The Very Lost Tribesman

4th March 2010

Video with 2 notes

Matemwe photos, and a new post: On schadenfreude, the economics of seaweed farming, and a theory of vacation…..

I post these photos of Zanzibar not to wallow in schadenfreude, as it is purely coincidence that my five days there came at the tail end of one of the worst winters in memory back home. Rather, I hope that the images will help create a better understanding of, um, a culture that, um…. Forget it. I am obviously just wallowing in schadenfreude. The place was awesome.

Perhaps, though, I can spin that as laying the groundwork for today‘s post, which will inevitably reflect the outright hedonism of the last five days more than the serious analysis and journalism skill-sharpening that were the original goals of this blog. I will try to return to those things. But after six weeks in Tanzania that have been rewarding but also challenging — have I mentioned the ants? The ubiquitous rice and beans? The Biblical dust? — I reached a decision: Our escape to Zanzibar would not be a working vacation. On the contrary, it would be an occasion for unapologetic self-pampering.

True, on the first morning after arriving by ferry from Dar we did take a few hours to walk around Stone Town, the main city, which has a colorful visage and almost the feel of a run-down New Orleans or Charleston. There was a stop at the Palace Museum, and a brief stroll through some of the meandering back streets and alleys, which in a cool way is the kind of place you where you might expect to see a scene from the next Indiana Jones movie filmed. There was also a bit of souvenir shopping and a bite of lunch in town.

And with that, the cultural tourism came to an end; by early afternoon I was back at the hotel on the masseuse’s table. From then on it was a steady parade of beach cocktails and declining brain activity, for two nights at a nice but larger hotel just outside the city, and then for three nights at the faraway, isolated fishing village of Matemwe, along the glorious white sand beach seen in these pictures. Matemwe seemed to be as non-touristy a place as could be found on the island, and along a dirt road off the main highway we made our way to a charming seven-room hotel owned by a pair of Scandinavians with friendly demeanors and an English brochure littered with comical misspellings (“The bathrooms are specious….”).

A better journalist, no doubt, would have used these five days for cultural betterment and learning. Zanzibar is an extremely interesting place — vibrant, crowded, spectacularly beautiful (it’s one of the two components of the federated Republic of Tanzania, along with the mainland, but guards its quasi-independent status in ways large and small, such as gratuitous passport checks and government signs putting the premier of the island’s “Revolutionary” government on equal footing with Tanzania’s). Fascinating topics abounded plainly in every direction. Twice our taxis were flagged down by policemen for assorted sticker “violations” _ how do people feel about rampant corruption and police power plays? Along the roads we kept passing thriving and crowded schools run by mosques, but the public schools seemed decrepit and empty. Is Islamic fundamentalism on the ascent here? Have mosque-run schools overtaken the ineffectual public school system? What are they teaching? Should Western policymakers be alarmed? Probably. Alas, another journalist will have to sound that alarm.

In occasional bits of mental exercise, I posed the question of how badly the tourism economy been hit by the global economic slowdown (not to mention the island-wide power outage, now in its third month). Answer: Don’t know, don’t care. All I can say is that, for the economy, I did my small part. Can a serious journalist really summon such deep incuriosity in a place so different from anywhere he’s ever been? Can and will.

The best questions were probably about the beautifully dressed, elegant women in Matemwe who wade into the lagoon each day at low tide to harvest seaweed, sitting for hours under the hot sun as they gather and string it together. There is something odd about watching people work in one of the most spectacularly scenic settings we could imagine — the shallows of a tropical lagoon. And yet, hardly a job anyone would trade for. Presumably, this industry has existed for centuries; maybe longer. How have the women resolved the famous “problem of the commons,” protecting their own little patches of seaweed harvesting in the territory but also managing the resources of a public place for their collective self interest? When it’s in everyone’s short-term interest to harvest as much seaweed as possible, but in everyone’s long-run interest to conserve, how are such dilemmas resolved? All fascinating questions. I highly commend them to any graduate student in economics or anthropology looking for a dissertation topic that will allow him or her to conduct field work in an agreeable, faraway location. In the meantime, yes, I believe I will have another gin and tonic.

By day 3 in Matemwe, my brain had slowed to the level of a mid-1980s computer program, summoning processing speeds sufficient only to make a series of sequential, discreet, binary choices. Should we go snorkeling today, or just do nothing and lie on the beach? (Lie on the beach). Chenin Blanc or Riesling with dinner? (Chenin blanc). Fiction or non-fiction for my next Kindle download? (Fiction, then non-fiction, after finishing the novel, then finally another novel after finishing the non-fiction).

If it makes people feel better, I will happily highlight a few imperfections. The power outage meant no fans or air conditioning and at night the rooms were pretty unbearably hot (though not having hot showers thus proved utterly inconsequential).

The journey home was somewhat suboptimal, though interesting. The principle guiding airline security in East Africa, at least on domestic flights, appears to be that running passengers through three identical but mediocre security screens is better than doing it once well. Matching an ID to a boarding pass is apparently not part of the protocol. And African airline timetables, it turns out, are just guidelines, along the lines of a subway sign announcing “the Red Line runs between 5 a.m. and 11 pm.” We got to Zanzibar Airport early, settled in for a wait, and all of a sudden they boarded our plane and we took off 25 minutes early. Given the flight from Zanzibar to Dar takes less than 20 minutes, we landed five minutes before we had been scheduled to depart - a veritable time warp without benefit of the International dateline. In Dar we discovered our connecting flight no longer existed so we would have to wait two more hours for the next one. But then that one left early, too. “Precision Air” was friendly and comfortable, but customers should be aware the company name contains no small amount of irony.

One more note on the trip, which I offer hesitantly, for fear of committing what I consider to be a major fault of travel blogs; that is, the bland recitation of travel logistics that nobody cares about, often followed by accounts of activities dripping with false drama and consequence (“And then we went to the Louvre, and it’s true, her eyes DO follow you around the room, and we were deeply moved, and realized how shallow America is even though we appreciate it more than ever, but still we will be different people from now on….”).

So I will just briefly note my terrible luck in choice of seats. One of my eccentricities is I love airplane views; I always choose window seats and carefully consider which side is most likely to offer the best view. Yesterday, returning to Moshi, my failures in this endeavor were particularly spectacular. On the flight from Zanzibar I guessed left side, but the plane took off the opposite direction and it was passengers on the right who could be heard ooohing and ahhing over the apparently spectacular blues and greens of the lagoons surrounding the island shimmering in the bright sun. I was on the left looking at nothing but ocean. On the next flight, from Dar to Moshi, I went left but thunderstorms took us on a northerly route, treating those on the right side to more amazing views of the coast, the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba shimmering in the distance, then finally, as we began to descend, Mt. Klimanjaro, whose size is even more impressive in an airplane because it still looms over you like a giant even when you’re 10,000 feet in the sky. The entire right side of the aircraft crammed up against their window panes like excited children, straining to take it all in and blocking the rest of us entirely as the captain checked off the sights. Meanwhile, out my left side stretched the endless, dusty, empty hills of eastern Tanzania — except for the occasional rounded enclosure of a Massai tribesman, essentially the view out an American DC-9 from Dallas to Phoenix. I sighed and returned to my Kindle and wondered what else I might miss (“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Just wanted to alert passengers on the right side of the aircraft to look out their windows, where shortly they will have revealed to them the very face of God.”) .

I will share with/inflict on everyone one of the most useful insights I’ve found — a rule of travel that this trip confirmed and which contributes substantially to my vacation enjoyment: I call it the “Rule of 2.” On any given trip, try to do at least two substantively different things or visit two different places. If you go camping, for instance, also visit a big city; if you got a big resort, also go to a small, quiet hotel, even if the beach is similar. This has one extremely useful and powerful psychological result: it makes any vacation seem to last longer. The basic ratio is that a 5-day vacation to two distinct places will feel in your memory as long as an 8-day vacation to a single place.

Maria and I discovered the Rule of 2 several years ago when we traveled to Argentina for just four nights, but found the trip did not feel unduly short at all, which we attributed to visiting two very different parts of the country, albeit briefly (Buenos Aires and the Andes). Many subsequent trips have been planned to make use of the Rule of 2, including our Zanzibar jaunt, and indeed whereas most vacations seem to go by in a flash, this one felt like a full five days or more.

Wherein lies the secret? Two recent news stories have helped me flesh out my instincts with some theoretical underpinnings. In one, the New York Times reported on a study in the magnificently named Journal of Applied Research in Quality of Life ( http://nyti.ms/a7zQAF )that people derive more enjoyment from planning vacations than they do from experiencing them. This is, of course, counterintuitive and thus the New York Times wrote a big story about it and millions of hyper-educated elites e-mailed it around to each other in a giant orgy of self-congratulatory cleverness. I think the study was probably partly right in the sense that the stress surrounding travel can make the anticipation relatively more enjoyable, though planning a vacation can be stressful as well. But my theory is the high point of any enjoyable trip is actually the very beginning of the trip, when it is all about to be experienced, and none of its value has depreciated with time. Such feelings are highly attuned in moderate neurotics such as myself, but I think widespread. If you’re like me, the best feeling is to arrive at a lovely hotel like ours in Matemwe and have everything about to happen but none of it yet to have done so. Objectively, the experience a few days later of sitting in the ocean or the pool with a drink in your hand and the sun shining is more enjoyable than carrying your bags in on the first day. But in reality it probably isn’t, because you are aware time is slipping and that your e-mail is backing up and that you still haven‘t filled out your TPS memos. This doesn’t entirely explain the Rule of 2, but I think they’re connected; by doing more than one thing, it increases the amount of time when you have something NEW to look forward to.

This theory of novelty is extrapolated to other areas of life (marriage and relationships for instances) at peril. But in travel I think it’s very robust. Another recent study endeavored to explain why memories of our younger years seems to spread out longer than even more recent memories. In hindsight, for instance, high school seems to have run on much longer than any subsequent four-year period of life. The reason is that we essentially award memory “space” based on novelty, and when you’re younger more of your experiences are new, so they take up more memory. If you do, for instance, a fairly similar job for 10 years it won’t seem — in memory — very long. To me, this was at last an explanation for why, when you’re doing something boring day after day, the days seem to go on forever but the weeks and months pass quickly. Of course, they don’t pass quickly, but you remember them as passing quickly, which, in a kind of Orwellian but very real sense, is really what matters.

So it isn’t terribly noble or romantic, but the moral of the story is that an essential part of planning a good vacation is a strategy to manipulate your own memory of it. Whether your vacation is enjoyable matters less than if you remember it fondly, as you will be on vacation only for a week or so, but will remember it forever.

All for today. I’m back in Moshi now and hoping to organize some trips out of town early next week to provide fodder for future postings and — I’m sure we all hope — return to the reality train instead of the slightly psychedelic one I appear to have hopped on today.