Pemba island

Aquí a Pemba todo es precioso. (Todo el mundo es muy amicable, pera exige dinero también.) (I am doing this spanish course and wanted to put it in use…)

This place is remote, mostly agricultural with tourism far away from everything — and I am not in the touristic place, but remote, at the beach, next to farmer villages. And it is beautiful here. So much green, such a blue sea. No hay aqua corriende (where I stay… but more on that later), pera no es importante.

This blog would not be my blog if I wouldn’t complain a bit… On the ferry to Pemba —where tourists have a different rate from locals (which differs by a factor of 2 I imagine… —everything is so terribly unorganised. When the ferry arrives everyone pushes and shoves to put their bags on first, without letting people (also carrying massive bags) off first. There is no system. And no pole pole. Everyone has to be on first for whatever reason. They have no concept of impenetrability—they try to walk through one another, and walk through my bike—and my cries of “let the people off first, and chill out; pole pole” go unheard. Then afterwards you have to do the luggage check again, which means putting all bags on a conveyer belt with no one looking at it, and a bodyscan where I could not be bothered to remove metal; no one cares anyways. And you are constantly demanded tips (I do not give them ever anymore.) This time they also demanded a “drive through gate” fee, with a receipt to make it look real, which I refused to pay without consequences. Every trick to rip you off.

Anyway, on the island I took a “dale dale” (overcrowded shabby minibus) which sped over huge bumps and potholes after waiting for an hour to leave for the last package to arrive, totally overcrowded. (And the locals don’t sit by and wait, they all start screaming things, probably “start goddammit!”…) My bike was put by some guy on the roof and it was too crowded for me to worry about how my bike was doing up there. What followed was a really beautiful ace-ventura-like drive (if you know what I mean.) with sooo much green, along with mangos, bananas, lemongrass, cinnamon, cloves, papaya, … everything grows here.

But I haven’t talked about the best part: the diving. I laid down a fortune to take a padi course here, as this is supposed to be one of the best spots in the world to see life coral reefs: I was not disappointed. The view underwater is amazing and all the kinds of fish you see is unforgettable; I wasn’t bitten by any moray eels but we saw 20 on one spot, hung out briefly with some venomous lionfish, and spotted a big ass turtle; this for me was surely better than any safari. So nice to see that this coral reef is still perfectly intact, despite everything, and that there are still lots of tuna here, despite all the overfishing (also here) against the fish.

Now for some brief more political and historical notes: this island is mostly agricultural, but belongs to the zanzibar archipelago and was part of zanzibar before the formation of tanzania. That makes it mostly islamic — there was a sultan of zanzibar here —but this island never developed towards tourism like zanzibar island (unguja, for the offended locals of Pemba) itself. However, you see foreign influence everywhere on the coast: seaweed farming. They learned here that they could sell the seaweed to china and korea — not making much money off it, so it’s actually a shit deal for them, given the amount of work it takes — so now most of the shoreline consists of seaweed plantations, for export. They also do not have nearly any plastic on the island, except what it’s imported and comes from china, etc.; no facilities to recycle or get rid of and so it just piles up and you can be cycling through piles of garbage when on smaller roads.

Speaking of smaller roads. A local guy from the surf center took me to a restaurant on the north of the island, on a crappy bike (I was cycling mine obviously) and we were basically riding through flat sandy singletrack 80% of the time. On the way there I was amazed how he managed with the rather suboptimal bike; on the way back I was really astonished. It was dark, I had my perfect supernova lights, and he wanted to ride with his phone in his hand for light… I told him not to and just use the beam of my light, but then he frequently went in front (on super narrow sandy singletrack) with no light, and he just rode on. On the way from where I stayed to the village, his phone was out of battery so he just cycled in the dark (on a super small overgrown singletrack full of sand)…Absolute madness but also quite impressive.

What was also very nice about hanging out at afro divers, the dive center, is getting their view on the locals. Because they are all friendly, but have their own way of doing things which you cannot get into and cannot change, and they are very proud. The guy I was staying at has a beautiful patch of land with an amazing garden, but he does not take good care of his apartments/ bungalows, and pretends that everything will be fixed even though he doesn’t have good pipes for running water, there is mold on the walls that he “will paint over”… but “hakuna matata my friend, I will sort it out”… it seems like a saying that makes them also not want to get things done for some, and actually get your shit together…

Which reminds me, and this is venturing somewhat into speculation, but Europeans provided a lot of services and education to these countries as a way to get them to be self-sufficient, which was also the policy of the first president of Tanzania, Nyerere, and during his administration literacy and education rates increased a lot. But currently, they work closely with the Chinese in Tanzania, whom they are thankful for and look up to somewhat; on the other hand Chinese makes Chinese projects which creates jobs so they can work, but China is in the end the one profiting off of it. They are very dependent and tied to China now, in Tanzania.

Ok, I will research this a bit more and maybe correct this, but I wanted to add some historical and economic points to this blog at the end, so you could also learn (or disagree) with some things.

Next up zanzibar, dar, and west, if the trains still run.

Oh there are incredibly cute puppies at the dive center, which actually walked over to my room in the night (300 meters away) and wanted to play with me at 5am.Read more