Approaching Zanzibar, with the green line of the shore scrolling by, I fiddle with my iPod while the sun warms my cheeks. This is not at all a bad way to live. Soon the vegetation gives way to the whitewashed walls of Arab palaces, to church spires and minarets, to the dhows breezing into port with their sails puffed out. There’s a bustle around the ferry terminal, a heaving mass of porters waiting, as I’ll soon learn, to scramble onto the boat, grab at anything in sight, and hope that the owners of a particular bag will – too flustered to argue – fork out a few shillings for them to carry it onshore. Livingstone, arriving at the start of what would be his last visit to Africa, found all the clamor of Stone Town, its duplicitous dealings and hypocrisies, to be distasteful. Raw sewage and human excrement filled the streets; “the stench at night is so gross or crass,” he wrote, of the place he dubbed “Stinkibar,” “one might cut out a slice and manure a garden with it.” Murderous thieves prowled the streets at night. Foreign diplomats and merchants – bent on their own Machiavellian schemes – plotted behind closed doors, eager to cash in on the island’s riches while ignoring its odious role in the slave trade. Livingstone wanted no part of the place. Instead he longed for the pleasures of the bush, far from the tainted influence of the white man, where “the stimulus of remote chances of danger either from beasts or men” was preferable to the coarse designs of the Americans and Brits.

I – no Livingstone, to be sure – will be happy for a month of good eats, steady boozing, and promiscuous Europeans in skimpy swimwear. At the Pyramid Hotel, climbing the vertiginous stairs, dumping my bags in a room on the top floor, I lie in bed and kick off my shoes and stare at the ceiling fan. Outside a crow squawks and beats its wings, lifting from a corrugated iron roof. Children’s cries sing from everywhere. I take a long shower and unpack some fresh shirts and go downstairs to meet with Ibrahim. He’s a handsome, chatty, agreeable man, and his solemn promises to find me some nice digs bode well for the month ahead. I run down my list of non-negotiables – a fully functional kitchen, natural light, plenty of space – and give him a ceiling of 300 bucks. He says he’ll see what he can do.

Outside, with dusk approaching, I lose myself in Stone Town’s twisted nettle of alleyways, visions of the great souqs of the Middle East dancing through my head. My inner Arab approves. I’m feeling upbeat about the month ahead, eager to unravel the mysteries of these winding streets – and, just as importantly, to sit at my laptop and begin the laborious project of getting my writing back on track.

The apartment question, though, is a distraction from the start, desperate for resolution. I’ve arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, and, at the risk of being impulsive – this will be, after all, my home for the next four weeks – I’m hoping to find a comfortable pad by the end of the week. I enlist the help of everyone I meet – the ubiquitous, gregarious beach boys are eager to make a few bucks at my expense – and by day two, I’ve already lined up a half-dozen house calls around town. My hopes and spirits are high: with any luck, I’ll have a place wrapped up by the evening’s sundowners. Ken, a portly kid in a wool-knit hat who, as I’ll soon learn, is one of Stone Town’s most eager hang-abouts, assures me he knows the perfect place. That things are going improbably smoothly at this point doesn’t raise a single alarm. Desperation, when it rears its ugly head, will do funny things to a guy’s capacity for common sense.

Ken, fat and mirthful, prodigiously sweating, takes me to his home and introduces me to his father. Ikrima is tall, angular, athletic. He wears a cut-off Nike t-shirt and running shoes and a look of shellshocked befuddlement at the pudgy, waddling progeny plucking the shirt from his moist man-breasts. He takes me to see a friend’s house on the north end of town, a gated, white-washed building with air conditioners thrumming in the windows. The owner is doing some business in Malindi – a neighborhood nearby – and we sit on a bench in the shaded courtyard, waiting for the keys to arrive. It’s a hot afternoon, and the glare from the walls is severe. Soon four girls in shorts and spaghetti-string tops come outside, chattering in some quick European dialect. Two more girls follow minutes later. I am very pleased with the neighbors.

The houseboy arrives and he takes us inside, where we kick off our sandals and march up the dusty stairs. Ikrima shows me the kitchen and living room, the washer-dryer, the bright, airy spaces still inhabited by a lingering, feminine aura. He shows me the master bedroom, handsomely furnished with Swahili dressers and four-posted bed frames; it is about the size of a bowling alley. He shows me the kitchen again, turning the faucets and watching me watch the water that comes gushing out. Downstairs he calls the owner, who offers the room for $20 a night. I ask about long-term rates, but he’ll go no lower than $550 for the month. This is almost twice the price I offered Ken, and suddenly the visions of lazy afternoons on the living-room sofa, slathering sunscreen onto my cohabitants’ pearly backs, are replaced by images of a blunt butter knife slipping easily and bloodily between Ken’s puckered tits.

It’s just the start of what will prove to be an afternoon rife with stupidity. After each disappointment Ken haplessly blubbers about another place just down the road, still grinning beneath his wool-knit hat, marching on through the heat. Before long it grows clear that whatever requirements I’d originally offered for my prospective pad – size, cost, location, general unshoddiness – have been entirely drowned out by Ken’s eagerness to show me something, anything, that might lead to a commission. He takes me to meet a friend, Said, who’s renting a small apartment somewhere in the middle of town. We discuss terms in front of his own home – a tidy, modern little building that’s so new, it practically has a price tag on the window – before he shows me the neighboring rental. The windows are dusty and opaque, the gates rusted; a few stray, feral cats prowl through the high grass, looking hungry and abused. The only thing missing is the chalk outline and the police tape. I tell Said I’ll think it over.

Again Ken leads me through the maze of Stone Town’s back alleys, little kids beating spare tires down the street with sticks, old men sitting scrunched up on the barazas. We stop outside another house and rap on the door. A portly man answers, giving Ken an intolerant once-over before asking my business. Ken explains that we’d like to see the apartment his son is renting, but the man disapprovingly clucks his tongue. The apartment, he says, is a two-bedroom, and while I’m welcome to look around, it’s bound to be out of my price range. His fat head wags sorrily on the thick trunk of his neck. He wears a white t-shirt with armpit stains the color of egg yolk. When Ken, laboring through the heat, retires to the shade nearby, the man says,

“These boys, they cause so many problems.”

“Not problems,” I say. “Frustration.”

“Frustration,” he says. “Yes.”

We soldier on. In Vuga, a quiet, leafy neighborhood next to touristy Shangani, we enter the compound of one Dr. Mehta, his name painted in bold white letters on the building’s blood-red walls. I’m hot and hungry and no closer to an apartment than I was when I rolled out of bed in the morning. My patience with Ken is quickly running out. We trudge up a flight of stairs and find a fat, elaborately made up Indian woman reclined on a divan, looking languid and expectant, as if we’d come bearing gifts of gold and Arab spices. She waves us inside, her gestures slow and sensuous, her little feet tucked up beneath her. The place is decked out in gilt-framed paintings and little elephant statuettes of obscure Oriental gods. The woman tells me in a high, trilling, Hindi-accented voice that she’s from Texas. At the table a bedraggled, one-legged man sits with a crutch across his lap, fussing with a half-dozen pill bottles. When he offers to show us the apartment he swings to his foot with a deft movement, props himself on his crutch, and starts poling himself across the room like a gondolier. I have no fucking idea what’s going on here.

The apartment he shows us is large, musty, dim, depressing. The living room furniture looks like it was pilfered from a Holiday Inn, the bedroom mattresses seem to have fallen prey to hungry rodents, and the cloistered, yellowing light has the air of a place where people go to die. I poke my head into the kitchen, the counter cluttered with rusty knives and a doleful assortment of pots and pans, and wonder what tales of culinary woe might be told if those walls could talk. Outside, careful not to upset my one-legged friend’s balance, I give him a gentle hand-pump and offer to think it over. At which point I explain to Ken in firm, less-than-kindly terms that his services will no longer be needed.

It’s been an exhausting day, and by the afternoon, bitter and defeated, I go for a long walk around town, wondering if the day’s headaches are an ill omen for what might lie ahead. I pass the old court house and the dispensary, the library sitting handsomely decrepit at the end of Creek Road. I pass the clamor of Darajani Market, the cries of the fishermen unloading their catches onto the slick pavement, the haggling over prices, the colorful chaos. Could this place really be a home for me? Nearby a spice-seller, Said, offers to walk with me through the narrow, winding streets of Malindi. I’m reluctant for more company: after my trials with Ken, after the other predatory touts circled with their own apartment offers, the last thing I need is another guy looking to get something out of me under the pretense of being helpful. I’m cold, brusque, hoping he’ll get the point. Subtlety, however, is about as useful in these parts as a down jacket. Said hangs to my side, points the way. We turn corners, disappear down blind alleys, find a marvelous old building with elaborate balustrades and Swahili doors carved with all the faithful craftsmanship of a Spanish cathedral. Old barefoot men recline on the barazas, women in headscarves fan themselves in doorways. There are kids shouting, scooting, pedaling too-big bicycles with wild abandon. We turn once and then once more and then suddenly we’re in the courtyard of the Aga Khan Mosque, its handsome, elaborate façade flooded with late-day sunlight. The madrassas are out, the girls in bright white hijabs, the boys in swirling caftans and crooked kufi caps chasing each other through the courtyard. Their shouts, their shrill voices, carom off the walls and shoot into the sky like a flight of swallows. And it’s at this very moment, this bright sunshot instant, that I remember what it’s like to fall in love.

Back at the Pyramid, Ibrahim’s friend, a local fisherman, is home from work. His is the last apartment I have the strength to see today. He points to a building just twenty steps from the hotel, jangles his keys, opens the door. The apartment is on the first floor, a cavernous one-bedroom with a modest kitchen and a canopy bed and a gaudy living room decked out with gold tulle curtains and silk floral arrangements. It is, in its own scruffy way, absolutely perfect. He names a price: three hundred US bucks. I ask when I can move in. The next morning I haul my things the short walk from the Pyramid. I unpack my musty old backpack and fuss with the dresser and armoire. I plop down on the living room sofa and turn on the TV and pad around the house with naked proprietorship. The highlight of my day is buying a carton of milk, putting it in the refrigerator, and looking at it. After close to two years, even if it’s just for a few short weeks, I’ve finally found a place to call home.]]> TravelGator http://www.travelgator.com/do/blogs/The-Travelin-Gator-Tours-the-World Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

After such an inauspicious start, I’m expecting little from a few days around Dar: a good cup of coffee, fast Internet, maybe a bit of shopping to beef up my musty wardrobe. In the morning, though, with a warm tropical breeze blowing through the streets, with the candy-colored façades catching the sunlight, I’m finding it a surprisingly agreeable place. The great wagging palms, the weather-stained colonials, the barebacked men pulling rickety donkey carts down the street: there’s something of the sultry clamor, the colorful bustle of Mombasa, that stirs so many fond memories.

Suddenly the prospect of passing a few days, a week, doesn’t seem so unsettling. We watch the clamor from our balcony, the colorful whorls of bougainvillea, the man straining behind a cartful of coconuts. Due south the soaring minarets of Mosque Street, trumpeting the call to prayer, the fervid soul-rocking blasts. One of these, compact and ornate, with green onion domes and elaborate Arabic script etched into the stone, has become my favorite sight in the city. I’ll make a point to pass it once, twice daily in the week ahead, admiring the hysterical whiteness of its walls, the artful arrangement of domes and spires. In the afternoon the beggars sit in the slanted shadows: old men on crutches, colorfully swaddled women with infants crawling across their laps. After the Friday prayers they’ll line the sidewalk outside, hands extended, coins jangling, wrenching alms from the guilt-wracked faithful spilling into the hard daylight.

After the scruffy, shambling charms of the north, where whole towns and cities seem to have popped up overnight, there’s something appealing in how this city clings to its roots. It is history, on whatever small scale, that greets you in Dar es Salaam. Founded by the Zanzibari Sultan Majid, son of the great Seyyid Said, the “Haven of Peace” was built as a sort of pleasure palace on the shores of the Indian Ocean. But the early seeds failed to blossom; eclipsed by the more vital port of Bagamoyo to the north, the Sultan’s playground languished in its tropical torpor. By the time the Germans chose its protected harbor for the seat of their colonial government in the 1880s, the little village that would become modern-day Dar was all but buried in the bush. Eventually it grew into a busy trading community, a vital harbor. But the years haven’t always been so kind. In the weather stains that spread across the trading houses and dry-goods shops, the runnels and cracks of history, you see the slow, plodding passage of time. Still, there’s still a tangible presence here, a sense of past lives being lived. Today the dates carved into the city’s façades – 1952, 1931, 1917 – seem, by East African standards, prehistoric. And in a country where the dominant modes of construction – brick, thatch, mud, tin – are almost elemental, these buildings are a reminder of a purposefulness, a care, a modest artistry, that causes a funny little stir in my heart.

For many Tanzanians, of course, they are a different sort of reminder – not so much of the colonial past, but of the long, slow, slouching progress toward modernity. On a broad, stifling, sun-washed avenue, fighting through the heat, I meet a young musician, a reggae singer, who’s moved to Dar from the north. We walk past tall concrete towers – government buildings from the socialist ‘70s – and look with quiet deference toward the Mövenpick, the Swiss-owned luxury hotel, standing stoic and ramparted with its Moorish archways and fluttering flags. It is, to Mass, a symbol of the great economic strides being taken around him, this impregnable, five-star fortress by the sea. Turning away from it, into a chaotic nettle of streets, he shakes his head with distaste at the crumbling colonials.

“For you, these buildings are beautiful,” he says. “But for us, they are old, they are ugly. We want to tear them down and build something new.”

For Mass, the blue-glass skyscrapers of the Nairobi skyline would be a bold leap forward from the colonial claustrophobia of downtown Dar es Salaam. The past, after all, has hardly been kind to most Tanzanians, and for the countless hustlers and strivers who come to Dar in search of better fortunes, the city gives their ambitions a physical shape. It’s grown quickly in recent years; today, the population is estimated at close to three million. But as Mass, smiling, slightly tilted forward, as if rushing toward some unfulfilled promise, tells me about his music and his family – about the private past he’s trying to escape – I get the sense that this city, for all its rapid growth, isn’t growing fast enough.

The road to Dar es Salaam has been long and bumpy for Mass. He left Tanga, a small coastal town in the north, to pursue a music career in the city. Selling bracelets and necklaces, sunglasses and t-shirts, he was able to put together enough money to buy some studio time. He recorded a few songs; later, after performing live around the city, after receiving favorable reviews in the local papers, after aggressively promoting himself to tourists on the streets of Dar, he befriended a German who wanted to support his fledgling career. The man paid for Mass to record a full-length album; he pulls a copy from his backpack, along with a binder filled with newspaper clippings. Now Mass is hoping to raise enough money to produce a short video. If he can show it on EATV, alongside videos from established Tanzanian artists like Professor Jay and T.K.O., it might give his career the big break he needs.

Still, despite his guarded optimism, Mass seems exhausted by his struggles. By day he walks the streets, promoting himself and selling CD’s; at night, spreading a blanket across the pavement near a popular tourist restaurant, he sells more of the hand-made jewelry that helped get him started. It has been an uphill climb; battling the music industry establishment here, dominated by the hip-hop acts that have made Dar the capital of East African music, he’s found it hard to sell his soulful, conscience-raising songs.

“They do not like messages,” he says of the local music executives. “They do not want what is right, they want what is wrong.”

And still he survives, hustles, soldiers on. He sells me two CD’s, and offers the hope that I can promote him through my writing abroad. He’d like to record his video, and another album; if he finds enough modest success, he hopes to visit his family in Tanga, too. It’s been two years since he last saw them; when he speaks to his mother on the phone, she asks when he’ll come home. But the ticket to Tanga is costly; and for a prodigal son returning from the city, it’s expected that he’ll come bearing gifts for his family, for his neighbors. Mass shakes his head, wondering where all the money will come from.

“Life is hard, brother,” he says. “Surviving in the world is hard.”]]> TravelGator http://www.travelgator.com/do/blogs/The-Travelin-Gator-Tours-the-World Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

It’s something I’ve learned, after nearly a year in Africa – the value of balancing those brief bursts of intense interaction with a few days to myself. It’s the only way to restore my equilibrium, to stay grounded. It’s how I remember who I am. Wholesale transformation, after all, is not what I’m after. Certain peculiarities and annoying habits aside, I’m happy with who I’ve become after two years on the road. I’m happy to feel at ease in surroundings that, when I first left New York, would have felt alien, even hostile. (Picture a younger me bombarded by batiks and Masai machetes in Arusha.) I’m happy to have picked up the local mannerisms – the elbow-touching, the shoulder-squeezing, the hand-holding – that are reliable ice-breakers among strangers. And I’m happy, too, to be gainfully employed, to have a fat Forbes paycheck in my bank account, to have high hopes that the year ahead – should it finally bring me to Cape Town – will find my African adventures on the desks of dozens of New York editors.

In Moshi I’m a recluse: watching Euro 2008 at the hostel, hunkering over cappuccinos at the Tanzania Coffee House, eating plates of fried liver at the auspiciously named Chrisburger. The afternoons are mercifully overcast – the town’s heat can be sweltering – and it’s not until my fourth day that the clouds part and Kilimanjaro appears in the distance. It’s an awesome sight, rising over the mosques and market stalls, and I’m grinning dumbly as twilight paints Kili’s crown in purples, pinks and blues. At the rooftop bar in the Kindoroko Hotel, I buy a bottle of Konyagi – three thousand shilling’s worth of Tanzanian whoop-ass – and drink poor man’s gin-and-tonics while the sun sets. I am getting to be awfully happy with how the days pass. Having set no goals for myself in Moshi, the simple project of passing the time is one I attack with great verve, mild inebriation, and a small bit of slack-jawed wonder at the dumbstruck beauty of my life.

There have been some challenges, few and fleeting. The project of mailing home a package – an almost Sisyphean boulder, at this point, which I’ve been pushing along since Rwanda – finally reaches its conclusion here in Moshi. After a day of wandering town, scouring the dry-goods stores in search of cardboard boxes, I finally find one big enough to fit four Congolese masks, three thick paperbacks, and the accumulated detritus of the past few months. It is a day of great triumph. I haul my load to the Posta, where the customs clerk fills in the necessary forms in triplicate, weighs the package, and then watches me mummify the cargo with enough packing tape to cover Kilimanjaro. We debate costs. Surface shipping, she says, could take three months – maybe six – to finally make it to New York. I tell her I’m in no hurry, so long as it gets there before I do in the summer of ’09. I ask if it will get there in less than a year. She pauses, looks into the middle distance, and says,

“Probably.”

This is hardly reassuring. But in the past few days, I’ve already begun to worry about my finances again, plotting out the months ahead and wondering when the next check will roll in. I pay Tsh30,000 – about 25 US bucks. The clerk fills in a receipt and stands there with her pen hovering, giving me a curious look. I have a brief vision of my package bouncing along in the back of an old lorry somewhere in Chad, or strapped to the side of a camel in Mali. I ask if it’s stupid of me not to shell out an extra fifty bucks for air mail instead. The clerk laughs, shakes her head, and says, “Yes.” Not wanting to trust my fine Congolese masks to the whims of fate and African transport, I fork over the extra money and send the package on its way. Two and a half weeks later, it’s safely on the ground in New York, having most likely beat me there by a solid 14 months.

The more pressing task, by day three in Moshi, has been finding a reliable place to watch the European Championships. After a weekend plopped down on the hostel couch in front of the footie, I’ve learned that local TV programming is terrifically erratic. With no less than four channels to choose from over the weekend – the French EuroSport, the South African SATV, the Kenyan NTV, the Tanzanian TBC – I have no more than zero channels to choose from on Monday night. I wander out in search of a bar with a satellite – no easy task, on the streets of Moshi. I step in and out of grim, rough-and-tumble places where groups of young guys lean drunkenly against the wall and a fluorescent bulbs flare over the pool table. My spirits are low. With the eyes of the footballing world fixed on Austria and Switzerland for these next two weeks, the prospect of following along on ESPN.com is looking both dire and likely.

Until, luckily, improbably, I find a dark, crowded joint on a nearby side-street where forty pairs of eyes are fixed on a tiny TV screen. Success – however mild – boosts my spirits. I take a place by the bar, squinting toward the action, animated more by the cheers and shouts of the guys around me than by what little I can make out from the tiny figures racing across the screen. Beside me is a tall, broad man, solidly built around the midsection, who’s telling a story to a friend with great gusto. He welcomes me to the bar and offers me a seat and introduces himself as Akwilin Chuwa. This, I tell him, is a marvelous name, and one that, with any luck, will someday feature in a novel of bold and heroic exploits in the bush. Akwilin, laughing, shaking his broad shoulders, is in very high spirits. My unlikely appearance here, in his brother’s bar, seems providential. There are whoops and cheers as Spain scores a beautiful goal. We order another round of drinks.

Given his girth, his crisply tailored shirt, his thoughtful eloquence, it doesn’t surprise me to hear that Akwilin is a politician – a local councilman with the opposition party, Chadema. We talk at great length about the failures of CCM, the ruling party, and the economic tailspin that began under the reign of Benjamin Mkapa – the first Tanzanian president to be elected under the multi-party system. Mkapa, says Akwilin, ushered in a period of graft, corruption, and bad governance. The results are still plain to see, more than a decade later. Akwilin sweeps his hand across the room, where local boys – ragged, out of school, unemployed – crane their necks to follow the football, or jostle for the pool cue to gamble away some pocket change. There is, he implies, little for Tanzania’s youth to look forward to, with the cost of school fees too high, and the prospects for employment slim. Most of the boys come to his brother’s bar each night, joking and passing the time around the pool table, the 100- and 200-shilling antes passing back and forth between them.

Yet Akwilin is proud of his country, and of his countrymen. Look across the border to Kenya, he says, where just a few months ago, warring tribes were fighting in the streets. Despite the failure of his socialist policies, it was to the credit of Julius Nyerere – Tanzania’s founding father – that he was able to create a single national identity.

“There are more than 100 tribes in Tanzania,” says Akwilin. “But we are not Chagga and Meru and Masai. We are Tanzanian. When I meet someone from my tribe, I do not greet him in my mother’s tongue. I greet him in Kiswahili.”

The history of post-colonial Tanzania is notable – and remarkable – for its stability. Though independence in Kenya came at the bloody cost of the Mau Mau Rebellion, and though the Zanzibar uprising brought a swift and violent end to Arab rule on the island, the transition from colonial rule on mainland Tanganyika was auspiciously peaceful.

“We did not have a revolution,” says Akwilin. “We had white men writing agreements and signing papers. When I was a child, I would watch them coming to gather with the elders in the village, signing papers. There was no revolution in Tanzania.”

In the morning I wander the streets of Moshi, past the arched and domed mosques, past the old railway depot, past the primary schools where students in khaki shorts run screeching out the door, massive bookbags bouncing on their backs. I have lunch at the police canteen, where two giggling waitresses watch my every move. I buy a terrible painting from a guy who looks like he could use a break, I buy a CD of Tanzanian hip-hop, I buy another six-month supply of Lariam, though I’ve already been popping pills for the past year. The days are happy and peaceful here, and I’m not in the mood to go anywhere just yet.

One night I take a taxi to the Glacier Bar, a popular ex-pat haunt on the outskirts of town, rumored to be showing the football on a big-screen TV. On that count the Glacier Bar disappoints, but on the count of drunken, orange-bedecked Dutch girls cheering for Holland, it’s a rousing success. I have a few drinks with an old Dutchman, Albert, who runs a safari company in Moshi. We talk about my work, and about his travels in Africa. He’s deep into a bottle of Konyagi by half-time, and his attention starts to wander in the second half. Suddenly, precipitously, he grows blindingly drunk. He staggers and sways and offers apologies at his drunkenness. Nearby a husky Tanzanian guy stands up, steps back from the bar, and collapses in a pile on the hardwood floor. We collect him into a chair and call for a taxi. Albert, leaning heavily on the bar, looks at me in a boozy haze.

“You are one of the ones who really understands,” he says, and then his voice trails off. I lean forward, eager for the sage-like pronouncement he was about to levy on the world. What, exactly, do I understand? He stands up and sways boozily to the side, and then he, too, is in a heap on the floor. Certain morals involving the Glacier Bar and Konyagi are becoming crystal clear. I help him into a chair and call for another taxi. While I’m hunched over him, offering reassurances and giving his shoulder a sympathetic squeeze, I notice our Tanzanian friend has staggered off. In the distance I see his large, tipsy silhouette making its way toward the front gate. He stops to exchange a few words with the askari, rocks heavily to the side, and then he staggers into the night.]]> TravelGator http://www.travelgator.com/do/blogs/The-Travelin-Gator-Tours-the-World Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

As the main gateway to Tanzania’s northern safari circuit, its streets crammed with muscular, mud-spattered Range Rovers plastered with logos for local tour companies (Comfort Holidays, Sunny Adventures, Bushbuck Safaris, Leopard Tours), Arusha attracts hustlers, strivers and small-scale entrepreneurs from across the region. Around the clock tower roundabout – the city’s central landmark – there are flurries of greetings and handshakes, obscure combinations of clenched fists and pounded chests I’m still struggling to decipher. Business cards are passed out, paintings unfurled, bracelets dangled on long daisy-chains. A bedraggled old man wags a Masai sword at my chest, suggesting it would make the perfect keepsake. I ask if he’s ever tried to clear customs with a machete. He smiles limply, shaking his head, and offers a few batiks instead.

It is a small but energetic town, the odds always good that if the guy on the street corner doesn’t want to sell you something, he knows someone who does. A painting, a wood-carving, a walking safari into the foothills of Mt. Meru. One portly man, perhaps unimpressed by the slow traffic outside his fruit stand on a Thursday afternoon, ambitiously ventures, “Are you maybe looking to invest here?” In just a few days I’ve been cornered, corralled, forced with a peristaltic push through rows of masks and necklaces and slender statuettes. The days are warm, the sky patched blue and gray. In the afternoon the clouds part over the mountain, and the scalloped ridges around the summit shine gold over a scrawl of lingering clouds.

Despite its reputation for hassles and hard-bargaining touts, I’m already warming to Arusha. The level of ingenuity, of thrifty entrepreneurship here, never fails to impress. Packs of boys roam the streets selling cheap wristwatches, survival knives, thermoses, brass teapots, porcelain mugs, sneakers strung together like sausage links around their necks. Men hunch over a workbench – a derelict coffee table; a wooden plank atop two orange crates – dissecting cell phones and watches. They screw and solder, fingers maneuvering through piles of springs and batteries, cathodes and circuit boards. Tailors and seamstresses work in the shade outside their shops, bare and stockinged feet pumping the pedals of old Singer sewing machines. Cigarette-sellers wear grooves into the sidewalks on Sokoine Road, hawking slim packets of Sportsman and Embassy and Safari, coins rattling loosely in their hands.

On Old Moshi Road I watch a game of three-card monty beneath the leafy boughs of a mango tree. The dealer shuffles three tea biscuits across a cardboard box, one with a bright red logo stamped on the bottom. A man beside me explains, “He buys the biscuits because they are 50 shillings” – cheaper than a deck of playing cards. Deft sleights of hand, the rapid-fire patter of Kiswahili offering the game’s universal, idle promises of fast money. There’s a commotion as two khaki-clad traffic cops come whizzing down the road on a motorbike. The crowd scatters, the biscuits are pocketed. I’m surprised the dealer doesn’t think to devour the evidence. A few men thrust their hands into their pockets and whistle conspicuously in the shade. Minutes later I’ll see them getting harassed by a baton-wagging cop just up the road.

On the way back to my hotel one afternoon I’m accosted by a young Rasta on Sokoine Road. He’s friendly, rambling, prodigiously stoned; behind his milky eyes, I catch just the faintest flicker of the mercantile instinct that ignites most of the touts in Arusha. He introduces himself as Saaduu.

“When you see something, in Kiswahili, you say ‘saa,’” he explains. “And ‘duu,’ duu is like cool. Saaduu. It’s like when you see something cool. You get me, man?”

“Um,” I say.

“That’s cool man,” he says, wagging his Rasta head. “That’s real cool.”

We cross into the shade, where the street vendors are preparing for the evening’s trade. Slouching men peel oranges from the back of a donkey cart, barefoot women roast corn over charcoal grills. Saaduu bobs along beside me, his strides long and slightly springy. He wears a black baseball cap which reins in great coils of hair; when he shows me his identity card, the photo reveals thick braids pronging up from his head, like the limbs of a baobab. He pats a long scroll of canvases tucked beneath his arm, a gesture that’s wistful, slightly paternal. Saaduu is an artist, born in a small coastal town near Dar es Salaam. Like most of the guys I meet around town, he’s come to Arusha because of the bustling tourist trade – a chance to sell his work, meet foreigners, maybe find a sponsor to help him earn a degree at the local college of tourism.

Outside my hotel he shows me his work, tribal masks and village scenes and women’s faces etched from coarse grounds of sand. He tells me about the difficult process of grinding down stones, of the different ones he’ll use to achieve different colors and textures. He tilts one drawing so that it catches the light, grains of sand lit like stardust. When you look at it, he explains, you can pretend you’re lying on the beach, staring up at the sky. It is awful, and I buy it, and I pay way too much for it. Saaduu scrawls his name and phone number across the back. Later I prop it on my desk, tilting my head from side to side to reveal different constellations in the sand. Saa. Duu. Saa. Duu. You get me, man?]]> TravelGator http://www.travelgator.com/do/blogs/The-Travelin-Gator-Tours-the-World Mon, 19 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In Tulu – a small, scruffy town an hour’s drive from Nakuru – Peter greets me at the matatu stage with some of his teammates. He’s playing football for St. Andrew’s – an elite private school which fields a team for Kenya’s First Division – and I’ve come to watch them play a league match later in the day. We have a brief, warm reunion. It’s hard to say if the past few months have taken a physical toll; even last year, Peter was a lean kid – all bones and sharp angles. He wears a Kenyan warm-up jacket given to him by a friend on the national team. He smiles brightly. After all these months, it is very good to see him.

On our way to the school there’s a commotion up the road. Dozens of villagers have lined the shoulder, clapping, singing, wagging their hands, as a convoy of SUV’s barrels past. Peter explains that President Kibaki and the newly appointed Prime Minister, opposition leader Raila Odinga, have arrived as part of the grand coalition government’s goodwill tour of the country. They’ve flown into Tulu by helicopter – St. Andrew’s boasts its own air strip and landing pads – and now their convoy is hurtling toward Molo, where the two men will address a crowd of thousands in the stadium. For a few giddy seconds we watch the villagers stomp and cheer; Raila’s hand – a big, fleshy paw poking from a well-tailored cuff – waves from the back of a Range Rover. There are ecstatic howls from the crowd. Then the SUV’s disappear around a bend in the road, leaving behind a cloud of dust.

We walk along a gravel path toward the entrance to the school. St. Andrew’s is one of Kenya’s top private academies; Peter has heard that the tuition fees run upwards of Ksh600,000 – $10,000 – a year. The grounds are immaculate, suggestive of a well-kept English manor: short, clipped grass, bursts of flowers, ivy crawling up the walls. A long, high chainlink fence surrounds the campus, topped by angry snarls of barbed wire; a few feet beyond it is another fence, strung from high-voltage electric wire. We do not cross to the other side. Peter’s team and the St. Andrew’s staff share living quarters in a separate compound, just outside the school grounds. Jerking a thumb over his shoulder, where flaxen kids shoot across a playing field like bolts of gold, Peter says,

“We are not allowed to go across to their side.”

The askaris and cleaning ladies, the cooks and grounds keepers, live with their families in concrete barracks squatting on the hillside. Laundry flaps from clotheslines; cows low; goats chew. There are kids everywhere. We sit in the cramped bedroom Peter shares with a teammate, catching up on the past few months. When we spoke in January, I sent him some money through Western Union to help him reach Nairobi. But it would be weeks before he finally reached the capital.

“I was very unfortunate, because of this business in Nakuru,” he says.

In Nakuru his bus was stopped at a roadblock. Just minutes before, angry youths had set fire to an Akamba bus. Peter and the others onboard fled, only to be stopped by the police. They were wrongfully accused and taken to the local jail. It was where Peter would spend the next two weeks. By the time he was released Mathare had filled its squad, and Peter – jobless, faced with an uncertain future – returned to his family in Kitale. But the news in western Kenya was especially grim. Peter’s family, like other ethnic Kikuyus in the west, had been chased from their homes. They were staying in a local church; then in a police station. Only months later could Peter appreciate their narrow escape.

“In Kitale they were chasing people, but they were not burning houses,” he explains. Kikuyus living in Eldoret, or Kisumu – strongholds of the opposition – were not always so fortunate. Hundreds were killed; thousands of others returned to the Rift Valley, where Kikuyus remained the dominant ethnic group. But in Kitale, after the violence died down, the Munenes returned to their homes. A wary peace set in. Peter again turned his thoughts to football, even when his prospects looked slim. A cousin suggested Peter join him driving delivery trucks; he was making good money hauling cigarettes, produce, brandy.

“I thought maybe it will not work for me as a footballer,” Peter says, “maybe I will be a driver with Kings.”

In March he was invited to try out with St. Andrew’s. When he made the team, it gave him some hope for his football career. The team offered work and housing for its permanent team members; Peter, newly arrived, would have to share a room and pick up odd jobs until his future with the team was certain. Still, he had a roof over his head, and the school paid out small bonuses for the team’s performance – Ksh200 for a win, Ksh100 for a loss or draw. Last week, one of his teammates was hired to help the school install its electric fences. He put together a small crew, which included Peter. They split the day’s Ksh2,000 haul between the five of them. Slowly, things were looking up. Kings would have to wait.

We join the rest of the team at the coach’s house, just inside the main gate to the school. A few clouds have blown in, and the guys form a circle in the patchy sunlight, kicking and heading the ball around and around. The coach arrives in a beat-up station wagon that stalls on the lawn. His two young boys get out, jumping and squealing and high-fiving the players, before disappearing up the limbs of a tree. The air feels heavy, moist; it smells sweet and earthy, promising rain before the day is through. After their warm-ups the players recline on the grass, and Coach Nandabi goes over the game plan. He is tall, full-faced, wry, commanding. The players give him their full attention, and he sketches out formations and attack plans in the dirt beneath his feet. Then we leave the coach’s house and walk through the workers’ village toward the field, winding past banana plants and bungalows, children and livestock chasing at our heels.

The team plays on a scruffy pitch just a few minutes down the hill. The grass is overgrown, the ground is uneven; a dirt bluff rises beside one of the touchlines, framed by eucalyptus trees. The crowd numbers around a hundred – mostly young boys chasing after errant kicks, and older, jobless guys in their teens and twenties, with no better options on a Saturday afternoon. Much of the crowd, as I’ll soon learn, is seriously intoxicated. The first drops of rain begin to fall, and a few umbrellas – bright, multi-colored – pop open on the far side of the field.

If the old saying about the Brazilian football team is true – that the pressure they face is especially high, since they have 60 million coaches to impress – then the task of your average Kenyan footballer is no better. The crowd is merciless, shouting insults at the defense, howling at each strike that sails high over the crossbar. Still, there’s no question where its allegiance lies, and when some sloppy defending in the first half yields a goal for St. Andrew’s, there’s a raucous celebration. Dozens of boys storm the pitch, leaping and cartwheeling and chasing the goal-scorer into the far corner, where some impromptu dancing commences. When the rain begins to fall more heavily, just a few spectators jog into the woods for cover. The rest huddle under their coats, leaning together in the grass, closely following the action on the field.

Earlier, when we were chatting in his room, Peter talked about his plans for the future. Already he was looking ahead, hoping that his fortunes will improve this season. With Mathare FC at the top of the Premier table, he suspected his chances of joining them during the June transfer window were slim. But both Agro Chemicals and Sher Karuturi – mid-table clubs in the Premier League – have expressed their interest; one has hired a former coach, who still keeps close ties with Peter. He shrugged and leaned back on the bed, uncertain what the future might bring. If all else failed, he still had a place with St. Andrew’s, who are jockeying with three other teams at the top of the First Division. Promotion to the Premiership would mean better living quarters, a better playing field – the school has promised the use of its own manicured grounds should the team get promoted – as well as better money. A Premier League team pays Ksh8,000 a month – about $130 – to each of its players, with a Ksh1,000 bonus for each win. In the world of Kenyan football, where most players are forced to maintain jobs on the side, this would be a very big deal. Peter tugged on his socks and laced up his cleats and stretched his calves in the cramped quarters. There was no telling what lay ahead, but he was sure that whatever the challenges, he would be brave enough to face them.

The game is rough, sloppy; at close range, with just a few catcalls coming from the crowd, you appreciate what a physical sport this is. Players grunt and curse; legs tangle; shoulders barrel into chests. The sounds are what you’d expect from a couple of prizefighters going the distance. Midway through the second half, conditioning becomes a factor: passes lack pace, challenges lack conviction. Spirits are flagging on both sides of the field. When Strathmore puts home an equalizer in the 70th minute, the St. Andrew’s squad looks ready to pack it in. The crowd is growing restless. Though it’s early in the season, dropping points at home could be disastrous in a heated title race, with four teams jockeying for position. A loss would drop St. Andrew’s into fourth place, three points off the pace. There is little consolation in a hard-fought finish that doesn’t end in promotion. Another year in the First Division is another year of sharing bedrooms, scrambling for work, battling on a pitch that’s a long way from the immaculate lawns of the Premiership.

Over the course of a long season, though, there’s no telling how the ball will bounce. Late in the half Peter has a golden chance to score. The keeper follows the play outside the box – a grave tactical blunder – chasing a St. Andrew’s midfielder toward the far touch line. With a few deft side-steps he dribbles around the keeper and sends a sharp cross into the box. Peter slips in between two defenders and finds himself all alone, twelve feet from goal with no one guarding the line. It is an improbable stroke of luck – as close as you can get to a sure thing in this game. But when the cross reaches Peter he rises and sends the ball awkwardly off the side of his head. It sails high and wide, drawing some heckles from the crowd. Peter spends a few anguished seconds lying on his stomach, his face buried in the grass. Chances in football don’t come often, and each missed opportunity is a missed chance to change the course of a game, even a life. On the sideline we’re all grimaces, shaking our heads. Only in the waning minutes is Peter let off the hook, when a teammate sends a beautifully struck shot soaring past the outstretched arms of the keeper, setting off a delirious celebration as the referee blows the final whistle.

It’s the sort of finish that Peter must have pictured for himself, vaulting into the wet April air, only to send the ball glancing off the side of his head. But while the glory went to someone else, it was still a good result for St. Andrew’s, and for Peter. And after his header soared wide, Peter didn’t lie on his stomach for long. He got up, brushed the dirt off his jersey, and jogged up the pitch, waiting for his next chance to score.]]>