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Published: December 21st 2023
Again I watched the sunrise from my bed! When I went onto the patio for a bigger view, I saw first one and then two elephants ripping and crunching trees in the valley below. An exotic way to end the safari part of our trip.
Breakfast was, as yesterday, vegetable omelet with toast, plus hot water and lime. Today there was some local, tough back bacon.
Once out of the Tarangire Park environs, we joined the highway and made good time. Speed bumps were limited to before and after villages, where the speed limit was 50 k. Cows plodding along and across the road were very emaciated, a few looking like they would be unable to hang on until the rains. The grass had been chewed into dust. More traffic moved in both directions, because we were on the way to Arusha, the major city of the region.
Our flight to Zanzibar was scheduled at 1:00, which meant an early lunch. Lucas told us that when he mentioned to his wife we would be eating at a local restaurant, she insisted that she cook lunch for us in their home!
Before that, we stopped at Hope School,
which Lucas founded and runs as a non-profit. The full name is
Hope School for Boys and Girls , with equal enrollment for both. He is rightly proud of it. He told us that fees are $450 per year, there are scholarships, and donations sustain much of the program. The school consists of several substantial buildings. The main building is two storeys; the class rooms are on the second floor, and on the main floor are a large dining hall and baby rooms. In keeping with other schools in Tanzania, they take children as young as two. One large room is chock-a-block with little beds for their naps, and the ceiling is painted in happy designs. Throughout the school almost every wall, inside or out, is painted with the alphabet and numbers or inspiring slogans and pictures with English words.
One new building is called Innovation House, devoted to the sciences and the arts. The paintings on the walls are cute cartoons of kids making engineering drawings or doing chemistry experiments. This is also where the computer classroom is, and soon there will be display space for the children’s projects. Outside, there is a large basketball court, cement ping-pong tables (the wood ones wore
Innovation House
Special classrooms for sciences and artsout too quickly), and a participatory garden. We met Lucas’s youngest sister, who is the head teacher; later, Lucas’s wife, Edith, told us she was the school manager.
Ten minutes away we entered a beautiful courtyard garden and magnificent house. This was Lucas’s family home. Each of the children at home came out politely to greet us, although they disappeared quite quickly; the oldest daughter, Sylvia, we had met in Kenya on the first day. Edith had prepared a feast of traditional dishes: vegetable stew, fried potatoes, potatoes boiled in a mildly spicy sauce, julienned sharp greens, meat sauce and spaghetti, rice cooked in beef broth, chicken legs in red sauce, and fried sweet bananas. (Although this dish was made from sweet bananas, I think they were cooked when green, as they were firm and not very sweet.) Lucas brought out some wine, and, as we were leaving, he gave Mariana and me the two unfinished bottles. Nice day on the beach tomorrow!
Another ten minutes to the small airport. As can happen on tours, Lucas was able to pile all our luggage together, to avoid overages, if any. Thankfully no one weighed the hand luggage because mine
Arusha
Over 600,000 population was full of cameras and equipment that probably weighed more than the local limit of 5 kg. Everything was screened, however. I beeped and received a pat down. For about an hour we waited in the sheltered, open-air lounge. When the moment came, the passengers rushed onto the plane – no assigned seats. Thanks to following Mariana, I got a window seat in the fourth row, just in front of the props.
What a difference a one-hour flight made – leaving behind the dry mainland to land in green, hot and humid Zanzibar! After a scramble at the airport to recover and scan our bags (again), we drove about an hour to the east side of the island. People were everywhere, even in what our local guide, Taib, called “rural”. He told us that agriculture is second only to tourism in their economy. All kinds of plants are grown together in mixed fields and gardens, ensuring good soil and lots of food variety.
Taib told us that during the height of covid the only tourists who came to Zanzibar were Russians. The Russians were vaccinated with their own vaccine, and Zanzibar had no restrictions. The coming of 1500
tourists per day saved the economy. That stopped with the war against Ukraine, when all the Russians left the country. Ukrainians who had come on flights from Moscow were abandoned.
As we came into the Golden Clove Beach Resort, palms waved in the warm wind, pale frangipani blossoms welcomed us in profusion, and colourful bougainvillea shone with gay abandon. Staff organized us. Amidst the mêlée, the owner (in his seventies) introduced himself. He was from Qualicum Beach in BC; he had come to help a friend and never left.
My small chalet is one of a cluster, where we are all staying. The windows look into the tropical garden, which also contains the swimming pool. In the large dressing-room/bathroom, I changed into lighter clothes and sandals. The walk through the garden onto the public beach was liberating! Soft on-shore breezes played with the shallow water. Behind discrete screens of bushes and low trees, long-stay resorts lined the beach. In the wide bay, fishing boats were anchored, this being the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Changed into my swim suit, I first swam in the ocean, bobbing on the swells, but too much attention was needed to avoid being
dragged out by the tide. I retreated to the sun-warmed swimming pool and into my comfort zone of lengths. This was my sixth consecutive day of swimming!
Dinner was tasty: two pieces of well-prepared octopus, two tentacles of charred calamari and a piece of lightly fried fish, accompanied by a lemon sauce and steamed vegetables. Five of us shared a bottle of red from lunch.
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Isabel Gibson
non-member comment
So much colour in the school! Lovely - and much ahead of any school construction I saw in Guatemala, which was all unadorned concrete block with high windows. And so much colour in the airplane view of Zanzibar City. In my teens I read a historical novel of Zanzibar where the Arab king fell in love with the green of Zanzibar, compared to the desert of his home. I love the story about the BC'er who "converted."