Dubai –
which must be the longest linear airport in the world. Full of
modernity and fancy duty-free shops and high-speed free wireless
internet – the very epitome of modernity, with hardly a whitey face
to be seen, as travellers were coming and going from all over the
middle east and on into the orient.
The first hint that Tanzania would be different was in the departure
lounge, where suddenly three quarters or so of the faces were
European – some looked like tourists, some like aid types and a
surprisingly high percentage of clerical collars, presumably headed
for missions somewhere. I guess not too many Tanzanians have the cash
it takes to travel internationally.
And the airport in Dar es Salaam more or less reflects this – at
least the JK Nyerere airport, which probably dates from the 1960s or
1970s, with very little change since. Airplanes must have been a lot
smaller and fewer then – so two tiny baggage carousels may have done
the trick, once upon a time. In my diary, the first day, I marvelled
at the sensually overpowering nature of arrival in Africa – the heat,
the smells, the crowds of closely packed people, line-ups and seeming
chaos, the interminable wait for a trickle of baggage onto a single
small conveyer belt, followed by an explosion into the packed
entrance hall. There waiting for us was the driver from REPOA and the
remarkable figure of Brian van Arkadie – one of the great characters
of post-colonial African development economics sagas.
We rode with him, in jam-packed traffic which had a small semblance
of order, and a lot of languid adaptation to whatever might happen –
a little like the Chinese model, in which the basic rule of driving
is that the other guy does not want to hit you, because that will
damage his vehicle, so asserting one's claim to space on the street
is how one enters, turns and leaves the road. But Dar does not have
the high key intensity of Nanjing or the speed of Beijing. It seems
like there are thousands of people on the sidewalk, buying and
selling and making and just going from here to there – the ambient
chaos of traffic, dust and heat and smells of garbage fires,
amazingly bad local roads and mixtures of every human function by the
roadside – they all combine to overpower the senses of any jet-lagged
intruder from the ordered cleanliness of northern climes.
For both Molly and me, part of it is also a surging recovered memory
of peoples and places that left a huge mark on our hearts long ago –
old cobwebbed emotions surging back as we rattled up the winding dirt
road, past the palatial villas of Tanzania's new elite and the scrap
corrugated iron shacks of their neighbours to "Gharofani wa
mzungu" (the white guy's two story house) perched on the hill-top
looking down to Msasani Bay and the Indian Ocean. It was a
spectacular view, but we had little time for it, as Brian fed us a
much-appreciated beer and regaled us with tales from the old times.
I knew Brian tangentially when I was in Dar in 1968 – he was very
much then the back-room guru of Tanzanian central planning He stayed
on through the hard times of the late 1970s and early 1980s when
Tanzania was resisting the IMF diktats and the crucal shortage of any
foreign exchange meant there was little to nothing in the shops –
today the currency is fully convertible and you are offered the
choice of US dollars or Tanzanian shilling accounts (or both) when
you open a bank account. When we arrived, he regaled us with stories
of how one managed to put life together in the hard times. He has
known just about everyone on the leftie development economist roster
– from my continuing friend John Loxley to 'past influential
radicals' like Hymer and Resnick to mythic figures like the senior
Barack Obama (whom he met in a bar in Nairobi when Obama senior was
returning to Kenya in the late 1960s). And Brian has a lot of
interesting observations on the origins of African development paths
– such as the Kenyatta's anglophilic obsession with creating a rural
hierarchy in Kenya, modelled on the English squires and Nyerere's
roots in Catholic social teaching. I was game to yarn on into the
night, but Molly was sinking into somnolence after 24 hours on the
plane, so off we went to the house we are renting from him.
Our house itself is very much a work in progress – it was started as
the house for Beatrice's mother, who died recently. My impression is
that it was then half-completed (at best) and that the prospect of
renting it to us, and hopefully to subsequent tenants, has energized
a major development project. Workmen are around every day, applying
masonry and tiling the back patio and doing things to the wall that
surrounds it. Bits and pieces have been added inside every day – this
afternoon an ancient washing machine was trundled in, which does not
appear to work, even if it could be connected, which it cannot (but
the ingenuity of Tanzanians means that if one wants to test
something, but has no plug, one just inserts the bare wires into the
socket). Yesterday was the day the mirrors for the bathrooms appeared
and pictures got hung on the walls – the day before that, the fundi
completed a complete rebuild of the sofa and chairs, stripping them
down to the frame on the front porch and, with nothing more than a
hand saw, hammer and nails, rebuilding the frames and reupholstering
to conceal the old packing cases from which it is constructed.
So every day we have had a little progress and we are converging on
the new normal rhythm of life. I had been saying to all and sundry
that I wanted our car to be in our driveway waiting for us (Molly
says she never believed this) – and it did just arrive two hours ago
(but without plates, so we cannot yet drive it). From arrival in the
port August 1 to arrival here August 22 – there were many
intermediate promises from Nelson (our next door neighbour and
Brian's brother in law) of imminent arrival (Wednesday the customs
form had not been processed, Thursday the gate pass was to arrive,
Friday it was blocked in by three cars whose keys had been lost –
but now it is here, and a very nice car it is too.)
And today I also managed to use my cell phone to pay on my
electricity bill using ZAP (the system for electricity is that you
pay in advance, and get a 20 digit code, which advances the amount
remaining on your meter). We got cell phones the very first day we
were here, for the amazing price of $25, and since cell phone time
can be bought in increments of $5 and the recipient of a call does
not pay, cell phone coverage is amazingly high – we sealed our deal
with Temius (the gardener) by exchanging cell phone numbers. I really
think the cell-phone and the accessible banking it enables will be a
transformative technology – most people simply cannot get banking
services at all, much less low-cost instant funds transfer (when I
applied for a bank account I learned that I needed a passport photo
and a letter of recommendation from my employer in order to get one –
since most people do not have an employer, this rules the informal
sector out of banking services from the get-go.
So some things are amazingly modern – but so much has also not
changed in any meaningful way. On the way to the Zain office this
morning was a man cutting grass with a small sickle and piling it to
take for cow feed – and all around our house are charcoal sellers and
we see water carriers pushing heavily laden bicycles up our hill.
Clearly Tanzania is now a capitalist society, in a way that it was
not 40 years ago. And it is African capitalist – aside from the
flight in, we have seen very, very few white faces and the dukas and
shops are no longer the preserve of Asians. There are some Asians in
evidence, along with a huge surfeit of labour of all types, at some
of the supermarkets where we have shopped for starter supplies but in
the maze of streets around Kariakoo and in the small sections for
specific trades and crafts – from bolt purveyors to hubcap providers
– the proprietors are all black, which is a HUGE change from the post-
colonial era.
Events are conspiring to provide lots of diary-writing and blogging
time – and perhaps also to smooth the edges of transition from
Canadian to Tanzanian rhythms. It's now almost exactly one week since
we took off from Halifax, connecting through the gargantuan mess of
terminals and planes and people called JFK, then landing at Dubai –
which must be the longest linear airport in the world. Full of
modernity and fancy duty-free shops and high-speed free wireless
internet – the very epitome of modernity, with hardly a whitey face
to be seen, as travellers were coming and going from all over the
middle east and on into the orient.
The first hint that Tanzania would be different was in the departure
lounge, where suddenly three quarters or so of the faces were
European – some looked like tourists, some like aid types and a
surprisingly high percentage of clerical collars, presumably headed
for missions somewhere. I guess not too many Tanzanians have the cash
it takes to travel internationally.
And the airport in Dar es Salaam more or less reflects this – at
least the JK Nyerere airport, which probably dates from the 1960s or
1970s, with very little change since. Airplanes must have been a lot
smaller and fewer then – so two tiny baggage carousels may have done
the trick, once upon a time. In my diary, the first day, I marvelled
at the sensually overpowering nature of arrival in Africa – the heat,
the smells, the crowds of closely packed people, line-ups and seeming
chaos, the interminable wait for a trickle of baggage onto a single
small conveyer belt, followed by an explosion into the packed
entrance hall. There waiting for us was the driver from REPOA and the
remarkable figure of Brian van Arkadie – one of the great characters
of post-colonial African development economics sagas.
We rode with him, in jam-packed traffic which had a small semblance
of order, and a lot of languid adaptation to whatever might happen –
a little like the Chinese model, in which the basic rule of driving
is that the other guy does not want to hit you, because that will
damage his vehicle, so asserting one's claim to space on the street
is how one enters, turns and leaves the road. But Dar does not have
the high key intensity of Nanjing or the speed of Beijing. It seems
like there are thousands of people on the sidewalk, buying and
selling and making and just going from here to there – the ambient
chaos of traffic, dust and heat and smells of garbage fires,
amazingly bad local roads and mixtures of every human function by the
roadside – they all combine to overpower the senses of any jet-lagged
intruder from the ordered cleanliness of northern climes.
For both Molly and me, part of it is also a surging recovered memory
of peoples and places that left a huge mark on our hearts long ago –
old cobwebbed emotions surging back as we rattled up the winding dirt
road, past the palatial villas of Tanzania's new elite and the scrap
corrugated iron shacks of their neighbours to "Gharofani wa
mzungu" (the white guy's two story house) perched on the hill-top
looking down to Msasani Bay and the Indian Ocean. It was a
spectacular view, but we had little time for it, as Brian fed us a
much-appreciated beer and regaled us with tales from the old times.
I knew Brian tangentially when I was in Dar in 1968 – he was very
much then the back-room guru of Tanzanian central planning He stayed
on through the hard times of the late 1970s and early 1980s when
Tanzania was resisting the IMF diktats and the crucal shortage of any
foreign exchange meant there was little to nothing in the shops –
today the currency is fully convertible and you are offered the
choice of US dollars or Tanzanian shilling accounts (or both) when
you open a bank account. When we arrived, he regaled us with stories
of how one managed to put life together in the hard times. He has
known just about everyone on the leftie development economist roster
– from my continuing friend John Loxley to 'past influential
radicals' like Hymer and Resnick to mythic figures like the senior
Barack Obama (whom he met in a bar in Nairobi when Obama senior was
returning to Kenya in the late 1960s). And Brian has a lot of
interesting observations on the origins of African development paths
– such as the Kenyatta's anglophilic obsession with creating a rural
hierarchy in Kenya, modelled on the English squires and Nyerere's
roots in Catholic social teaching. I was game to yarn on into the
night, but Molly was sinking into somnolence after 24 hours on the
plane, so off we went to the house we are renting from him.
Our house itself is very much a work in progress – it was started as
the house for Beatrice's mother, who died recently. My impression is
that it was then half-completed (at best) and that the prospect of
renting it to us, and hopefully to subsequent tenants, has energized
a major development project. Workmen are around every day, applying
masonry and tiling the back patio and doing things to the wall that
surrounds it. Bits and pieces have been added inside every day – this
afternoon an ancient washing machine was trundled in, which does not
appear to work, even if it could be connected, which it cannot (but
the ingenuity of Tanzanians means that if one wants to test
something, but has no plug, one just inserts the bare wires into the
socket). Yesterday was the day the mirrors for the bathrooms appeared
and pictures got hung on the walls – the day before that, the fundi
completed a complete rebuild of the sofa and chairs, stripping them
down to the frame on the front porch and, with nothing more than a
hand saw, hammer and nails, rebuilding the frames and reupholstering
to conceal the old packing cases from which it is constructed.
So every day we have had a little progress and we are converging on
the new normal rhythm of life. I had been saying to all and sundry
that I wanted our car to be in our driveway waiting for us (Molly
says she never believed this) – and it did just arrive two hours ago
(but without plates, so we cannot yet drive it). From arrival in the
port August 1 to arrival here August 22 – there were many
intermediate promises from Nelson (our next door neighbour and
Brian's brother in law) of imminent arrival (Wednesday the customs
form had not been processed, Thursday the gate pass was to arrive,
Friday it was blocked in by three cars whose keys had been lost –
but now it is here, and a very nice car it is too.)
And today I also managed to use my cell phone to pay on my
electricity bill using ZAP (the system for electricity is that you
pay in advance, and get a 20 digit code, which advances the amount
remaining on your meter). We got cell phones the very first day we
were here, for the amazing price of $25, and since cell phone time
can be bought in increments of $5 and the recipient of a call does
not pay, cell phone coverage is amazingly high – we sealed our deal
with Temius (the gardener) by exchanging cell phone numbers. I really
think the cell-phone and the accessible banking it enables will be a
transformative technology – most people simply cannot get banking
services at all, much less low-cost instant funds transfer (when I
applied for a bank account I learned that I needed a passport photo
and a letter of recommendation from my employer in order to get one –
since most people do not have an employer, this rules the informal
sector out of banking services from the get-go.
So some things are amazingly modern – but so much has also not
changed in any meaningful way. On the way to the Zain office this
morning was a man cutting grass with a small sickle and piling it to
take for cow feed – and all around our house are charcoal sellers and
we see water carriers pushing heavily laden bicycles up our hill.
Clearly Tanzania is now a capitalist society, in a way that it was
not 40 years ago. And it is African capitalist – aside from the
flight in, we have seen very, very few white faces and the dukas and
shops are no longer the preserve of Asians. There are some Asians in
evidence, along with a huge surfeit of labour of all types, at some
of the supermarkets where we have shopped for starter supplies but in
the maze of streets around Kariakoo and in the small sections for
specific trades and crafts – from bolt purveyors to hubcap providers
– the proprietors are all black, which is a HUGE change from the post-
colonial era.
Molly's first comments
Saturday, August 22 2009
Here we are after six days in Tanzania, in our pink house on the hill, with internet, cell phones, a means to cook (gas), running water and a car in the driveway. What more could we ask for? When you step through the gate, and go up the steep drive, the view across the way is astounding...spread out below is the Msasani peninsula, and the high rises of downtown Dar...in the immediate foreground are local houses and several undulating hills. Such an interesting area we live in! The road up the hill is long, winding and very bumpy and it goes through a neighbourhood I can only describe as "varied". High walls with barbed wire and security notices are interspersed with corrugated iron shanties; chickens, goats and cows roam freely and children greet us with enthusiastic "good morning"s. We have had lots of time to explore our neighbourhood on foot, and today went off the main road to finally shop at our local market. I had a hard time buying vegetables in the various European style supermarkets we have been taken to, but without a car it has been difficult to get to markets.
Here we are after six days in Tanzania, in our pink house on the hill, with internet, cell phones, a means to cook (gas), running water and a car in the driveway. What more could we ask for? When you step through the gate, and go up the steep drive, the view across the way is astounding...spread out below is the Msasani peninsula, and the high rises of downtown Dar...in the immediate foreground are local houses and several undulating hills. Such an interesting area we live in! The road up the hill is long, winding and very bumpy and it goes through a neighbourhood I can only describe as "varied". High walls with barbed wire and security notices are interspersed with corrugated iron shanties; chickens, goats and cows roam freely and children greet us with enthusiastic "good morning"s. We have had lots of time to explore our neighbourhood on foot, and today went off the main road to finally shop at our local market. I had a hard time buying vegetables in the various European style supermarkets we have been taken to, but without a car it has been difficult to get to markets.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
5 great iPhotos
This is our house on top of the hill the night we arrived. 
Our first walk in our new neighbourhood - its predominantly rural (at least by the time you get to our house) and features lots of churches, little dukas (shops) and a constant stream of people moving.
This is our landlady, Beatrice, having a quiet drink with us while talking on her cell phone arranging a million details before leaving for England the next day.
Our first view of downtown Dar - as we walked 6K from Lars workplace in.
Finally a car...after many bumps on the road of customs extraction, we finally got the car out of bondage. Only problem now is that it has no license plates... however, our friends (including Isaya the driver, and Temius the gardener) were very enthusiastic!
DSCN0024.JPG
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