The Tanzania Trip of 2012

I think I've finally moved far enough past bitter to write about my annual Tanzania trip in December 2012.

It was supposed to be a 7 week trip. I had missed Tanzania like crazy all through the summer, after having such a great but brief 4 week trip there at the end of 2011, and I wanted to stay for a long long time. The thought had even entered my mind at one point that I should live in Africa for a whole year at some point in my life so I can truly understand what that culture and pace of life is like. I was following the blogs of the Orphanage I had visited, and of the volunteers who were working there for extended periods of time, and I was a bit jealous. I must have been a bit nostalgic about my first visit there in 2008 too, as I was reminiscing about when I had a house and a job in Tanga, a routine and a sense of purpose. I missed Africa, and I was keen to go back.

I had decided that I would forego Christmas back home with the family for another quiet holiday at the beach with Saumu. I would spend all the money I could have spent on unnecessary Christmas gifts on the orphanage, or repainting my Kindergarten or resupplying Saumu for her final year at primary school. I would spend lots of time in Tanga and hopefully settle back into the slow paced "Africa Time" way of life. I would re-connect with my friends, improve my Kiswahili, and most importantly reconnect with Saumu.

One of my best friends from childhood, whom I had been out of touch with for a couple years, moved back close to home and decided she'd join me for the first part of my trip. I was excited. I planned out a perfect mini 3-week tour of Tanzania to show Vanessa some of the highlights that the country, the landscapes, the wildlife and the people had to offer. We would go up to the northern region to do a traditional camping safari in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro crater (I'd sleep in a tent under African skies again!), we'd spend a week in Tanga in hopes of showing Vanessa an authentic small town (and my friends, my school, my girls!), and then we would end on the beaches of Zanzibar (scuba diving, white sand, turquoise waters!).

And in hindsight, we did all of that. And really, it was great.

But amidst all of the sightseeing and beach time, I was faced with a sometimes sick companion, a mysteriously cranky and unusually quiet 14-year-old Saumu, and some kind of bad karma that made everything that could go wrong, go just ever so slightly awry.

Usually all of the crazy Africa stuff is simply par for the course - the power outages, the water shortages, the broken down bus on an already 8 hour long bus journey, the scams at the bus station, the scams with the Safari company, the taxi driver's white tourist tax, the ants in the bathroom, the unreliable water pump at the hotel, the questionable bacterial content of a meal offered by unimaginably generous people who have so little, the heat, the humidity, the tummy aches, the constant "HEY MUZUNGU!" harassment, the pesky touts, the tourist prices, the motorcycles without mufflers at 4am, the nightclub next door with the bongo flava music cranked at 3am, the call to prayer at 5am on the one opportunity to sleep in, the call to prayer at 6am, the call to prayer at 7am, the pesky flies swarming your dinner plate, the broken down air conditioning in a stuffy room, the overly forward Tanzanian Men and the hugely different culture - and all of it can be taken with a grain of salt. Usually I would find all the bumps in the road laughable, to a degree. But on this particular trip, I temporarily lost my ability to laugh it off. A momentary loss of my sense of humor.

On this recent trip, I saw this world through a new set of eyes. I had presumed that Vanessa would find the huge disparity of wealth and culture between Canada and Tanzania to be interesting and humbling. I had grown accustomed to the lack of first world creature comforts and can now see them as unnecessary and luxurious, while she experienced all of the crazy inequalities and the foreign culture for the first time. The heat and humidity were a struggle. When the water pump was turned off too early during a shower (after a long day in the blazing sun, in a dusty market, at midday), we weren't exactly laughing at that particular moment. When the bus broke down on the side of the road for a couple hours in the middle of nowhere, I could tell Vanessa was getting a bit stressed. When the safari company we had booked everything with tried to scam us at the last minute we worried and got so angry to the point that we considered canceling. At another point, despite the fact that we were a mere 10 metres from a leopard along the side of the road or amongst thousands of zebras roaming the Serengeti plains, we somehow got caught up in the broken door handle of the truck and the crappy job the guide was doing at providing us with the tour we had paid for. And when someone got the worst sunburn of her life (let's just say I had already learned this lesson on my 2010 trip and knew not to make it again...), the turquoise waters and white sand beaches just didn't seem quite so appealing.

It's crazy isn't it? In hindsight now, we have some great stories. NOW we are laughing about it all. NOW we are realizing how fortunate we were to have seen all those animals, experienced all those places, met all those generous people and taken away these stories. But in the moment, when Vanessa was struggling to experience Africa for the first time, it was a bit of a battle, not an adventure.


So there was all of that, and then I got sick. Really sick. Like, sicker than I have ever been at home in my life. We were in Zanzibar and I had been feeling increasingly crappy for a few days, but kept popping Advil for my headache, cough drops for my throat and taking it easy with extra naps in the afternoon. And then just a couple days before Vanessa's trip was over and she was about to leave to go back to Canada, I got so sick I couldn't eat or leave the hotel room. So Vanessa and Saumu made me go to the scary medical clinic with poor hygiene standards, where - long story short - they couldn't diagnose me, they didn't know what they were doing, they tried to keep me in the hospital, they botched an attempt at putting in an IV (without freaking gloves!) and I got scared, and came home.

Within a few of hours after the whole debacle I consulted my travel insurance, probably scared my parents pretty good with a phone call to tell them what was happening, changed my plane ticket, bought another plane ticket to where my international plane ticket departed from, bought a plane ticket for Saumu to fly back to Tanga, paid her school fees, arranged for Steven to care for her back in Tanga, set her up with extra cash for school supplies, called my friends to say goodbye, and was on the same flight as Vanessa, less than 24 hours after the whole hospital ordeal (and all of this done while feeling absolutely terrible). Back at home, my lovely doctor in Canada ran some tests, diagnosed me and sorted me out with the medication I needed. I then proceeded to spend three weeks on the couch at home recovering, relatively happy to be home over Christmas with my family, but totally devastated that after all of my struggles in Tanzania this time around, my trip ended so poorly and I left on a low note.

Three months later, after just enough time to heal and process it all, I'm finally losing some of that bitterness and remembering why I love Tanzania so much. Vanessa and I get together often, and of course the Tanzania trip is a main topic of conversation that we can now laugh about. In the end, Vanessa came back grateful for her privileged life, humbled, appreciative and aware. It just took a while to get there from sunburnt, hot and sticky, scammed, and frustrated with a foreign culture.

People keep asking me if I'll ever go back after all of this.... And I will.