Thinking Ginger

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After two weeks of waking up before the sun to carry sloshing 18-litre buckets of water on our heads to fill the big blue water bucket, after calluses and blood blisters and even a scorpion bite incurred as what was an empty field in the Shamba countryside became a building, Zanzibar was what most would dfine as paradise - pristine white beaches and clear turquoise ocean, groves of palm trees waving in the spice-scented breeze, coffee, and flush toilets. I spent every day wondering how the next thing on the schedule could possibly be more luxurious or fascinating or delicious than the last; to even attempt to describe an experience like snorkeling (such an ungraceful, awkward pimply word for such a beautiful thing) off Chumbe Island among outer-space formations of vivid coral and iridescent schools of purple and gold sparkling fish would be to have the almost blindingly colourful memory of it mock the paltry two-dimensionality of words. Touring a spice farm, I sniffed a piece of cinnamon bark shaved directly from the branch and numbed my palate chewing a fresh green clove, painted my lips orange with turmeric and nibbled on a crisp pale ginger root. Though buying a packet of cinnamon coffee was immediately tempting, I was right to wait until Tine and Yuan and I found a rooftop coffee bar, up four flights of stairs through an ornately disheveled hotel. There, literally trembling with three weeks of decaffeinated anticipation (the withdrawal headaches for the first few days in the Shamba were actually tunnel-vision debilitating. Lydia insists that it is an addiction...hollow-eyed, with shaky hands and cold shivers while slowly rocking back and forth in a corner alone, I am NOT in denial) I drank my first cup of coffee since the day I arrived...and it tasted nothing like coffee, milky-pungent with pods of cardamom and clove floating to the top. Though we were worked hard enough, or had to wait for supper long enough, in the Shamba for the meal of sticky rice and beans to always taste delicious (especially when sopped up without silverware, the way it's supposed to be eaten, the beans so hot they burn the tips of your fingers, still recovering from trying to scoop up the beans and ugali from lunch), the smorgasbord of fresh barracuda and shark meat on skewers with red and green peppers and a pale green glass of cool juice from a stick of crushed sugar cane in the Forodhani Gardens open market was overwhelming. Everything, it turns out, can and is improved through the addition of eye-wateringly copious amounts of chilli salt and lime. Unfortunately, for every other member of the Atlantic College-Li Po Chun Tanzania Project 2009 all that delectable fish and falafel and fresh coconut milk vegetable curry is now only a memory, after the ferry voyage (and it WAS a voyage) back to the mainland. We should have all taken the spice tour guide's advice, and chewed a ginger root. Though it meant resorting to a ridiculous-looking gymnastic routine of squat thrusts in order to keep my equilibrium intact every time we catapulted over another massive wave/tsunami-ette, I was the only one who kept my coconut curry out of one of the many plastic bags handed out by a very green and wobbly crew. At one point, I looked to my left to see, hear and smell everyone retching in unison. To my right, Yuan was sprawled out clammily across two seats looking like someone dying - or dead - of some exotic Victorian disease. I looked up at the television to stifle my own gag reflex, and there was Charlie Chaplin playing Hitler; the film they had chosen to show that evening, to a boatload of passengers from diverse and varied cultural backgrounds and sensibilities, was that feel-good fun-for-the-whole-family classic, The Great Dictator. How on earth did I get here? I thought to myself, or tried to form as a complete thought before it was cut off by my brain reverting back to WAVE!!!! JUMP!!!!PANIC!!!!and I guess HITLER!!!! mode. It is quite clear to me now why our spice tour guide laughed and said he could count on his hands the number of times he had ever left Zanzibar. The Indian Ocean itself seems to get very angry when you don't stay.

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