And yet there is something almost romantic, enchanting perhaps, about our crippled state. we are slowly adjusting to a culture, blossoming into our new selves. With this painful and blistered transformation we will arise ready to face our surroundings, like wildebeest, with newly fashioned hooves.
Or maybe these are just the rantings of a rhetoric major, smearing his flourished crap on his blog post.
In any case, we have had quite the week. We ended our Zanzibari journey at the almost unhumanly beautiful White Sands Beach Resort. Oh yes, my friends, the beaches, they were white, the water, a color of blue I once thought to be alien in nature. The standard beach chairs all replaced by hammocks and Italians. It was surreal, and I was strangely uneasy about the entire situation.
I think what irked me was the drive from glorious touristland Stonetown to White Sands, both of which make up an extremely small population of Zanzibar. In between the two, the poverty line is virtually tangible: the city limits of both make up a haunting gap. While Stonetown and the resorts of the north are known for their lavish wealth (of which only 10 to 20 percent actually stays in Africa), the inland country is on a slow burn. Makeshift shacks sprouted like matchstick books among smoldering landfills and hungry families. It's heartbreaking, to say the least, to have felt apart of a system that seems to rub the country's poverty problem in it's face. Tourism is both the reason Zanzibar hasn't been crumbled by now, and also the reason it eventually will.
We took another boat back to the mainland and were greeted by the Peterson brothers, Mike and Thad. Behind them were two young men who looked like they had jumped out of romance novel covers. Tan, shirtless men with steroid-like muscles, later to be introduced as the next generation of Petersons, were immediately followed by ten or so of the girls on our trip, as if they were pied pipers fluting mice ashore. Thad and Mike (along with their older brother Daoudi) are the sons of Minnesota missionaries who moved to Tanzania before the brothers were born. Although they are all fluent in Swahili and German, their extreme northern Minnesota accents were perfectly retained.
For the next week we were scientists. Or at least snorkelers. Our mission was to travel to two reefs, Fungu Maziwe and the drastically less protected Fungu Zinga, and to perform quadrat and transect surveys on the biodiversity of the surrounding substraights. In short, we counted fish for a week. It was glorious.
And now we are here in the bustling urban metropolis of Arusha, in a somewhat nice hotel that the students all picked out. WiFi, internet altogether, even phones, will be history starting tomorrow. The beginning of our 3 week safari. Hope the world keeps turnin
More to come,
Tim
