when new years come on islands

It’s becoming a tradition to start off travels with passport drama. In order to go from Malawi to Tanzania, one does indeed require a passport. But that happened after Christmas when possibilities of Zanzibar started. A Christmas morning that included activities in a place that if someone told me I would be when I was 24 I wouldn’t believe them. The morning opened with a run and continued with a duck slaughter and finishing two chapters of The Two Towers, the second book in the Lord of the Rings series. The day continued with the eating of the duck and receiving of gift items such as amazing earphones and jeggings (the child of jeans and leggings). Christmas day ended in a clash of mango wine and Christmas carols being sung to neighbors on a hot porch in front of lightening lit skies.

And then a slide to Zanzibar. A passport retrieved and three girls grab bags, climb onto buses and onto more buses until borders where they buy beers and trek into buses until beds and its time to board a train compacted with compartments and broken windows.

And with broken windows and compartments she rushes into Tanzanian landscape committed to bursting through landscape without breaking up the trees and mountains and instead tricking passengers who are left without view of the tracks into believing they are part of an air sliceage that cuts landscape with grace and swiftness. She wraps around turns assuring the dining car that plates could slide out windows, but then she’s back around the bend and dinner and the coke bottle are protected from mountain splash with crash. Passengers settle into comfort in their slide from car to car and she delights in their miss-steps and their grab at doors and metal bars she provides. She can’t help but speed through night while heads stick out and turn upward for a full frontal star attack and squint at whether or not those mountains exist after dark. She lets them all off and they rush and don’t rush in lines with bags and one girl rushes off while the other throws bags out the window and another one climbs out the window avoiding the gap between tracks and station.

Bags grabbed again and they head off to another rush for a ferry that has already left and they wash over with disbelief at their decision to take a tiny plane that ruffles ocean from the coast to the island lifting into the air holding onto the ridiculousness of a 20 minute plane ride to a island that stretches out into the Indian Ocean with trimmed white beach limbs. And they land, the three, to sit overlooking the ocean on white polished tile lifted above to the height of palm tree necks where they have dinner and slip down stairs. To promises of white beaches with pearly blue water they start out in old markets with scarves and spices before a giving into beaches and tropical drinks, giving into waves and ocean motions and being coated with salt. To give into bars where the alcohol is nestled within a tree and juice is being squeezed neatly behind the counter.

Squeezed back into cabs for salt scrubbing off in preparation for the New Years Eve that starts with three pairs of tight jeans wandering into a hotel party that holds tightly to its middle aged guests with twinkly white lights and pristine pool and shuns without knowing, the three pairs of pants that grasp their spiked cokes and smile at the inappropriateness of their presence before deciding to turn around where they sit on dark beaches where drunken Masai waver towards them as they head to shark and barracuda on skewers. Giant glasses of red wine tip and tip towards the decision of skewers and they get up again this time to have skewers grilled and given with chapattis, coconut bread, and sweet bananas that are consumed at the edge of glowing lights of park grill fires and flickers. With countdown the park quietly and gently explodes with cracks and sparklers and small pieces of lit up ocean that soon melds into late night swimming where the electricity around the pool flickers and gives out to a pool under complete naked night sky who embarrassed, blinks and blushes through her stars at anyone who notices her from below.

And the sun burns thighs that lay out looking onto last day of ocean ready to blister after buses and ferries. The ferry whips ocean underneath and feet stick off the edge as heads lean over the bar wanting to feel ferry-less and alone speeding over water towards more water and finally a cityscape that wraps up sun burns and tiredness with sandwich subs and a promised bus that doesn’t make it fast enough to the border. But that does present giraffes, elephants, and hippos, to passengers crammed against their window seat. And the border without light and day for a passport stamp presents a hostel and an argument and anger that spirals down into late night chips, eggs, and coke, and a morning of a different bus, back to Malawi, back home, back to beliefs that exist beyond beaches.