Stranger in Paradise

Travel Stories: Christopher Vourlias searches for a place to call home in Stone Town, Zanzibar

06.15.09 | 2:19 PM ET

Stone Town photo by Christopher Vourlias

It was noon and the sun was heavy and here was Ken, red-faced and plucking the shirt from his chest. We were waiting for his father, Ikrima, a local hustler who’d promised to find me an apartment by the end of the day. Around us the streets of Stone Town were abuzz with the music of Zanzibari life: women chattering over pots of maize meal, men clacking stones into the empty pods of a bhao board. The muezzins chanted, “God is great, God is great.” Ken might have argued the point.

We’d been pounding the pavement all morning, his stubby legs needing two steps to match the ground I covered in a single stride. God’s greatness looked increasingly debatable.

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” he said, tugging at his collar, while his face suggested the stations of the cross.

Just a few days before I’d been skipping across the waves aboard the Sea Star ferry, watching the green line of Zanzibar’s palm-fringed shores scroll past. After nearly two years of traveling I’d come to Zanzibar for an extended breather—a chance to unpack my bags, iron my shirts and settle into the sort of purposeful domesticity that no 30-year-old travel writer should so desperately crave. I had none of the intrepid, buccaneering spirit of the Burtons and Spekes, the Stanleys and Lugards and Livingstones, who had come to Zanzibar to prepare their grand caravans for expeditions into the forbidding African interior. My hopes were more modest: a couple of months of good seafood and steady boozing, maybe some promiscuous Europeans cavorting around the beaches in skimpy swimwear.

But after the postcard scenery of the boat ride, my introduction to island life was jarring. I was bumped and jostled around the ferry terminal, had my arms and bags grabbed at by elderly porters with severe, down-turned faces. Dubious offers of assistance were made and rebuffed. A fisherman wagged a few crustaceans under my nose with what can only be described as menace. It was hardly the warm welcome I’d imagined. Sweating through the afternoon heat, struggling to find a hotel that, the owner assured me, was just a five-minute walk from the terminal, I found Stone Town’s confusing nettle of alleys—endlessly lauded for their “charm” by travel writers like me—to be a real pain in the ass.

Now it was Ikrima who came galloping down those same streets, tall and lean, a picture of Spartan health in a cut-off Nike T-shirt and white running shoes. When I’d enlisted him Ken assured me of his father’s house-hunting competence. Indeed, everything about Ikrima suggested a capable man, a tireless worker, an f—-er of other men’s wives. I laid down my conditions and he nodded quickly, digesting the particulars. A fully functioning kitchen. Natural light. A bit of elbow room after months of crowded buses and stuffy hotels. Yes, yes, he knew just the place. He led us briskly through the streets, working his cellphone like he was running a telethon. Motorbikes roared past, grave bearded men gripping the handlebars while their caftans whipped in the wind.

It was an exhausting afternoon. We visited dusty houses, forlorn houses, houses with stray, feral cats prowling through broken windows, looking hungry and abused. On the north end of town we came to a modern, gated, white-washed building with air conditioners thrumming in the windows—a sultan’s palace beside the day’s less palatable options. Upstairs Ikrima showed me the washer-dryer, the living room, the master bedroom about the size of a bowling alley. He showed me the kitchen, turning the faucets and watching me watch the water that came gushing out. It was almost too good to be true.

And it was. He named his price: almost twice what I’d offered that morning. A long silence passed between us. I reappraised this Ikrima with narrow eyes: his stringy arms and beveled cheeks, his legs like mangrove poles. Maybe it was the harsh afternoon light that made him look so hollowed-out. I wondered how many rackets and failed schemes had gathered through the years, had compounded the quiet disillusionment of his life. We bargained, briefly, but there would be no deal. Sulking, he took my hand, shook it not unkindly, and offered his best wishes. I left the two of them, father and son, standing dejected in the shade. And it was only now, with the day’s failures behind me, that I began to appreciate the work that lie ahead. A stranger in a strange land, a tight-fisted foreigner looking for American comforts at African prices: Really, now, what did I expect?

For a few hours I tried to put my disappointment behind me, to make what I could of the place I was so eager to call home. Foreigners, so easily seduced by the island’s outward charms, had long grown disenchanted with life in Zanzibar. In the 19th century, the British consul Christopher Rigby, just months after rhapsodizing about a place that was “the very perfection of rich tropical scenery,” scribbled words like “muggy,” “unwholesome” and “detestable” in his journal. The explorer Burton, mindful of the island’s pestilential climate and murderous intrigues, wrote that “every merchant hopes and expects to leave Zanzibar forever.” Livingstone passed this simple judgment: “No one can truly enjoy good health here.”

But what was “good health,” really? What was I after? In the haste to settle in after countless months on the road, to find a place where I could restore my emotional equilibrium, could stop worrying about getting on the right bus, finding the right room, keeping an eye on the guy who’s keeping an eye on my bags at the train station—in all my eagerness to take a break from the rigors of traveling, I hadn’t asked myself if I could really be happy here.

I was still half a dozen time zones away from the only place I’d ever known in my heart as home: the brick bungalows and johnny pumps, the streets lined with ailanthus trees, the pug-nosed butchers pushing buckets of soapy water across the pavement with their brooms. Home was a father who dozed off in front of ball games on ESPN, it was the familiar smells from the kitchen, the neighbors who knew me since I was a boy. It was a world that had watched me grow. But here, surrounded by a scene of riotous commerce at the market, the ground slick with vegetable carcasses and fish guts and nameless somethings piped from the underbelly of the Third World, I had to wonder if Zanzibar could ever find a place like that in my heart.

Beaten, harried, jostled by spice-sellers, I took panicked flight behind the market. I turned corners, disappeared down blind alleys, found marvelous Swahili doors carved with all the faithful craftsmanship of a Spanish cathedral. Old barefoot men reclined on the stone barazas, moon-eyed, grinning, their faces coarse as peach pits. Women in headscarves fanned themselves in the doorways, henna’d hands fluttering like butterflies. Everywhere I turned I was greeted with smiles, with warm welcomes and salaamas, I was peppered with questions about my family, my home. There were kids shouting and pedaling too-big bicycles with wild abandon. Life, in all its precious delirium, whirled by.

Behind a majestic old mosque I found myself in a courtyard flooded with sunlight. The madrassas were out, the boys in white caftans and the girls in black bui-bui robes scooting across the yard like little chess pieces. Their shouts, their shrill voices, caromed off the walls and shot into the sky like a flight of swallows. And it was at that very moment that I remembered what it was like to fall in love.

Later, at my hotel, the owner introduced me to a friend who was renting an apartment nearby. It was a cavernous one-bedroom with a modern kitchen and a canopy bed and a gaudy living room decked out with gold tulle curtains and silk floral arrangements. It was, in its own scruffy way, absolutely perfect. He named a price: 300 U.S. bucks a month. I asked when I could move in.

The next day I busied myself with the business of making a home of my new home. I bought a woven-palm basket at the market, I filled it with rice and produce, with spices and condiments, with utensils and plastic containers and rolls of toilet paper, with bottles of cooking oil and sacks of sugar. I took pride in arranging and rearranging these things around the house. I plopped down on the living room sofa—my sofa!—and turned on the TV and padded through the kitchen with naked proprietorship. I bought a carton of milk and put it in the fridge and looked at it. It was a marvelous sight.

That night I slept the sleep of a sultan. In the morning the muezzins were calling, the faithful were up early and I could hear them shuffling through the streets. I could hear the fruit-sellers, the women scrubbing last night’s pots, the clanging of a bicycle’s bell, the cries of children, the crows beating their heavy wings and lifting from their nest outside my window. Love can be a simple thing. On the street a boy pushed a wagon full of coconuts, singing softly, his feet scuffing the pavement, the joints of the wagon creaking, the wheels turning over the pebbles and the dust. Sunlight lit the rooftops, the shutters flung open like a lover’s arms, it warmed my hands.

I had a home in Africa and I knew some happiness there. I drank white wine on the balcony and watched the commotion on the street, growing used to the days’ rhythms until they became as familiar as the beating of my own heart. Mothers woke the street with the throaty calls of their domestic tyranny. Solemn men came home at dusk, heavy-shouldered after the day’s labors. In the dwindling daylight, little girls in frayed dresses scampered through the rubble of abandoned houses. They picked the hibiscus flowers growing through the rocks, bending the branches until the blossoms kissed their faces.