I wasn’t sure if I should write about all this but the owl says it’s cool to talk about the jellyfish. So here goes…
I spent the last year living in Moshi, near Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Last year for New Year’s Eve, I was going to take a bus to a town called Tanga on the Indian Ocean Coast for a big party at a friend’s house. Just as I was at the front of the line at the station to buy my ticket, my phone did a-start a-beepin. I looked at it and there was a message. It read, no lie, “Hey Ted, this is Sophia and Jacque’s friends Dean and Caz and we have one spot going to Tanga tomorrow in a car. You wanna come?” I called them and said yes, yes I would be taking that spot.
Turkish Delight. Gotta love it.
So the next morning, I caught a taxi into Moshi town to meet up for the ride at a local watering hole. I sat there enjoying a rare moment to sit in town, relax and people-watch. While I was there, a midget in an African robe on crutches came over and greeted me. We shook hands and we traded pleasantries. He went over to another table and talked in Swahili to some other folks – everyone in the place seemed to know him. Mini-buses drove by with Gari boys hanging off the side yelling out names of places they claimed to be heading.
So then they showed up and off we went. The road to Tanga from Moshi is the same road that goes to Dar es Salaam. It runs along the Pare and Usambara mountains on one side, along plains and fields on the other. The ride out there is just beautiful.
I was staring out the window at the mountains when Nigel, the dude driving, swerves and says “Holy shit, did you see that?!?” So we were all “What?!?”
My Neck after the Jelly Fish I went back to the room and tried to pee in my hands but I was dry. I went back outside and held ice bottles against my neck. My stomach wasn’t hit as bad so I could lay down some. Finally the cook came over and asked if I wanted some local medicine. “Yes please” I said. I sat there imagining some exotic Zanzibar papaya-hibiscus-aloe potion that would be sure to help. He came back, the stuff was applied and sure enough, it made the burning diminish significantly. “What is this stuff?” I asked.
“Soy sauce and lemon juice.” After a few hours it felt no worse than a sunburn.
We went for a walk on the beach late in the afternoon. There were jelly fish all over the beach. We could hardly walk without stepping on one. We stared at a few of them. They are strangely beautiful and disgusting at the same time; dark blue creatures laying on a bed of the finest sand in the world. I don’t know if jellyfish have a consciousness, but I imagined the jellyfish looking up at me, seeing the burn on my neck, and nodding approvingly. As it turns out, the jellyfish tide happens every year for two weeks in January at this beach.
The rest of the trip was blissfully uneventful. We met up with some other friends at a non-jelly fish beach. The beaches are the nicest beaches I have ever seen in my life. From 10 a.m. to 3-4 p.m. it is hard to swim because the tide goes out really far. But in the morning and evening the water is amazing colors, warm and buoyant.
So our last day in paradise, we were having lunch when some more friends we had met up with. A shaved-head Canadian dude had tagged along with my red haired friend Emma. He recounted a story about how while in Stone Town, police had grabbed them, accused them of having drugs, taken them to the police station, searched them, threatened them with imprisonment, and kept saying they knew they had drugs and were going to search his hotel room. Luckily for them, they didn’t have any and were eventually allowed to leave.
I looked at red haired Wendy, who had been me when I made my purchase, felt my shaved bald head and Wendy was nodding back at me. Had the dudes in the surf shop tipped off the local cops to look for a red haired woman and a bald dude? Probably not, but I figured I wouldn’t buy dope in Zanzibar anymore, even if the owl was looking for some.
