Teacher on Two Wheels

Above:  Two stitched images from Zanzibar.  Click on the images, then click ‘All sizes’ for more detail

Taken from my journal:  10/21/09  Kendwa Beach, Zanzibar

When I asked the stocky Zanzibari who sold me the tickets for the snorkeling trip what his name was, he smiled and said, “Captain Morgan.”  Before we parted ways, I tried to put down a small deposit to save our spots for the trip the following day.  Captain Morgan shook hs head and closed his eyes, incredulous.  “No, no.  No deposit.  If you give us money now, we’ll drink it all away tonight!  Pay all tomorrow.  Hakuna matata.”

The  next morning, a motley batch of foreigners filed onto a battered boat with a crew of muscled Zanzibaris.  Most of us tourists clutched cameras, bottles of water, and sunscreen in ways that made us seem vulnerable and fragile, like eggs rolling across a freeway at rush hour.  Even amidst all the sand and cerulean seas, despite the hammocks, naps, sundowners, and familiar Western meals, we still somehow seemed completely out of place and reliant on talismans and habits from home for soul support.   The Zanzibaris, most shirtless and all with the chiseled arms and sinewy hands of fishermen, joked and loaded things onto the boat for the voyage:  gasoline, coolers, two 10-pound tunas.

Our destination for the day was Mnemba Island, a tiny tree-shagged island circled by a wide, Saturnian disk of white sand off Zanzibar’s eastern coast.  The island, Captain Morgan assured me the day before, was famous for its fish-populated fields of coral.  The schedule he pitched me back on the beach went something like this:  Leave bright and early from Kendwa, snorkel at two spots off Mnemba, then head to the beach for an all-you-can-eat fish barbeque, returning to Kendwa by 3:00 pm.  Things went kind of as the Cap’ said they would…sort of, but for a trip that cost half of what the certified dive ships were offering, I couldn’t complain.

It took two hours of sailing past breakers slamming the outer reefs, past deserted beaches on Zanzibar’s northeastern coast, before we pulled into the lake-calm waters encircling Mnemba.  During this time, couples enduring relationships in varying stages of decay passed the time in silence, time that ticked by as slowly as the single-sail fishing canoes floating on the horizon.  Tight-lipped, most couples maintained no physical contact with each other, as long ago they touched enough to never touch again.  One couple flat out hated one another so visibly that I feared the sun burnt, frowning woman would dispatch her man to a watery grave with a quick elbow to the nose at any moment and without reason. 

Boom! Man overboard!

Most couples, though, didn’t seem capable of such brutality.  They were nice, sun-burnt folks in revealing bathing suits.  They loved each other and saw our snorkeling excursion as a prime example of something that couples of their status should do while on vacation.  It was a neatly packaged memory in the making, a day away from the resort, a no-brainer that would yield a mass of picture dividends to show friends back home.

True to the Captain’s word, the snorkeling off Mnemba was stunning.  For an hour, we floated around in another world, one mountained with bulbous coral bluffs, peopled with fish as bright and sacred as orchids, and carpeted with gelatenous underwater plants and rigid branches of delicate, fanned coral.  Fish of every imaginable color flitted about, drifting motionless in schools above mounds of coral like a sliding screen of stars in a turquoise sky.  Needlefish threaded a maze of coral—20 or 30 creatures floating together—waving like leathery flags through the water.  A tiny point-nosed purple fish dug its snout into the gills of larger fish, cleaning them with a flurry of jabs and nibbles.  And everywhere, blue ruled.  An emerald blue, a rich Neptunean blush permeated even the smallest coral nooks and crannies.  Visibility faded into a misty curtain of blue that always hung just out of reach.

On this watery stage, with only my slow pulses of white noise breathing for a soundtrack, I felt at home.  I was at home.  In the water, I managed to steal a departure from the Natural Disconnect that marks man’s love affairs with routine, the ironically uncomfortable anxiety that underscores his endless quest for more comfort and convenience.  Once again, in the water with coral as my compass, I managed to realize my place in all of this.