Pemba, the great escape off Zanzibar
reproduced from the Sunday Times 4 January 2009
by Lionel Shriver
The scent of cloves on the breeze, deserted white sand beaches, snorkelling off the coral reef ...
As Sartre would agree, for contemporary travellers hell is other tourists. As my greying, long-haired hotelier in Stone Town despaired, Zanzibar 15 years ago was “a paradise”, yet now mills with sandy, sunburnt Europeans in flip-flops, clutching bottled water.
Kindred riffraff hold up an unwelcome mirror, for other tourists are an embarrassing reminder of what we ourselves look like.
Thus real luxury tourism requires an extra layout of time, effort and dosh to ensure that you do not bring with you half the population of Dulwich. For stalwarts willing to hop three different planes, slump through two charmless layovers in grotty African airports with no AC, board a minivan and then catch a speedboat, paradise is still on offer.
A stomach-churning half-hour plane ride in a 20-seater from Stone Town’s airport, Pemba lies 50 miles northeast of Zanzibar. About half a million, mostly Muslim, Tanzanians inhabit this leafy, lumpy island, which is bursting with gargantuan papaya, jackfruit and mango trees, like the set of Jurassic Park. Locals survive by subsistence farming of cassava and plantains, as well as from harvesting Pemba’s one famous cash crop: cloves.
It was the clove connection that first attracted me. Maybe I betray my weakness for pumpkin pie, but when my companion on this trip first told me about an island permeated by the aroma of cloves, I had to go. Thus when a minivan picked us up at Pemba’s airport in Chake Chake, I strained out of the windows with petulant sniffs.
Yes, the tin-roofed houses of red clay and sticks were picturesque. Women in bright kangas and men on bicycles with baskets of fish were agreeable reminders that I had finally ventured further afield from my London flat than Borough High Street. But where was the perfume of cloves?
At last, as the van drew toward the southern port of Mkoani, mats spread with a spiky brown nubble lined every verge. In town, hilariously, swathes of cloves were spread to dry not only down the road’s meridian, but out on the tarmac, where cars and cycles crunched across the crop.
The van infused with the smell of hot whisky. Pay dirt. That jar of umber nails in my spice cabinet would never seem the same again. If nothing else, when I next mull wine I will wash them first.
The island has a few primitive hotels and diving hostels, but there’s really only one place to stay on Pemba.
Granted, it’s pricey. But even in its low-end hillside huts, £205pp per night includes meals and booze; for that price in New York City, you’d be lucky to get a single bed at the Y and a Nathan’s hot dog. Unless you’re clinging to youthful bohemian pretensions, which I long ago swapped for a hot shower and some assurance that nobody would steal my laptop, after all the bother getting there, you might as well spring for Fundu Lagoon
Fundu’s speedboat dropped us on the jetty. Thatched in coconut palm, tasteful tented accommodations lined a beach of the kind of fine, white sand used in hotel ashtrays, before a sea of such a surreal aqua that it looked Photoshopped.
At first glance, the vista resembled those mendacious panoramas in travel brochures that, in reality, prove upholstered in edge-to-edge beach towels, where vendors hawk bad, melting ice cream, and droves of paunchy fellow nationals in loud swimsuits wish you weren’t here, either.
Yet this lagoon’s coastline is pristinely underpopulated. Even in the height of the summer wedding season, with a mere 18 units, Fundu can grow only so crowded. Sporting three bars, an entertainment room, three lounges, two restaurants and five different places to kick off your shoes in your own encampment, it is one of the last beach resorts on earth where you can get away from other people.
From the first day, I countered sunstroke with sidestroke at sunset and, aside from the odd local fisherman poling a hollowed-log canoe called a mtumbwi, I had, it seemed, the Indian Ocean to myself.
Fundu’s amiable management is well aware that paradise is intrinsically dull, and tries to keep the programme moving. Barbecues on the beach (with a whole red snapper the size of a small whale) and Swahili dinners on the jetty (chopped cassava leaves, seafood in coconut milk) help to keep the tedium of overeating haute cuisine to a minimum.
Numerous diversions undercut the insidious enervation of hedonism. Though Fundu offers diving, including for beginners, the snorkelling on the coral reef off Misali island is sufficiently top-notch to skip the cumbersome gear. A morning’s speedboat plough through pods of spinner dolphins was well spent; these beguilingly undersized dolphins throw themselves into the air and twirl: maritime break dancing. Yet, in truth, the best entertainment at Fundu is a good book.
Two resident Balinese pros provide massages, but be prepared to strip down to ballooning disposable plastic nappies, the most humiliating garment I’ve worn in my life. Facials and body scrubs employ the better part of the pantry — turmeric and yogurt, mango and brown sugar, coffee and Dead Sea salt — all a bridge too far for me, having got over the urge to smear dinner all over my face by the age of three.
Fundu keeps a full-time local staff of 140, giving the resort a much higher than usual help-to-guest ratio: when a step splintered on the pathway, management didn’t leave a sign, but an entire employee. Unless they’re lucky enough to work for the resort, most Wapemba earn about £1.50 a day.
Yet if Fundu’s staff feel justly contemptuous of westerners who lavish £60 on a “banana-leaf body cocoon”, they keep the disdain under wraps. Supporting a school for villagers and planning to build a clinic as well, Fundu gives a huge boost to the island’s economy, and its employees seem to take pride in an operation more than one proclaimed “the best hotel in Africa”.
Far more stimulating than Fundu’s near-desperate provision of amusement is a dander through the mainland. A “spice tour” amounts to little more than a shuffle around an enterprising local’s back garden, but especially for cooks it’s interesting to see vanilla pods dangling on the branch, or cinnamon bark still on the tree.
Likewise, at the market in Chake Chake, the culinarily inclined should be sure to stock up on cardamom, cloves and black peppercorns for back home, all with five times the potency of their desiccated counterparts at your local supermarket.
When I first visited rural Africa in 1972, white people were a novelty. Villagers in the remote Kenyan highlands would reach out to touch my ash-blonde hair with amazement. Yet by the time I lived in Kenya, 20 years later, palefaces were just walking dollar signs, and every stroll collected 25 urchins with their hands out and a dozen hawkers foisting ungainly carved-elephant key chains.
Pemba is different. Folks actually say hello to be friendly, and not because they want your watch. On our stroll through Mkoani, the only local who half-heartedly tried to sell us anything was a vendor with fresh fish. Two white women on their own would have suffered more sexual harassment in Brighton. Wapemba have seen tourists before, but we still elicit bemused curiosity. While most interaction comprised a simple “Jambo! Habari?”, a few locals know enough English to converse.
One jovial gentleman informed us that Wapemba don’t, themselves, use cloves in cooking. The buds are medicinal, regarded as an aphrodisiac — or, as he put it with a wink, “good for home affairs”. But get to Pemba quick, because if the small children screaming down at us from one hillside are any guide (in unison, “GIVE US YOUR MO-O-NEY!”), the upcoming generation will be on the hustle.
Since my friend and I are incurably heterosexual, our last night’s romantic dinner for two on our private beach was sadly wasted: an enormous seafood grill, cosily lit with glowing paraffin lanterns. Within minutes those lanterns had drawn a billow of micro-midges — less like insects than bad weather.
We tried to be appreciative while flapping napkins over the lobster and prising crawling protein from our eyes. Alas, once the lanterns were out, the animate dust storm headed to our tent, readily penetrating the beds’ mosquito net-ting. While a shot of Raid felled the creatures, their raining dead bodies crumbled across the sheets all night.
But that was all right. We were in Africa, and great white hunters still have to bag trophies of some sort.
reproduced from the Sunday Times 4 January 2009
by Lionel Shriver
The scent of cloves on the breeze, deserted white sand beaches, snorkelling off the coral reef ...
As Sartre would agree, for contemporary travellers hell is other tourists. As my greying, long-haired hotelier in Stone Town despaired, Zanzibar 15 years ago was “a paradise”, yet now mills with sandy, sunburnt Europeans in flip-flops, clutching bottled water.
Kindred riffraff hold up an unwelcome mirror, for other tourists are an embarrassing reminder of what we ourselves look like.
Thus real luxury tourism requires an extra layout of time, effort and dosh to ensure that you do not bring with you half the population of Dulwich. For stalwarts willing to hop three different planes, slump through two charmless layovers in grotty African airports with no AC, board a minivan and then catch a speedboat, paradise is still on offer.
A stomach-churning half-hour plane ride in a 20-seater from Stone Town’s airport, Pemba lies 50 miles northeast of Zanzibar. About half a million, mostly Muslim, Tanzanians inhabit this leafy, lumpy island, which is bursting with gargantuan papaya, jackfruit and mango trees, like the set of Jurassic Park. Locals survive by subsistence farming of cassava and plantains, as well as from harvesting Pemba’s one famous cash crop: cloves.
It was the clove connection that first attracted me. Maybe I betray my weakness for pumpkin pie, but when my companion on this trip first told me about an island permeated by the aroma of cloves, I had to go. Thus when a minivan picked us up at Pemba’s airport in Chake Chake, I strained out of the windows with petulant sniffs.
Yes, the tin-roofed houses of red clay and sticks were picturesque. Women in bright kangas and men on bicycles with baskets of fish were agreeable reminders that I had finally ventured further afield from my London flat than Borough High Street. But where was the perfume of cloves?
At last, as the van drew toward the southern port of Mkoani, mats spread with a spiky brown nubble lined every verge. In town, hilariously, swathes of cloves were spread to dry not only down the road’s meridian, but out on the tarmac, where cars and cycles crunched across the crop.
The van infused with the smell of hot whisky. Pay dirt. That jar of umber nails in my spice cabinet would never seem the same again. If nothing else, when I next mull wine I will wash them first.
The island has a few primitive hotels and diving hostels, but there’s really only one place to stay on Pemba.
Granted, it’s pricey. But even in its low-end hillside huts, £205pp per night includes meals and booze; for that price in New York City, you’d be lucky to get a single bed at the Y and a Nathan’s hot dog. Unless you’re clinging to youthful bohemian pretensions, which I long ago swapped for a hot shower and some assurance that nobody would steal my laptop, after all the bother getting there, you might as well spring for Fundu Lagoon
Fundu’s speedboat dropped us on the jetty. Thatched in coconut palm, tasteful tented accommodations lined a beach of the kind of fine, white sand used in hotel ashtrays, before a sea of such a surreal aqua that it looked Photoshopped.
At first glance, the vista resembled those mendacious panoramas in travel brochures that, in reality, prove upholstered in edge-to-edge beach towels, where vendors hawk bad, melting ice cream, and droves of paunchy fellow nationals in loud swimsuits wish you weren’t here, either.
Yet this lagoon’s coastline is pristinely underpopulated. Even in the height of the summer wedding season, with a mere 18 units, Fundu can grow only so crowded. Sporting three bars, an entertainment room, three lounges, two restaurants and five different places to kick off your shoes in your own encampment, it is one of the last beach resorts on earth where you can get away from other people.
From the first day, I countered sunstroke with sidestroke at sunset and, aside from the odd local fisherman poling a hollowed-log canoe called a mtumbwi, I had, it seemed, the Indian Ocean to myself.
Fundu’s amiable management is well aware that paradise is intrinsically dull, and tries to keep the programme moving. Barbecues on the beach (with a whole red snapper the size of a small whale) and Swahili dinners on the jetty (chopped cassava leaves, seafood in coconut milk) help to keep the tedium of overeating haute cuisine to a minimum.
Numerous diversions undercut the insidious enervation of hedonism. Though Fundu offers diving, including for beginners, the snorkelling on the coral reef off Misali island is sufficiently top-notch to skip the cumbersome gear. A morning’s speedboat plough through pods of spinner dolphins was well spent; these beguilingly undersized dolphins throw themselves into the air and twirl: maritime break dancing. Yet, in truth, the best entertainment at Fundu is a good book.
Two resident Balinese pros provide massages, but be prepared to strip down to ballooning disposable plastic nappies, the most humiliating garment I’ve worn in my life. Facials and body scrubs employ the better part of the pantry — turmeric and yogurt, mango and brown sugar, coffee and Dead Sea salt — all a bridge too far for me, having got over the urge to smear dinner all over my face by the age of three.
Fundu keeps a full-time local staff of 140, giving the resort a much higher than usual help-to-guest ratio: when a step splintered on the pathway, management didn’t leave a sign, but an entire employee. Unless they’re lucky enough to work for the resort, most Wapemba earn about £1.50 a day.
Yet if Fundu’s staff feel justly contemptuous of westerners who lavish £60 on a “banana-leaf body cocoon”, they keep the disdain under wraps. Supporting a school for villagers and planning to build a clinic as well, Fundu gives a huge boost to the island’s economy, and its employees seem to take pride in an operation more than one proclaimed “the best hotel in Africa”.
Far more stimulating than Fundu’s near-desperate provision of amusement is a dander through the mainland. A “spice tour” amounts to little more than a shuffle around an enterprising local’s back garden, but especially for cooks it’s interesting to see vanilla pods dangling on the branch, or cinnamon bark still on the tree.
Likewise, at the market in Chake Chake, the culinarily inclined should be sure to stock up on cardamom, cloves and black peppercorns for back home, all with five times the potency of their desiccated counterparts at your local supermarket.
When I first visited rural Africa in 1972, white people were a novelty. Villagers in the remote Kenyan highlands would reach out to touch my ash-blonde hair with amazement. Yet by the time I lived in Kenya, 20 years later, palefaces were just walking dollar signs, and every stroll collected 25 urchins with their hands out and a dozen hawkers foisting ungainly carved-elephant key chains.
Pemba is different. Folks actually say hello to be friendly, and not because they want your watch. On our stroll through Mkoani, the only local who half-heartedly tried to sell us anything was a vendor with fresh fish. Two white women on their own would have suffered more sexual harassment in Brighton. Wapemba have seen tourists before, but we still elicit bemused curiosity. While most interaction comprised a simple “Jambo! Habari?”, a few locals know enough English to converse.
One jovial gentleman informed us that Wapemba don’t, themselves, use cloves in cooking. The buds are medicinal, regarded as an aphrodisiac — or, as he put it with a wink, “good for home affairs”. But get to Pemba quick, because if the small children screaming down at us from one hillside are any guide (in unison, “GIVE US YOUR MO-O-NEY!”), the upcoming generation will be on the hustle.
Since my friend and I are incurably heterosexual, our last night’s romantic dinner for two on our private beach was sadly wasted: an enormous seafood grill, cosily lit with glowing paraffin lanterns. Within minutes those lanterns had drawn a billow of micro-midges — less like insects than bad weather.
We tried to be appreciative while flapping napkins over the lobster and prising crawling protein from our eyes. Alas, once the lanterns were out, the animate dust storm headed to our tent, readily penetrating the beds’ mosquito net-ting. While a shot of Raid felled the creatures, their raining dead bodies crumbled across the sheets all night.
But that was all right. We were in Africa, and great white hunters still have to bag trophies of some sort.
reproduced from the Sunday Times 4 January 2009
Labels: pemba
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