Strangers in paradise.

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For two weeks I’ve shopped at the market and diced tomatoes in the kitchen and sat on the couch watching ESPN over a plate of lukewarm leftovers; in most ways, it’s been as unexotic a fortnight as you could possibly imagine in Zanzibar. It’s also been a huge relief. Homeless for close to two years, having my own place, my own household routine, has been about as foreign and thrilling to me as spotting lions and leopards on the plains of the Serengeti would be to a bunch of tourists on safari. I’ve traded Grevy’s zebra for grocery lists and cheetahs for channel surfing, and this sort of purposeful domesticity - scrub the counters! buy more dish soap! - gives me a sense of fulfillment no 30-year-old travel writer should be forced to admit. In fact, my biggest regret as I watch reruns of Sunday Night Baseball, digging into the prawns massala I whipped up with zeal, is that I didn’t think to do this in Beirut or Kampala or any other stop along the way.

When a friend from Dar decides to pay a visit, our weekend of wining and dining at the tourist traps, of snapping pictures and browsing in the curio shops, is as much a vacation for me as it is for her. Jessie has been working in maternal health care in Dar - her second summer foray into the Tanzanian work force in as many years - and the grind of being her office’s designated mzungu has nearly unraveled her nerves in just a few weeks. A certified, card-carrying, college-educated Canadian, she’s quickly emerged as an authority around the office, her grammatical skills employed on every memorandum and proposal, her opinion eagerly sought out at meetings. That she’s enjoying a respect no 22-year-old health-care worker in the Western world could possibly imagine, though, is tempered by the mounting workload: with co-workers constantly deferring to her better judgment - or just slacking off altogether - she’s taken on more than she’d originally signed up for. Coupled with a power outage at her apartment earlier in the week - and the constant conniving of a sticky-fingered house girl - she’s reached a point where getting trashed on the waterfront and eating out three times a day is the only way to restore some measure of equilibrium.

It’s a gluttonous weekend, and after nearly two weeks of home-cooking, a bit of gourmet seafood is a nice change of pace. It’s nice, too, to blow off my writing for a few days, putting a couple of works-in-progress on the backburner while we tour Stone Town. We admire the elaborately carved Swahili doors and snap pictures of old men on bicycles. We watch local boys on the beach using a spare tire as a trampoline - sprinting across the sand, vaulting with their bony legs, flying and tumbling through the air. We watch young guys in jeans and football jerseys, in white caftans, in track pants, diving into the water from the seawall, shirts drenched and clinging to their chests. We pinch the cheeks of small kids and look at masks and statuettes we have no intention of buying. We brush off the beach boys selling Tanzanian football jerseys and the ubiquitous “Jambo-Jambo” CD’s, a collection of East African hits so named because the title track, with its aggressively catchy refrain - “Jambo! Jambo bwana! Habari yako? Mzuri sana!” - gets sung in a funny little falsetto by every last beach boy wagging the CD under our noses. We sit on a breezy balcony outside the House of Wonders, wind shaking the palms and boats puttering across the bay, enjoying as perfect an afternoon as you could hope for.

And the booze flows freely all weekend long. We have afternoon drinks at Livingstone and sundowners at Mercury’s; we wash down dinner at La Fenice with beer and wine and sit groggily in the back of a taxi for the two-minute ride to Malindi. I’m drunk and stuffed for most of the weekend, which does little for my conscience in a town where gaunt, haggard kids shuffle around, eager for even the small commission that might come from bringing you to a certain restaurant or selling you a goddamn “Jambo-Jambo” CD. Every time I shrug off a beach boy waving a pack of cashew nuts in my face, I worry about the state of my soul. When Jessie finally heads back to Dar, I’m happy to hole up in my apartment for a few days, indulging in the breezy, non-judgmental company of ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball crew.

In a year’s worth of African travels, despite long stays on the Kenyan coast and in the safari ghetto of Arusha, I’ve never seen a place quite so driven by the pursuit of tourist bucks. After a few weeks you find yourself lulled into a sort of hypnotic stupor, watching the touts parade down Kenyatta Road with their packets of spices, the ruddy tourists fingering Masai statuettes and Congolese masks and tinga-tinga paintings that might just look good on the living room wall. It quickly becomes good sport to watch the new arrivals struggling with their backpacks on the jetty from my beachside perch at Mercury’s: walking sandals lashed to their feet, faces fixed with the grim intensity of white people in foreign lands. But there’s always a hint of self-recrimination just below the surface, and I know that, no matter how much time I might spend here in the weeks ahead, we are all of us part of the same foreign tribe, and I’m just another white guy snapping pictures of the natives and worried about getting too much sun.

Despite the carnival of sun-bronzed flesh around the waterfront, though, I’m quickly losing interest in the company of white people. It’s a startling development. Much of my grand design for plopping down in Zanzibar for a couple of months, after all, was not uninfluenced by the prospects of promiscuous white chicks in skimpy swimwear looking for holiday flings. After a few weeks, though, the novelty has worn off. It is a strange, paradoxical thing, to find yourself living in a holiday town. For a while you can skim along the surface, as giddy and care-free and sun-drunk as the rest; in fact, it’s easy to see how a certain class of ex-pat might find the scene addictive: the ever-changing cast of characters, the countless feats of self-invention, the tippling to good times in exotic lands. It’s a constant buzz, and one that doesn’t have to wear off: before you’ve had time to grow sick of the company, the punters and backpackers and gap-year students and volunteers and co-eds have all hopped back on their planes to Birmingham and Brussels and Boston, and a new crop has flown in to revel at the improbable joys of life in a tropical paradise.

Which might make for good, boozed-up memories and everlasting promises to keep in touch, but it’s hardly why I came to Africa to begin with. The longer the party, the bigger the hangover, and it’s not long before I’m steering clear of the boozy revels at Livingstone and Mercury’s, preferring to spend my time around the market or lost in the alleys of Malindi and Harumzi.

One afternoon on the waterfront I meet a fisherman named Miller, a muscular young guy sitting under a thatched canopy, watching the dhow builders chipping and banging away at a new boat. For two months they’ve been laboring on this project, he explains; tomorrow the owner - a wealthy old merchant from Oman - will be launching the boat into the sea. It’s a festive occasion, with all of the builders and fishermen gathering to push the dhow into the water, then digging into sweet, sticky haluwa brought by the owner. He invites me to come along the next afternoon and I readily agree, picking up some of my own haluwa along the way, as a token of my gratitude.

It’s a sweltering day, and when I arrive at the beach, the boat’s owner is sitting with some fishermen in the shade. He rises and grins and adjusts his kufi cap, taking my hand eagerly. His English is sparse, but when I gesture to my shopping bag and say the magic word - haluwa - he gives a little whoop of delight. Miller explains that the man was supposed to have some haluwa of his own delivered hours ago, but it still hasn’t turned up. There are sighs of relief all around: at least there will be some haluwa for the celebration. The man pumps my hand again and offers his thanks. He leaves for afternoon prayers, planning to launch the boat when he gets back. On the beach a few barebacked men are laying mangrove poles in the sand, making an improvised track for the dhow to slide across. The sun is fat and roosting in the tops of the palms. Tourists are milling around the water, waves lapping at their pearly white shins.

By the time the Omani returns there are twenty, thirty of us gathered around the dhow. Some are old men with salt-and-pepper stubble on their chins; others are young boys, their arms slender, their grins wide. We take up our positions, and one of the fishermen - a muscular guy with a loud, gravelly voice - shouts his encouragement.

“Moja!” One! There’s a powerful chorus of Yooooo!

“Mbili!” Yooooo!

“Tatu!” Yooooo!

We lower our shoulders and throw our weight forward. The boat slides along the mangrove poles, improbably light as gravity propels it, then comes to a rest halfway to the water. There’s good-hearted laughter and ribbing - many of these guys, you suspect, have just come along for the haluwa - and then we plant our feet again in the sand. Moja! Yooooo! I work my fingers along the edge of the boat, struggling to find a grip. Mbili! Yooooo! A few tourists have gathered, training their cameras on us. Tatu! Yooooo! We heave forward with a mighty shout, our feet kicking up sand, and the boat glides over the steeply sloping beach. We whoop and cheer ecstatically and give one final push. It is a glorious moment. Only the boat has different plans: it stops just a few feet from the water’s thin skirt of seafoam, a few rogue waves lapping at the helm. There are embarrassed grins all around; some of the crowd has already started trudging back to the shade. With one last little nudge the dhow takes to the water, and there’s a burst of congratulatory applause as we slap each other’s backs and offer our well-wishes to the owner.

Back in the shade the old man begins to dole out little plastic cups to the crowd. His haluwa has finally arrived, and there’s a rowdy scrum as everyone pushes forward to get their reward. Soon the old man is overwhelmed; a couple of burly young guys flank him, helping to keep back the mob. Things have so quickly gotten out of hand that it’s hard to really believe such bedlam could erupt over little cups of haluwa. It’s a dispiriting sight, with angry men demanding their fair share, and young boys on the verge of tears as the bigger boys elbow them to the side.

I’m reminded of a day in Nairobi, after a charity football tournament in the Kibera slum, when the event organizers began handing out stacks of promotional calendars to the crowd. Soon a scene of similar chaos ensued, boys pushing and clawing past one another to get their hands on these glossy calendar posters trumpeting the names of the day’s sponsors. For the poorest of Kenya’s poor, I thought, anything to break the day’s monotony, to enliven the threadbare walls of their homes, was worth the cursing, the shoving, the angry commotion.

And here, on this sunlit Zanzibar beach, with tourists snapping pictures and knocking back $5 glasses of wine: is this the sight of hungry men, desperate to put something - anything - in their stomachs? Or are there other, obscure motives at work that I’ll never be able to comprehend?

I shake hands with Miller and drift off along the waterfront, where the machinga are selling packets of cashews and knock-off sunglasses. The fishermen are loading their boats: at dusk they’ll set off for deeper waters, the lonely night spent bobbing on the darkened sea, nets cast beneath the waves. Crowds of tourists have gathered along the waterfront, fussing with their cameras. And I watch the Americans and the Dutch, the Italians, the British; I watch the rustling peasant skirts, the primary-color tanktops, the leather sandals bejeweled with appliqué flowers; I watch the arms toned and tanned, the hands covered in liver spots, the hair flecked with sand, the self-possession of great financial windfalls; I watch them fringing the shore, a beached tribe in 30 SPF sunblock and designer shades, pointing their cameras at the sunset.

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