Moshi/Arusha

Wednesday 25 April, 2007 - 16:22 – Kilimanjaro

Last Saturday in Dar es Salaam a thief rendered me deflated, stealing my phone and a good chunk of money. The lady I live with urged me to continue on with my travel plans or, as she so adamantly believed, the thief would win – walking away with more than just what was in my pocket. For me it’s not about winning or losing, but taking an adventure with the momentum of eagerness, curiosity and ambition riding behind me. Although these were snuffed out prematurely when I lost my naïve trust in humanity, after some pouting I took my fear to the bus station and set off to Moshi, 7.5 hours north, with neither plans nor even so much as a place to stay.

About halfway up I squirmed a little when I realized what I was doing was crazy, then sent a barrage of text messages to the only four numbers in the directory of my replacement phone. To my great fortune, a woman who gave me a lift a few days earlier had family in the area, and wrote back saying her father would pick me from the station, adopt me as a temporary son and take me home.

As Africa goes, we arrived late. The lot was full of hustlers and hawkers, packed with pushing people and helplessly overwhelmed police - all causing a great bout of anxiety to well up within me. I called the father-figure as the bus parked, who eased my worries with a few syllables: Ninakuona – I see you! There were a trillion people on the other side of the window, but with a click glance I spotted him as well - the same way we pick out the main character as a movie opens; something quirky about the way he or she is dressed tips us off. Although to me the man I’d soon call Baba was a stranger, he could not have been anyone else in the crowd - a stout, pot-bellied old fellow, cloaked in a sky-blue blazer who carried an umbrella that functioned as a cane. Mustered beneath his hand-me-down feathered hat were some scraggly white hairs of a rather mellow beard. We became instant friends, quickly whisking away to his home.

I about wet my pants when a tiny window in the smothering clouds opened to reveal a corner of Kilimanjaro. Baba was clearly honored to have hosted my first glimpse but embarrassed that, in his eyes, I received a measly introduction to his mountain. He insisted we somewhere to get a better view – from his father’s house. Never would I ever have imagined we’d actually live on the mountain for the next few days.

It was a quick ride in a daladala (or matatu, as it’s called elsewhere – again, these are the overcrowded public transport vans of Tanzania) to the base of the mountain. The next leg was equally crammed, but taken standing up in the back of a pick up truck, encircled with metal bars to keep everyone in – and it went up the mountain, bouncing back and forth between rivets until the path ended. The rest we crossed on foot, hiking alongside and over crisscrossing open irrigation streams that cut through the rainforest, eventually making their way to maize fields below. I never wondered where water came from before. At home it comes out the faucet – piped from somewhere, but I never think of the pipes. But there it was, flowing through thin, age-old trenches that have been passed down from generation to generation for longer than anyone can remember. When streams need to cross paths, one is dug down a bit while the other passes via a hollowed-out tree-trunk-bridge. This way no farmer steals from another’s rightful supply.

We took some locally brewed banana beer, caught our breath, then continued on our way. One more stop to give condolences to a family grieving the death of a grandma before finally reaching home. Babu (his father, my grandfather) is an equally pleasant man, although has been set back with a mysteriously and incredibly swollen leg. He is happy to be in the village, though – because everything he needs is there.

Life in the rainforest was a splendid discovery. The mountain was exactly how I have always pictured the garden of Eden to look – food is just, well, there. And in abundance. Who ever knew that bananas grew like packets of food on trees? Certainly not I, who always thought they came from the grocery store. There are many varieties too – bananas for eating and those for beer – and within the eating subgroup are sweet bananas, like we eat, and starchy bananas, like potatoes. The forest is also donned in a plethora of trees, bushes and shrubs that produce avocados, cherries, mangoes, raspberries, tea leaves and coffee beans. To top off their food choices, locals also raise chickens, cows and pigs.

But back to the fruit: please allow me to be your mental tour-guide through perhaps my most interesting food discovery. It is called Finesi in Swahili, but more popularly referred to as the most bizarre fruit known to man. Picture yourself, arm out, holding a pear in your hand. Pick a color somewhere between green and yellow and feel the pear’s weight as it rests in your palm. Here comes the fun part. Hold the pear’s shape, but now imagine it to be the size of one’s abdomen. Replace its smooth skin with something more prickly, like the dodecagon you constructed out of a zillion pieces of paper folded into triangles half way through Junior High math. It’s green, heavy, pokey enough to leave indents in your skin but not so much that it hurts. Now cut it in half lengthwise. Peel the halves apart to find what looks like a pineapple-esque interior. But what look like the grains of a piece of pineapple are actually pods of fleshy fruit packed together, each impregnated with its own seed. Remove one of these meaty casings, the fruit, and notice that now held up it looks like Rigatoni pasta, except that inside is a sort of amniotic sack that nourishes the growing nut. You can even spin the nut round and round by gently squeezing your fingertips on the outside. The nut is edible, and anything that might be left over is fed to the animals so as waste nothing. The limp, macaroni fruit smells awful, but is darn sweet and great finger food. Grossed out? Intrigued? It is called Jackfruit in English – feel free to pause for a moment to run a google search if you need to see it to believe it; I won’t go anywhere.

The following morning a local fellow and I went for a 45-minute hike through a valley and back up the mountain on the other side. We crisscrossed the same stream half a dozen times but at different altitudes, cut through hand-me-down plots and their respective grass huts, and finally ended up at the butcher’s shop where he bought a couple kilos of beef, hacked off from a dangling carcass. We did stop twice for his asthmatic relief – which turned out to be a small glass of locally brewed whisky at each break. I took a sip, not knowing it wasn’t water… about died. He drank whole glass. Ironically enough in spite of the alcohol, I tripped and stumbled, up and down the mountain, a whole lot more frequently than he did… but then again, he was born on the mountain, and I come from a place where people now get to and fro on Segways so they don’t have to walk.

After a few days left the village, walked down the mountain and into town. There I caught a bus from Moshi to Arusha, and stayed the week with Baba’s son. He and his wife were a lovely couple, in their late 20’s or early 30’s, and shared a small living space, made significantly smaller when it accommodated a third person. But it was a real home – a place with character, somewhere one walks in and feels warm – and they love having guests. In fact, for them it is an honor. Although for all intents and purposes, I came a stranger, from the first day they loved me as nothing less than family – and when I left they nearly cried. They begged me to stay, and put on the guilt trip for returning early (it had only been five days). We were friends, cooking together, sharing everything, laughing with one another and even traveling to see some animals a close to their home. Late into the evening of the night before I departed, well after the lights were out, she came into my room, checked that I was still awake, and presented me fabric – a gift they wished to send my sister when I return home. And this I found to be characteristic of most everywhere I went within the country. Tanzanians, at least those with whom I interacted, are in incredibly hospitable and welcoming people.