by James Best
I asked at reception, but I just seemed to confuse them. ‘So you want to see Kili?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
The girl at reception looked at me blankly. ‘You can see it from the verandah upstairs.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I know, but I want to see it without all the electrical wires and stuff. Is there somewhere out of town with a good view of the mountain?’
‘So you want to go to the mountain?’ I had really confused her.
‘No, just to see the mountain.’
‘You can see it from upstairs.’ Around and around the conversation went. I’m sure they thought I was quite stupid. They eventually organised a taxi to a place that was meant to be half an hour away. We headed off in the cab, zipping through the trucks and buses of the traffic surrounding Moshi, dust and fumes swirling in the dying light, the three of us with not a clue where we were going.
Our taxi driver spoke little English. I just hoped he understood what we were after. I just wanted to take a bloody photo of the mountain! As far as I could tell we were going the wrong direction, skirting the mountain base. It was also taking a lot longer than half an hour. Eventually we headed in towards Kili. He was taking us to the park entrance.
Given the language barrier, there was no way we could explain to him what we actually wanted, and we had a lot of trouble convincing him to turn around as the sun disappeared behind the canopy of cloud surrounding the mountain. We couldn’t see Kili at all. Morton and I shrugged. It wasn’t a big deal. To Sam it mattered even less—just another long drive on the crazy roads of Africa.
We were meeting Kerri and Mama Grace for dinner in their home town. They knew the best place to go: a local steak restaurant run by British expats. The food was excellent and Sam was stoked he could have real ice cream. In between stuffing his face, he talked and talked and our hosts got to know his quirky personality a little better. Sam has a knack, for all his social inappropriateness, of winning people over. Throughout the trip this aspect of him, previously only known to people close to him, was increasingly apparent to those he’d only met once or twice. Due to his frequent exposure to strangers, the time between a first introduction and a prolonged reciprocal conversation was shortening. It also made him a lot more fun.
It had been a good night, despite Sam insisting on patting the head of a small baby on a table of wazungu women sitting nearby. Fortunately, the mother didn’t mind.
The next day was a big one of travel, as we journeyed east across northern Tanzania to Dar es Salaam. It would be our last long bus trip in Africa. There was the walk to the bus station with Sam whinging constantly, a crappy roadside coffee with me whinging constantly, and then nine and a half hours on a crowded bus.
The Jurassic landscape of northern Tanzania, with its mountains soaring up from the flat plains, gave way to a more stereotypical Africa: acacia and thorn bush scrub scattered with roadside stalls selling mobile phone data cards, warm soda bottles and a cornucopia of Chinese-made just-about-anything. Piles of burning rubbish smoked the air, young men filled their boda boda tanks with petrol from Coca-Cola bottles and brightly swathed women, shrouded and veiled, swayed along, their cargo motionless atop their heads and infants on their backs poking out from their robes. When we slowed, children waved at the bus and shouted ‘Jumbo’ (Hello) and ‘Mumbo?’ (How are you?).
Our progress, as always, seemed to falter as we neared our destination. As the bus crept along, I was having trouble deciding which was moving more slowly, the bus or the plot of the melodramatic Swahili movie flickering on the television suspended from its ceiling. There was no escaping it; you had to look at the screen. One-dimensional characters (with baddies inevitably getting their comeuppance), hilarious special effects (devils and spirits invading the souls of the protagonists), and a music score that made spaghetti westerns look understated were interspersed with more modern African elements. Mobile phones were omnipresent, money meant everything and HIV was a common theme. Sam was mesmerised, Morton and I were anaesthetised.
We crawled into the Dar es Salaam bus station. While a city of three million people, Dar had a reputation for being, well, boring. Several years earlier, Morton had lived in the city for six months, so it was good to have a knowledgeable guide handy. He organised a cab and we ducked and dodged our way across town in the ridiculous traffic, past embassies and shopping malls, through shanty suburbs and roadworks, until we finally reached our hotel, one that Morton was familiar with, on the north shore of the city.
A familiar ritual followed: unloading packs, organising laundry, sort out wi-fi access, deciding on dinner, checking emails and just lying down for a spell. I tried to get Sam to help me in such situations, but sometimes I was just too knackered to bother.
Matt arrived at our hotel after spending two hours crossing the city from the airport in the peak-hour traffic. It was great to see him.
He looked at Sam and did a double take. ‘Sam, you’re so tall! And what’s going on with your hair?’
Sam flapped, bounced up and down, and smiled at Matt, peering at him through the greasy long hair covering his eyes. ‘Matt Rickard is in Africa!’
We headed to a beach-side restaurant nearby. Sam devoured a pizza and we got devoured by mosquitoes; I had forgotten the insect spray. Matt and I had a big catch-up, and Matt got to know Morton, although he kept mistaking his name and nationality: Morton the Dane became Milton the Norwegian.
We tried to figure out what to do in our time together. Go to Zanzibar? Travel up the coast? How long should we stay in Dar? Sam, what do you think? Sam talked and talked but it wasn’t quite on-topic: Harry Potter, The Incredibles, The Simpsons, Mugabe, ‘Idiot’ Amin, Hermione Granger.
Matt turned to me. ‘Er, Sam talks a lot now!’
The next day we cruised around the city with Morton as our guide. I tried to get Sam to take the lead but it was difficult with the four of us, and it was also a challenging environment. The roads were, like in all African cities, quite dangerous, and the footpaths were obstacle courses: impromptu shops, parked cars, tut-tuts, motorbikes, boxes, crates, displays of CDs, clothing or electrical equipment on racks. Anything, everything, and then some.
On a corner a man was making a racket, somewhere between singing, rapping and just being a pain in the arse. He was surrounded by a crowd of thirty or so people, some of whom were taking pictures on their phones, their interest perhaps piqued by his oddness.
As we skirted the small crowd I accidentally stepped on a man’s foot. I immediately apologised, but he grabbed my upper arm and squeezed, hard. I winced in pain as I continued to profusely apologise. But then with his other hand he grabbed Sam. At this point I got seriously worried.
It was now a scuffle. Sam cried, ‘Hey, Dad, he is hurting me!’
‘Let him go!’ I yelled. I pushed the man, who let go of Sam but continued to squeeze my arm. His eyes were bloodshot and hazy, and I realised he was stoned. I managed to hit his hand away from my arm. People were jostling and yelling all around us. In the middle of the melee, the man suddenly smiled, put his hands up in the air and retreated. He’s up to something, I thought to myself.
Matt sidled up beside me. ‘Check your bag. Some people were close to it.’ I checked the daypack I had been carrying; it was closed and intact and the stills and video camera were both inside.
Morton took the lead. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
We headed for the nearest taxi stand and tumbled into a cab, out of the glare, dust, noise, heat and chaos. As I hit the tatty vinyl back seat, the penny dropped. ‘My wallet is missing.’
‘Fuck, really? What was in it?’ Matt said.
I checked my money belt as I replied. ‘Only about thirty bucks. All the big stuff and credit cards are in my money belt.’ I felt cross. ‘Damn, I knew he was up to something…But I trod on his foot…’ I was turning the events over in my head.
Morton joined in. ‘He probably stuck it under yours on purpose.’
‘Bastard!�
� My anger was rising, as was my embarrassment. I examined my arm. Some bruises were coming up.
Sam wasn’t happy. ‘The police should arrest them. They should apologise for stealing your wallet.’
‘I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon, Sam,’ I replied, reminding myself that, unpleasant as it was, this was probably another of life’s valuable lessons for him.
CHAPTER 36
Sam in charge
The next day, Matt, Sam and I flew to Mafia Island, while Morton stayed in Dar to sort out his upcoming trip down to Zimbabwe. We had selected Mafia, an island south-east of Dar off the Tanzanian coast, more on a whim than anything else: it sounded good in Lonely Planet and we could make endless jokes about Italian gangsters. We could have gone to Zanzibar, but we knew we were visiting there later when Heiress Film’s camerawoman, Naomi, arrived, and Sam didn’t want to go twice. He was now in charge, after all.
It had been over a week since I made my commitment to Morton to put Sam in charge. I had certainly increased the level of responsibility I was giving him, but still wasn’t able to do it perfectly. Sometimes, for safety reasons, or even time management reasons, I just had to do things myself.
It was my natural inclination in this uncertain environment that I had purposefully placed the two of us in to be protective. Consciously I knew this, and I had to actively resist the urge. Since the new commitment, I’d become more focused on letting go. I also think it helped that I’d overtly made that commitment to Morton, and also to Matt, who’d been informed. I felt like I was being watched in how well I performed my role, which was a good thing.
Sam was making more decisions: what to eat, when to go, when to stop, how to get there, what to buy. I had to keep handing over the reins.
So, with Sam involved, we decided to go to Mafia. The tenseater plane was the smallest Sam had ever been in. We flew over the tropical waters and landed on the island’s tiny airstrip. Mafia, home to forty-five thousand people of mixed African, Arab and Indian descent, had been fought over for centuries due to its strategic position. The Arabs, Portuguese and various African tribes and kingdoms had held sway at different times, with vicious battles for supremacy and atrocities committed.
We found the single budget accommodation on the island and settled in. We were the only guests, and the first in over a week, despite the hostel’s spectacular position on a beach-side precipice, with sweeping views across the Indian Ocean back towards the African mainland. The hostel manager said tourists were staying away because of the upcoming general election in Tanzania; people were spooked about potential political violence. Looking through the palm trees to the deserted beach below, it was hard to imagine significant activity here at all, let alone violence.
The three of us took a stroll down the beach. With the tide out, fishing boats were marooned by the receding waters, lying tilted on the sodden salty flats stretching away from the beach nearly to the horizon.
On the beach, fishermen mended their nets, children played with crab shells and old anchor chains, and women carted sacks of grain and buckets of fish on their heads. It felt like we were the only wazungu on the island.
We walked into Kilindoni, the capital, for lunch. We sat down in a dodgy and dimly lit bar, near empty, with white plastic tables and chairs on a concrete floor under a broad conical thatched roof. Mayai na chippi (eggs and chips) was the plat du jour. We ate our lunch while Matt tolerated the slurred rants of a local alcoholic on the scotch at midday, and I tried to decipher the persistent requests from a woman who clearly had some intellectual impairment. It appeared to me she probably had foetal alcohol syndrome. I eventually figured out she wanted me to take a photo of her so she could request some money from me for doing so. I relented.
I unsuccessfully looked for a wallet in the threadbare shops, to replace the one stolen in Dar, before we grabbed a tut-tut back to the hostel. The afternoon was idled away in chess, games of Five Hundred and reading. We watched the massive tide sweep in from the sea and pluck up the fishing boats from their resting positions, our footsteps from our midday stroll down the beach now three metres underwater.
The sun dived, dissolving into the mauve haze before reaching the horizon. We ate some decidedly good Indian seafood and slept well despite the echoes of village life outside the hostel walls: dogs barking, roosters crowing, the call to prayer through crackling speakers at dawn and laughter on the sand-lined streets.
Our second mellow day in Mafia began with some much-appreciated free time for me. While Matt and Sam played chess at the hostel, I headed down to a pier shooting off from Kilindoni and strolled the two-kilometre stretch of sun-bleached grey boards, out to an open and unfenced twenty-metre-wide platform at the end.
I was the only person on the entire length of the pier.
A fishing boat, its hull painted in red, yellow and black stripes, with SURE BOYS in large white letters on the free board, rounded the pier and headed towards the village. It was packed to overflowing with men, ropes, boxes and plastic crates. The crew waved to the mzungu sitting alone on the platform in the wind, probably thinking I was very odd, even for a mzungu.
Thirty metres below me, a one-armed man snorkelled with a spear gun in the deep waters around the great pylons of the pier, which were cloaked in orange kelp below the waterline. I could see no way he could climb up onto the pier, so I guessed he had a long swim back into town when he was finished. I was worried just watching him, but he probably did this every day.
Buffeted by strong winds, I sat in the centre of the platform and looked out to the endless Indian Ocean. An eerie feeling swept over me. I reminded myself it would be very foolish to plummet off the platform. I didn’t know why I would ever fall off, but I reminded myself just the same.
When I returned, batteries recharged and thankful to Matt for my ticket-of-leave, the three of us walked along the beach to Kilindoni again, with the intention of catching a local minibus across the island to the ferry to Chole, the ancient capital, which sat on a tiny island off the south coast of Mafia and was now home to all the ritzy resorts.
The bus was filled with Islamic women and children, adorned in colourful robes highlighted with sparkling jewellery and metal threads. After a one-hour drive to the ‘ferry’—a four-metre runabout with an outboard motor—we were on our way across the emerald waters to Chole.
As we chugged along, the sea breeze buffeting us, Matt turned to me. ‘Sam is pretty chilled. I don’t know how my kids would go if I got them to do this sort of stuff.’
I smiled. ‘Oh yes, travel doesn’t faze him at all these days.’
We jumped into the warm shallows and waded ashore, shoes in hand. We walked around ruins of nineteenth-century gaols and administrative headquarters, the stone buildings now only held together by the strangler figs growing in their courtyards. I pretended I was stuck behind the bars of a derelict gaol.
Sam pointed and grinned. ‘It is Azkaban!’ The prison in Harry Potter was probably much more secure than this one.
We looped back through a cute village with no roads, only walking tracks. In the primary school, a baobab dominated the grassed playground, and children in white shirts and emerald-coloured pants and skirts gazed and giggled at the wazungu.
That evening, on the hostel verandah, we once again watched the tide come in while we played chess and practised juggling and catching.
‘I’ve never learnt to juggle,’ Matt observed.
‘It’s not a skill that’s normally required in surgery,’ I reflected.
It was another spectacular sunset, the sky lit high in crimsons and pinks, reflecting on the water like a Turner seascape. We all just looked. Nobody spoke. My heart rate was possibly the slowest it had been the entire trip. Perhaps, as the journey drew to a close, I was finally adapting to the African pace.
Perhaps. That night my heart rate was not so slow. Booming reggae and African dance music thumped across the village all night. We would later learn that it was a wedding, whic
h I suppose made us feel a little more conciliatory It stopped at four a.m. but then restarted, much to my and Sam’s annoyance, twenty minutes later. It wasn’t like you could call the police to complain. Just before dawn, the music competed with the call to prayers from the mosque. It made for an interesting contrast in vocals. At least I couldn’t hear the mosquitoes hovering inside my net.
We reluctantly left Mafia and flew back to Dar. Matt took a second flight to Zanzibar, where we would meet him in a couple of days. I met Naomi, the new camerawoman from Heiress, at the airport and we caught a cab together back to our hotel, where Naomi struggled with her jetlag and Sam got used to the fact that she wasn’t Max.
The next morning Naomi, feeling human again after a decent sleep, got to work. I’d forgotten what it was like to be under the microscope. Probing interviews, retakes and waiting for shots to be set up became part of our day once more. Like Max, Naomi did what she needed to do while remaining respectful of Sam, cognisant that it was indeed a burden but an unavoidable one.
We vanished into the crowds of the market area again, the site of the theft of my wallet. I was still nursing the bruises from that visit but we thought it might provide some interesting footage. The streets were lined with mats and sheets covered in shoes, belts, books and jewellery. Motorbikes and tut-tuts slipped through the maze of people and wares. Bowls and bales were carried on bobbing heads. And a thousand colours exploded everywhere we looked: in the spices, the haberdashery on display and the hijabs and buibuis women wore.
Shopkeepers sang to the streets, music blared from speakers, megaphones competed to send out messages from politicians atop political party trucks and from mullahs atop mosques. Corn roasted on coal fires, and peanuts boiled in gas-fired pots. And we didn’t get robbed.
The next day an American woman sat next to us at breakfast and Sam spontaneously started up a conversation with her. ‘How old are you?’