Bananas and Fireworks

Have you ever seen fireworks from the air? Well, travelling a budget airline when the New Year kicked in we unfortunately weren’t treated to a free glass of champagne as I optimistically hoped for, but seeing fireworks from above was very cool. It looked like a cross between a circuit-board lighting up and an air strike on a battlefield – explosions of light bursting up and out from the ground below!

Strangely somewhat fitting, the two descriptions above could perhaps be taken as metaphors for two key characteristics of so much of Africa; bright lights of electrical energy symbolising the huge potential that it has, playing against a ravaged ‘war zone’ of poverty and corruption that is prevalent in so many areas, holding it back.

Up until now I have almost exclusively been in Cape Town, which whilst it has its own examples of these characteristics (for which the inequality extremes are only I believe matched by Brazil), it is developed and westernized enough to allow one to sometimes forget they exist. Such occasions are now being left behind. Journeying away from the most ‘European’ city in the most developed country on the continent south of the Sahara, I know that life for me is going to get a lot more basic and a lot more ‘real’. ‘Real Africa’ – the one that is typically depicted with the heat, the humidity, the dust and the sweat – I was flying straight for it.

Veering away from the more sober strain of thought above...  Whilst everywhere has troubles of some sort, there are always friendly, happy and smiling people mixed in amongst them. Aside from the fact that obtaining a visa at Zanzibar Town Airport must have taken all of 60 seconds, with a grand total of zero questions, my taxi driver into town could only be described as one of these happy, smiling people. Our pleasant conversation was briefly interrupted along the way as he stopped along the side of the road to buy some bananas. He was quite right. They were very sweet and very delicious, but one was enough for me. Despite his insistence, I couldn’t possibly have accepted taking half of the bunch. What a nice welcome. I have problems recalling the last time a taxi driver offered me a bunch of bananas...

And so this marked the start of my journey into East Africa.