Here Comes the Rain

Zanzibar is one of those places where time just slips by. I could have easily spent another week there, enjoying the beach, watching the sunsets and moon rises, and part-ay-ing on the beach until the wee hours. But time is running short, my friends, and I wanted one last adventure before flying home next Wednesday.

Before the full moon party I had purchased a ticket to fly from Zanzibar to Entebbe, Uganda, connecting in Dar es Salaam. Dennis Hopper's voice had faded from my head, no doubt forced out by days spent lazing at the beach by day and killing brain cells by evening, and I figured splashing out for a flight to save four days travel when I only have eight days remaining was a decent idea. I guess I might actually digress from Uganda for a moment to write a bit more about the full moon party and impressions of Zanzibar in general. Again, chances are that this will be more for my edification than yours, so bear with me.

It's not that there was anything wrong with the full moon party per se. Rather, it had just been built up so much that I was expecting the world and was a bit disappointed when it didn't arrive. Unlike Thailand, where the full moon party (let's just call it the FRUMP for Full-on-Rager-Under-the-Moon-Party) spans the entire beach at Kho Phangan, in Zanzibar the party is isolated to a single bar called Kendwa Rocks. I actually like that it's smaller in Zanzibar because it feels more intimate, and because if you're tiring of the party you can walk five minutes in either direction and enjoy the beach with some privacy. Rather than comment on why one would want such privacy, I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to surmise for yourself.

But lest your imaginations run too far too fast, I'll go ahead and drop that I didn't really meet any interesting women in Zanzibar. Perhaps that's why I liked Thailand's FRUMP better, but I must admit that in the back of my mind I had dreams of meeting Zoe #2 and spending the last two weeks of my trip just chilling out honeymoon-like on the beaches of Zanzibar.

That of course didn't happen, but I did see lots of, well, um, let's just say not-so-attractive women who walked arm-in-arm down the beach with local men. In Thailand you see disgusting old farts parading around with a local prostitute on each arm, but here it seems to be the opposite: it's western women that shell out the bucks to get laid. I think that men go to Thailand for this sort of sex tourism because it's cheap, the women are good looking, and the culture is generally accepting of their transgressions. Africa isn't nearly as cheap, the Muslim culture of Zanzibar is most certainly not open to the idea of sex tourism, so I can logically deduce only one attribute unique to the African male that might cause these women to come flocking in droves. Given that this is a PG-blog, I of course can't say explicitly what that attribute is. But I can say that I was once firmly in the size-doesn't-matter camp, and now I'm starting to question some of my most fundamental beliefs.

Frankly, I didn't come to Zanzibar to concern myself with the sexual lives of others, nor did I come here for the FRUMP. So I really didn't care that the party wasn't all that great. I came here to chill out on the beach and nothing more. And my god does Zanzibar have incredible beaches. The sand is so fine it sticks to your skin like flour, the water is so warm and smooth on your skin that you can't help but make an evening skinny dip part of your regular routine, and the sunsets are so incredible--accented as if on cue by dhows crossing through view--that it's the biggest priority of the day to be relaxing with a cocktail in hand to watch it go down. And one of the best parts is that there virtually no development on the beach so you can relax in peace.

And land here is cheap. Incredibly cheap. So incredibly cheap that I wouldn't think twice about buying here if I were allowed to as a foreigner. A Tanzanian friend of mine--a fellow Stanford student who we joined at the FRUMP--is looking at purchasing land in Zanzibar. He found one plot that's three acres with 300-400 yards of pristine beachfront for the grand price of........wait for it.....$25,000. $25,000!!! I'm telling you, Zanzibar is going to be Ko Samui in 20 years' time. If they ever relax the restrictions on foreign ownership of property, this place will explode. The food is pretty average, the music selection is pretty limited, but any place where the locals give themselves names like FBI, Black Moon, State, and Black Mamba (the names of the guys we were hanging out with last night) is going straight to the top in my opinion.

But I'm now in Kampala, Uganda, and it feels a world apart. For starters, it's raining something fierce right now. Hard, thunderous, torrential rain. Rain so hard that the 15 seconds it takes to get your backpack out of the trunk of a taxi is enough to saturate your clothes entirely. I really haven't seen rain since Cape Town, where I saw it in droves, so it feels kind of nice to have it raging outside. Uganda seems lovely though it's too early for much in the way of observations.

Tomorrow night I'm off on the bus for southwestern Uganda to a town called Kisoro. I'll spend a day and a night there getting everything arranged for the trip into the Congo, and by Friday morning I should be with a habituated family of mountain gorillas in the DRC. I will need to double check with everyone the security situation in the DRC at the moment, but indications are good that it's safe to cross over as long as you stay in the park, where the military guards against poachers and guerillas. If I think it's excessively risky, I won't hesitate to bail out.