liberal swallows

We sardined twelve girls and all our luggage into a vehicle the size of a large matatu. It was a pretty uncomfortable ride, but it was an accomplishment that we all fit in it at all. We'd chartered it to carry us to Nungwi for our week of free travel. Anja made the arrangements through our new local friend, a teenage boy named Moody (yes, sometimes we called him Mad Eye) who, like most boys everywhere, developed a crush on her. It only cost us about $5 USD each, too. We got stopped by cops at a checkpoint, and I think our conductor had to pay a bribe to pass. In East Africa, a police uniform enables you to extort cash from everyone.

In an hour we arrived in Nungwi, moved all our luggage into our rooms (pretending to be less people than we actually were, since technically we'd only paid for eight of us and were slipping in four under the radar by sleeping two to a bed), and then we went exploring. We'd only booked Safina bungalow for one night, so we needed to find some alternate accommodations for the remainder of our stay. After much haggling with bungalow managers and discussion amoungst ourselves, we agreed on a bungalow called Baraka. It's costing us less than $15 USD a head per night, breakfast included. Some of us are two to a bed, but we're not sneaking it, and we don't mind snuggling. The place is right on the beach, lushly landscaped, and has lots of hangout spots. Zanzibar during the tourist off season is terrific.

We played all day on the beach, reading, photosynthesising, footballing, sandcastle building, and swimming in what we discovered (to our dismay) to be jellyfish infested waters. And getting tremendously sundburned, despite repeated applications of sunscrean. Ironically, the other half our classmates ended up in Nungwi too, boarding at a neighbouring bungalow. The boys (plus Courtney) had decided that the town they'd gone to initially was too expensive, so they uprooted and relocated. Not to knock the boys, but we'd really been looking forward to being a smaller group for a little while. We'll get plenty of each other when we're all together on safari next week. About three of the boys (who are not with the "boys group") rented bikes and are circumnavigating the island during free week.

Rachel is sick with something that might be strep or a particularly vicious sinus infection. Adam has strep (he informed me ten minutes ago when we walked into the same cyber cafe as me), and Nora's been harbouring a nasty cold for a week, which has also been passed around to several other students within the last week. Yesterday Nora and Rachel went to a clinic in Nungwi. Here's something that'll make you wary of the medical system here: they didn't bother with getting checked for what they might be afflicted with, they just marched up to the chemist (pharmacist) counter demanding amoccicilin, which they were granted sans fuss.

I've got a mysterious and very itchy rash attacking my skin. It started at my elbows yesterday morning and at first I thought it was flea bites because there were fleas in the mattresses at our previous hotel in Stone Town, but it's since spread to my feet, legs, arms, hands, and the backs of my upper thighs, so it's probably some weird tropical virus that manifests itself in the form of hives. The rash has not improved, despite my liberal swallows of benadryl and applications of cortisone. I've no other symptoms, I'm not allergic to anything that I know of, and the clinics in Nungwi we visited this morning seem to lack doctors entirely (although the twentysomething in jeans and a polo suggested he could administer a cortisone shot, which I promptly refused). The best I could do was buy a tube of antihistamine cream at one of the clinics. If this rash doesn't start clearing up by tomorrow morning, Nora and I will catch a matatu to Stone Town, which is the only place on the whole island with a hospital.

Inexplicably, East Africa is making me girlier. The coolest thing to wear (recall that it's hotter than Natalie Portman here) is a skirt or a kanga tied into a backless dress, so those are the things I've been dawning every morning. We all agreed to go tourist style during our week of free travel, because while the hijab/burka/headcovering thingy was fun and cultural, it was also like wearing a cloth sauna on your head. Not conducive to warding off heat stroke, though it does help with the mosquitoes.