Arrival in Zanzibar
The air is heavy and warm. Cool night air rushes through the car windows, all four windows are rolled down because we’re cruising through the highway. It leads us from town through the tropical Jozani Forest. I breath as deep as I can to be filled with the life-laden winds. We are heading towards Paje village that lies on the south-western coast of Zanzibar. The man driving me, Hassan, is playing Islamic Tanzanian music from a flash drive. The melodies seem to dance in the wind. Palm trees, street cats, and mosques illuminated with warm lights. Sometimes the roadside is a marketplace, sometimes it’s a front yard, and sometimes it brings us deeper into the forrest. Bed frames sit out, fruit stands, and a man selling ice cream from a cart. Beautiful kitenge fabrics hang on lines outside homes. Mango yellow, baby blue, tangerine orange, lime green, fuscia - the colors in kitenge here sing of the seaside and its surroundings.
The stars here are set in the sky just the same as in Nairobi. I smile as I remember my first time seeing the constellations from East Africa, it’s rotation from Los Angeles and Oregon were stark. Now, it’s clear how fast something like the night sky becomes a new familiar to me. The moon is full on this night.
As we drive east the landscape opens up, more grass, larger plots of land, each thing is further from its neighbor. The crickets sing loudly the further we go. The air feels lighter on my skin and in my lungs. The trees are bigger, the houses too. Every few hundred meters a rich, smokey, sweet smell fills the air. Hassan says that every night at this time, the villages we’re driving through burn piles to maintain the forrest. The fragrance of the earth is like a romantic poem to me, courting me to cherish all that is here. Huge mango trees line the road on either side. Just past them are palm trees, banana trees, and fiery orange flowering shrubs.
The small buses here are called Dalas Dalas's. One passes by full of construction men perhaps ending their work day. The night sky is a warm blue. The full moon carves out silhouettes of palm trees and tin roofs of brick houses.
The air gets warm again. We approach Paje beach.
This is where I will live for fourteen days.