We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

  We were running out of empty pages in our passports. With no empty pages, we would not be able to get visas to enter the countries that lay ahead. In the “old days” of global travel—before 9/11—one could show up at any U.S. Embassy and have extra pages pasted into a passport: a twenty-minute fix. No longer. The only solution available to us was to get new passports—while in Tanzania. We made an appointment at the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, a sparkling new compound not far from our apartment. We were buzzed through the wall surrounding the embassy into a bulletproof security post. We passed through a metal detector and surrendered our phones and cameras. A security official escorted us to the consular building, which we entered through a heavy blast-proof door. Once inside, we were directed to a small room where we met with a consular official who was sitting behind bulletproof glass.

  The shiny new embassy and the technology were impressive—and then I connected the sad dots. The U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam was one of the embassies bombed by al-Qaeda in 1998. There was a simultaneous attack on the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Hundreds were killed and thousands were hurt. The gleaming U.S. Embassy in Tanzania with its fortress-like security had been rebuilt after those attacks.

  “How long will it take to get the new passports?” I asked the friendly consular official behind the bulletproof glass.

  “They’ll be ready in seven to ten business days,” she told us. That was almost as much time as we had. We would be leaving Dar (as the locals called it) on a bus for Arusha in nine days. From there, we would depart on a safari, which we had booked back in India and was not flexible. We decided to take a gamble on the efficiency of the U.S. diplomatic corps.

  CJ was captivated by scuba diving after the Great Barrier Reef, especially once he realized that his penis would not explode. He persuaded us to take a side trip by ferry to Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania with excellent scuba diving. From the moment the island came into view, it was as interesting and exotic as “Zanzibar” would suggest. The water in the harbor was an arresting azure-blue. Wooden sailboats with large, billowing white sails skimmed across the picturesque sea. The architecture on shore suggested centuries of influence from different parts of the world.

  Zanzibar was developed as a trade port, connecting the Arabian Peninsula to Africa. Ships ferried cargo back and forth across the Indian Ocean: spices, ivory—and humans. The Sultanate of Oman controlled the island for nearly two hundred years. The capital city of Stone Town, a World Heritage site, still has a Middle East feel: a labyrinth of narrow alleys winding between whitewashed stone buildings with elaborately carved wooden doors. The British took control of the island at the end of the nineteenth century. David Livingstone, the British explorer who disappeared while searching for the source of the Nile in Central Africa, filed his dispatches to London from the telegraph office in Stone Town. That post office is still open; I walked by it every morning on my way to write at an outdoor café. The place is still a cultural crossroads. Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen (portrayed in the film Bohemian Rhapsody), was born in Zanzibar to an Indian family with ancestors from Persia.

  Our hotel in Stone Town had a rooftop restaurant with lovely views in three directions. Early one evening I went up to the roof to have a beer. As the sun was setting in one direction, a full orange moon was rising in the other. The call to prayer rang out from a nearby mosque. Zanzibar would be a perfect setting for one of those big-budget adventure films in which the stars find themselves in an exotic locale racing through narrow alleys on motorcycles, overturning fruit stands, and surprising shoppers at open-air markets full of colorful foods and clothing. That was how we felt every day, except that we were wandering on foot rather than racing on motorcycles. We walked the alleys of Stone Town, enjoying fresh fruit, seafood, and local dishes born of the island’s mélange of cultures.

  We also confronted the reality of what had made Zanzibar this bustling cross-cultural outpost: slavery. There was a small museum documenting the island’s role in centuries of trade in human chattel. Slaves were captured in the interior of Africa, brought to Zanzibar, and then exported to the rest of the world. There were maps and relics documenting this trade. The numbers were so large as to be numbing: at the height of the slave trade, sixty thousand humans were trafficked through Zanzibar every year. The exhibit that packed the most emotional punch was on the lawn outside: a full-scale sculpture of several women with chains around their necks looking up from a pit in the ground. I do not know what the rest of the family was thinking—it was a place where even CJ was silent—but as I looked into the pleading eyes of those enslaved humans, I could feel the weight of human cruelty in the depths of my soul.

  From Stone Town, we hired a taxi to take us about an hour up the coast to the tiny beach town of Nungwi, a destination CJ had picked for scuba diving. Sometime around noon we pulled up at a lovely resort overlooking a sandy beach and some of the clearest, most inviting blue water I have ever seen. The beach in Nungwi functioned like a road. The restaurants were on the beach, as were the hotels and even a little grocery store. We took off our shoes when we checked into the resort and did not put them back on for four days.

  For all the loveliness of the ocean and the beach, the heat at midday was oppressive. We retreated to our small air-conditioned rooms, or to the big open-air restaurant with ceiling fans whirring away. At about five o’clock, as the heat began to dissipate, tourists and locals made their way to the beach. Women in bikinis walked past women in headscarves. There were spirited pickup soccer games up and down the beach. Groups of tall, thin Masai men wandered past in their bright red robes. They carried long sticks, which from a distance looked like spears. Sophie had the temerity to join some local guys playing volleyball. “How is it going?” I asked during a break.

  “These guys are really good, and I’m out of practice,” she said.

  “Are you having fun?” I asked her.

  “Are you kidding?” she said. “This is heaven.”

  “Come on, Sophie, we’re starting up,” one of the guys called to her. She held her own, despite being out of practice. These were the golden hours, both because of the vibrancy of the beach and because the setting sun bathed all the activity in a soft golden glow—a cinematographer’s dream.

  About a quarter mile down the beach from our hotel—a walk, like the others, that did not require shoes—was Spanish Dancer Divers, the dive shop that CJ had selected for our scuba adventures. The water and visibility were as impressive as the Barrier Reef, if not better. During the boat ride back from one of the dives, we encountered a pod of dolphins. CJ grabbed his mask and fins and jumped into the water with them. The dolphins swarmed around him for a brief stretch and then disappeared. “How long do you think I was swimming with them?” he asked when he climbed back into the boat.

  “Ten seconds or so,” I said.

  “That’s long enough,” he declared.

  “Long enough for what?” I asked.

  “To cross ‘swim with dolphins’ off my diving bucket list,” he explained.

  After the dive trips, CJ remained behind in the Spanish Dancer office, a small open hut on the beach, where he paged through the reference books to identify the creatures he had seen. He befriended the staff, who answered his questions and loaned him equipment so he could snorkel off the beach. There was also a wild monkey that camped out in the Spanish Dancer hut. Each morning, the monkey came out of the trees and ensconced himself in one of the comfortable chairs. The first time I walked into the dive hut and saw the monkey, I was shocked that the staff had not noticed him. “There’s a monkey over there sitting in one of your chairs,” I told a dive instructor doing paperwork.

  “He’s here most days,” the guy replied without looking up. Leah and I were amused by the image of CJ sitting in one chair for hours reading his diving books as the monkey sat opposite him—with the Spanish Dancer staff patiently indulging them both.

  On our last day in Nungwi, which was also our final
day in Zanzibar, CJ and I opted to do a night dive. Our dive instructor, Paul, gave us a briefing on the beach as we watched the sunset. He alerted us to something we had not encountered on the Great Barrier Reef: swarms of tiny fish. “If you begin to feel claustrophobic,” he warned, “just press your flashlight against your chest to cover up the light.” The tiny fish are attracted to the light and will dissipate if the light is extinguished, he explained. Tiny fish? I thought. We had seen sharks and barracudas and moray eels. How scary can tiny fish be?

  The three of us waded into the dark water. The dive was shallow, which meant that we would see different things than we did on the Great Barrier Reef. Also, our air would last much longer. (The deeper one dives, the more compressed the air in the tank becomes, meaning that every breath consumes more of it.) We followed Paul along the bottom, observing an array of nocturnal creatures: eels; cuttlefish; an enormous flatworm; a spotted ray; an anemone that was delivering electric shocks to small fish.

  And then the tiny fish came. To describe them as a “school” does not do justice to the blinding storm that enveloped me. I felt as if small stones were pelting every part of my body. All I could see were flashes of silver banging incessantly against my mask. Once my panic subsided, I put the flashlight against my chest and the swarm of fish disappeared. Only later, on the beach, did Paul tell us his most unnerving tiny fish story. On an earlier dive, one of the fish had swum straight into his ear canal, where it banged repeatedly against his eardrum. “It was like someone was using a power drill on my brain,” he said. He had to abort the dive so he could return to shore and get the fish out of his ear.

  CJ, Paul, and I stayed underwater for an amazing eighty-eight minutes. (Most dives are closer to half an hour.) We drifted slowly along the bottom as Paul pointed out fascinating night creatures. After the dive, we met Sophie and Leah for dinner on the beach. The restaurants stayed open late to take advantage of the cool evening temperature. Zanzibar was a place where everyone was happy: Sophie was playing volleyball; CJ was diving and hanging out at Spanish Dancer Divers; and Leah and I were feeling relieved by news from Katrina that she was taking her medicine without incident and enjoying her travels with Kati.

  Thus, it was a rude awakening to put on our shoes and check out. When the ferry landed in Dar, we retraced our steps to the consular section at the embassy, where the woman who had helped us on our first visit slid three stiff new passports to us under the bulletproof glass.* She punched a hole in the old passports and returned them to us. In theory, the visas in those passports—including the Indian visas we had worked so hard to get—would still be valid.

  With new passports in hand, we boarded a bus before sunrise the next morning for the twelve-hour ride from Dar es Salaam to Arusha. We were the only non-Africans on the bus; the other passengers were mostly families, including more than a few crying babies. The air-conditioning worked, the bathroom was not locked, and if I angled my legs properly, my knees did not hit the seat in front of me. There was a hostess on the bus in a crisp blue uniform. The best innovation in Tanzanian bus travel, however, was a law stipulating that drivers can be fined if they arrive at a destination too quickly. It is a clever way to enforce speed limits. “The bus used to do this route in six hours,” one passenger complained to me. But I was delighted: the last thing I wanted was a lunatic driver racing along at eighty-five miles an hour.

  The bus made its way at a languid pace through a landscape that was flatter, greener, and more open than what we had seen in South America and Asia. On occasion, the flat landscape was interrupted by towering acacia trees blooming with yellow flowers. We stopped for lunch at an open-air oasis that offered a buffet lunch: rice, cooked bananas, chicken, beans, and sautéed greens. I was responsible for buying the tickets for the lunch buffet, which cost seven thousand shillings, or about three dollars a person. “Why do you think it’s so expensive?” I asked Leah.

  “I think we’ve just been traveling for a long time,” Leah pointed out. “Because that’s really not very much money for a full buffet.” The food turned out to be delicious—if overpriced by my distorted reckoning. The journey continued, and the hills gradually became bigger. Just before dark, we spotted Mount Kilimanjaro on the horizon.

  The bus dropped us on the side of the road in the dark, roughly thirteen hours after we had departed from Dar es Salaam, also in the dark. We put on headlamps and walked along the side of the road until we came to a small guardhouse at the entrance to our hotel. This was a luxury establishment, included in our safari, and the attendant was puzzled to see guests with backpacks arriving on foot. We had vacillated over whether to include a safari in our travels. The expense was significant and would have to be “off-budget.” On the other hand, a safari is much cheaper when one is already in Tanzania. A month earlier, my hand had been forced on this question, or at least nudged, when one of my Dartmouth colleagues sent me an e-mail asking if I would like to teach an extra class when I got back to Dartmouth. I accepted. The class felt like found money—much of which we promptly spent to book the safari. As we were checking into the hotel, Sophie used the bathroom in the lobby. “That bathroom is bigger and nicer than most of the rooms we’ve been staying in,” she exclaimed when she came out.

  At breakfast (buffet included!), we met our guide, Stanford, who loaded us into a Land Cruiser decked out for safaris: tires with enormous treads; a roof that popped up so we could stand and look out in any direction; a metal “bull bar” on the front to protect the grille; and bench seats just uncomfortable enough to remind us that we were going on safari. Stanford drove us through rolling green hills, with the hue of the distinctive reddish soil changing subtly along the way. In describing the shades of “orangish red,” I eventually turned to spices: paprika, cumin, cinnamon, chili powder. As we entered the Ngorongoro Crater, a hundred-square-mile indentation in the earth created by volcanic activity millions of years ago, I spotted two zebras in the distance. I stood up and began taking photos through the gap beneath the roof. Stanford did not slow down, which left me peeved. Did he not see these zebras a mere three hundred yards away?

  “Zebras!” I yelled, snapping more photos of the tiny creatures on the horizon. Still no response from Stanford.

  In fact, I was like a tourist who arrives in New York and begins snapping photos of five-story apartment buildings when the Empire State Building lies ahead. I was still annoyed that we had raced past the zebras when we drove into an open plain with wildlife in every direction: lions, elephants, zebras, wildebeests. The vista itself was impressive, the flat floor of the crater ringed by steep green hills. Every wildlife encounter seemed more amazing than the last: the baboon with a baby riding on its back; the zebras grazing lazily with an elephant behind them; the black rhinos—one of the most endangered species on the planet—trotting along in the distance. It was The Lion King, only for real.

  Stanford stopped the Land Cruiser next to a male lion resting in the shade. We were close enough to smell him and see the flies buzzing around his mane. CJ was unable to resist leaning out the top of the Land Cruiser to take a selfie with the lion in the background. Thankfully, the open top of the vehicle was far enough off the ground that he did not earn himself a Darwin Award.†

  The next day we continued on to the Serengeti, which is Swahili for “where the grass meets the clouds.” The land is vast, flat, and oddly entrancing for having no topography and few trees. The green and brown terrain stretches as far as one can see, creating an effect in which the ground does appear to meld with the sky. We drove through Masai villages, with their hallmark round thatched huts and wooden fences, just like the dioramas our kids had made in school. There were long stretches where we saw nothing, making it all the more interesting when we did: a pride of lions lounging in the shade; a small group of hyenas; a leopard resting in the V of a tree trunk.

  The “tented camp” that night had electricity, comfortable beds, and an attached bathroom with a shower. Still, it was in the middle of the Se
rengeti; the animals were not the visitors, we were. We played cards as the sun set, with the noise of small birds as the soundtrack. Five or six storks—enormous birds up close—were roosting in a tree that towered over the camp. It was not hard to imagine Hemingway drinking heavily in a camp just like this, cleaning his guns for a morning hunt. Our sleeping tents were only fifty yards from the dining tent, but we were forbidden from walking that short distance at night without a staff member accompanying us. Stanford told us that he once saw three male lions walk right through the middle of camp. “Don’t leave your shoes outside the tent,” he warned. “The hyenas will take them.”

  The next day, we happened upon a lioness that had recently given birth and was resting in a patch of bushes at the base of a large rock. Some kind of deer-type animal was lying dead on the ground beside her. “She’s resting before she shares the kill with her cubs,” Stanford explained. “They’re hidden in the bushes.” As we were watching the lioness, Sophie tapped me on the shoulder. “Look,” she said, pointing to a hyena approaching from the other side of the Land Cruiser. The hyena could smell, but not yet see, the freshly killed deer. We watched the hyena track the scent, pacing back and forth as it approached the lioness nestled in the bushes. When the hyena was within about twenty yards of the fresh kill, the lioness took notice, crawling out of the bushes and standing up on a rock to face down the approaching scavenger.