The woes of Kilimanjaro.

---

Leaving Arusha behind, driving through market towns and fields of maize and bright, sunflower-filled pastures, I arrive in Moshi upbeat, ready to square myself for the journey south. Surprised to see two weeks pass in Arusha, having glimpsed not a single lion or leopard or loping giraffe, I don’t want to linger long; memories of a month spent worrying over finances in Nairobi are, after all, still fresh. But the fortnight in Arusha was intense: the pile-up of impressions after arriving in a new country, the whirling circus of the Sullivan Summit, the commercial frenzy around the clocktower. I was busy gathering, hording images, devouring tales of woe in the local papers; my senses were constantly engaged, and by the time I left town, I felt curiously spent.

It’s something I’ve learned, after nearly a year in Africa - the value of balancing those brief bursts of intense interaction with a few days to myself. It’s the only way to restore my equilibrium, to stay grounded. It’s how I remember who I am. Wholesale transformation, after all, is not what I’m after. Certain peculiarities and annoying habits aside, I’m happy with who I’ve become after two years on the road. I’m happy to feel at ease in surroundings that, when I first left New York, would have felt alien, even hostile. (Picture a younger me bombarded by batiks and Masai machetes in Arusha.) I’m happy to have picked up the local mannerisms - the elbow-touching, the shoulder-squeezing, the hand-holding - that are reliable ice-breakers among strangers. And I’m happy, too, to be gainfully employed, to have a fat Forbes paycheck in my bank account, to have high hopes that the year ahead - should it finally bring me to Cape Town - will find my African adventures on the desks of dozens of New York editors.

In Moshi I’m a recluse: watching Euro 2008 at the hostel, hunkering over cappuccinos at the Tanzania Coffee House, eating plates of fried liver at the auspiciously named Chrisburger. The afternoons are mercifully overcast - the town’s heat can be sweltering - and it’s not until my fourth day that the clouds part and Kilimanjaro appears in the distance. It’s an awesome sight, rising over the mosques and market stalls, and I’m grinning dumbly as twilight paints Kili’s crown in purples, pinks and blues. At the rooftop bar in the Kindoroko Hotel, I buy a bottle of Konyagi - three thousand shilling’s worth of Tanzanian whoop-ass - and drink poor man’s gin-and-tonics while the sun sets. I am getting to be awfully happy with how the days pass. Having set no goals for myself in Moshi, the simple project of passing the time is one I attack with great verve, mild inebriation, and a small bit of slack-jawed wonder at the dumbstruck beauty of my life.

There have been some challenges, few and fleeting. The project of mailing home a package - an almost Sisyphean boulder, at this point, which I’ve been pushing along since Rwanda - finally reaches its conclusion here in Moshi. After a day of wandering town, scouring the dry-goods stores in search of cardboard boxes, I finally find one big enough to fit four Congolese masks, three thick paperbacks, and the accumulated detritus of the past few months. It is a day of great triumph. I haul my load to the Posta, where the customs clerk fills in the necessary forms in triplicate, weighs the package, and then watches me mummify the cargo with enough packing tape to cover Kilimanjaro. We debate costs. Surface shipping, she says, could take three months - maybe six - to finally make it to New York. I tell her I’m in no hurry, so long as it gets there before I do in the summer of ’09. I ask if it will get there in less than a year. She pauses, looks into the middle distance, and says,

“Probably.”

This is hardly reassuring. But in the past few days, I’ve already begun to worry about my finances again, plotting out the months ahead and wondering when the next check will roll in. I pay Tsh30,000 - about 25 US bucks. The clerk fills in a receipt and stands there with her pen hovering, giving me a curious look. I have a brief vision of my package bouncing along in the back of an old lorry somewhere in Chad, or strapped to the side of a camel in Mali. I ask if it’s stupid of me not to shell out an extra fifty bucks for air mail instead. The clerk laughs, shakes her head, and says, “Yes.” Not wanting to trust my fine Congolese masks to the whims of fate and African transport, I fork over the extra money and send the package on its way. Two and a half weeks later, it’s safely on the ground in New York, having most likely beat me there by a solid 14 months.

The more pressing task, by day three in Moshi, has been finding a reliable place to watch the European Championships. After a weekend plopped down on the hostel couch in front of the footie, I’ve learned that local TV programming is terrifically erratic. With no less than four channels to choose from over the weekend - the French EuroSport, the South African SATV, the Kenyan NTV, the Tanzanian TBC - I have no more than zero channels to choose from on Monday night. I wander out in search of a bar with a satellite - no easy task, on the streets of Moshi. I step in and out of grim, rough-and-tumble places where groups of young guys lean drunkenly against the wall and a fluorescent bulbs flare over the pool table. My spirits are low. With the eyes of the footballing world fixed on Austria and Switzerland for these next two weeks, the prospect of following along on ESPN.com is looking both dire and likely.

Until, luckily, improbably, I find a dark, crowded joint on a nearby side-street where forty pairs of eyes are fixed on a tiny TV screen. Success - however mild - boosts my spirits. I take a place by the bar, squinting toward the action, animated more by the cheers and shouts of the guys around me than by what little I can make out from the tiny figures racing across the screen. Beside me is a tall, broad man, solidly built around the midsection, who’s telling a story to a friend with great gusto. He welcomes me to the bar and offers me a seat and introduces himself as Akwilin Chuwa. This, I tell him, is a marvelous name, and one that, with any luck, will someday feature in a novel of bold and heroic exploits in the bush. Akwilin, laughing, shaking his broad shoulders, is in very high spirits. My unlikely appearance here, in his brother’s bar, seems providential. There are whoops and cheers as Spain scores a beautiful goal. We order another round of drinks.

Given his girth, his crisply tailored shirt, his thoughtful eloquence, it doesn’t surprise me to hear that Akwilin is a politician - a local councilman with the opposition party, Chadema. We talk at great length about the failures of CCM, the ruling party, and the economic tailspin that began under the reign of Benjamin Mkapa - the first Tanzanian president to be elected under the multi-party system. Mkapa, says Akwilin, ushered in a period of graft, corruption, and bad governance. The results are still plain to see, more than a decade later. Akwilin sweeps his hand across the room, where local boys - ragged, out of school, unemployed - crane their necks to follow the football, or jostle for the pool cue to gamble away some pocket change. There is, he implies, little for Tanzania’s youth to look forward to, with the cost of school fees too high, and the prospects for employment slim. Most of the boys come to his brother’s bar each night, joking and passing the time around the pool table, the 100- and 200-shilling antes passing back and forth between them.

Yet Akwilin is proud of his country, and of his countrymen. Look across the border to Kenya, he says, where just a few months ago, warring tribes were fighting in the streets. Despite the failure of his socialist policies, it was to the credit of Julius Nyerere - Tanzania’s founding father - that he was able to create a single national identity.

“There are more than 100 tribes in Tanzania,” says Akwilin. “But we are not Chagga and Meru and Masai. We are Tanzanian. When I meet someone from my tribe, I do not greet him in my mother’s tongue. I greet him in Kiswahili.”

The history of post-colonial Tanzania is notable - and remarkable - for its stability. Though independence in Kenya came at the bloody cost of the Mau Mau Rebellion, and though the Zanzibar uprising brought a swift and violent end to Arab rule on the island, the transition from colonial rule on mainland Tanganyika was auspiciously peaceful.

“We did not have a revolution,” says Akwilin. “We had white men writing agreements and signing papers. When I was a child, I would watch them coming to gather with the elders in the village, signing papers. There was no revolution in Tanzania.”

In the morning I wander the streets of Moshi, past the arched and domed mosques, past the old railway depot, past the primary schools where students in khaki shorts run screeching out the door, massive bookbags bouncing on their backs. I have lunch at the police canteen, where two giggling waitresses watch my every move. I buy a terrible painting from a guy who looks like he could use a break, I buy a CD of Tanzanian hip-hop, I buy another six-month supply of Lariam, though I’ve already been popping pills for the past year. The days are happy and peaceful here, and I’m not in the mood to go anywhere just yet.

One night I take a taxi to the Glacier Bar, a popular ex-pat haunt on the outskirts of town, rumored to be showing the football on a big-screen TV. On that count the Glacier Bar disappoints, but on the count of drunken, orange-bedecked Dutch girls cheering for Holland, it’s a rousing success. I have a few drinks with an old Dutchman, Albert, who runs a safari company in Moshi. We talk about my work, and about his travels in Africa. He’s deep into a bottle of Konyagi by half-time, and his attention starts to wander in the second half. Suddenly, precipitously, he grows blindingly drunk. He staggers and sways and offers apologies at his drunkenness. Nearby a husky Tanzanian guy stands up, steps back from the bar, and collapses in a pile on the hardwood floor. We collect him into a chair and call for a taxi. Albert, leaning heavily on the bar, looks at me in a boozy haze.

“You are one of the ones who really understands,” he says, and then his voice trails off. I lean forward, eager for the sage-like pronouncement he was about to levy on the world. What, exactly, do I understand? He stands up and sways boozily to the side, and then he, too, is in a heap on the floor. Certain morals involving the Glacier Bar and Konyagi are becoming crystal clear. I help him into a chair and call for another taxi. While I’m hunched over him, offering reassurances and giving his shoulder a sympathetic squeeze, I notice our Tanzanian friend has staggered off. In the distance I see his large, tipsy silhouette making its way toward the front gate. He stops to exchange a few words with the askari, rocks heavily to the side, and then he staggers into the night.

---