To Tanzania, by dhow

I was quite young when I hit the dusty pavements of Tanzania, or at least young compared to me now. I say dusty pavements, but really it was a dhow boat that I sailed in on, from Mombassa, Kenya, gliding for 5 days down the coast of East Africa into the spice island of Zanzibar. These boats are the ancient craft of this region. Operating for millenia, they were brought in by Arab traders to catch the North East monsoon winds that blow from the Kingdom of Saba in Yemen and have not changed one bit since those days. To sail on a dhow is to transport yourself back in time and to lose yourself in the experience of proper, no frills, beautiful sailing.

I had absolutley no idea about any of this when I stepped aboard. This was in the brilliant days of backpacking and I had been seduced by the romanticism of the journey. The only thought I had given to practicality was what I would eat. I had been warned that we could be becalmed for days out at sea if there was no wind, so I made sure that I had enough. A trip to the frantic and incredibly exciting market ensured I had a giant bag of avocados, a giant bag of tomatoes and a great stack of arabic flatbread, its papery thinness curling slightly at the edges as the days went on. I imagined no cooking facilities on board and I was almost right - a small brazier hung off the side of the boat and a fishing line trailed hopefully behind us. I don't remember us having any luck with this, though we did have thick strong coffee on the five mornings that broke on my journey, each dawn, it seemed to me, breaking in an instant to bright heat and being accompanied by clove flavoured coffee in tiny ceramic beakers.

There were no cabins, just a bulky haul of unidentified cargo under tarpualin, which became my seat and bed for the journey. With nothing in the way of stanchions, I tied myself on every night with a sarong I had picked up in a Nairobi market and as the sun dropped suddenly into darkness, I fell asleep under the milky way to the sound of the Indian Ocean gently slapping the hull.

One of the earliest written sources of this trade route that I took is a first century manual for travellers, an early lonely planet if you like; the Periplus of the Erythraen Sea, written in the mid first century. What I particularly love about this text is that it mentions the area of ocean that I transited, as a young West Country girl alone, as the Female Sea, which made me think of protection and safety. This was very satisfying to me, as my boyfriend at the time had been spooked by the fact you had to sign a governement disclaimer to do this trip and had declined to join me. He wasn't happy with the becalming issue whilst being far out at sea. When he told me this, I added a couple more avocados to my bag, just to be sure, and waved him goodbye.

The Kiswahili word for Zanzibar is Unguga, which means transit. At the time, I had no idea of what lay in store for me, on that journey or in life, as none of us do, yet many of us when young go blithely on, transiting the world with no real road map or plan, putting one foot in front of the other with only sometimes just the merest inkling of what it means to live: to eat good food in the sun, to travel, to explore, to see new ways of life and enhance your own with these new ways.

We docked without drama in Zanzibar 5 days later and I waved goodbye to the Zanzibarian crew and hopped on a bus to the Northern beaches of the Spice Island.

I didn’t think that when I worked as a temp in bustling London to save money for this trip that I would get on a dhow for 5 days to live on a beach for a month, where the shower was a drum of sun warmed water and a bucket, and dinners were cooked on an open fire by a group of women who looked like birds of paradise in their vibrant and exuberant clothes. But I did.

I did, and I did it fearlessly. Transiting from Stone Town, with its incredible night market full of stalls selling the blend of food that makes up Swahili cuisine, delicious and heartbreaking in equal measures, given its provenance to the Northern beaches, I ate from roadside stalls and markets all the time. Bags of fruit salad containing avocado, how shocking to this West Country girl, and cobs of corn cooked on embers in their husks, charred and nutty to the bite became my mainstay. We were budget backpackers though it never felt like that.

How could it? I had one of the best meals of my life during that month I spent in a tent on the beach. One day a lithe and beautiful boy of no more than eight years old waded out to sea and after some time, swept back in carrying an octopus. After he had dispatched of it, he buried it in the sand and went off about his day. Hours later, he came back to retrieve its carcass and watched curiously by me, delivered it to the tiny shack which served as a kitchen for those of us staying on the beach.

Inside this shack was an open fire, laid on the sand and hung with several smoke blackened pots. Shadowy figures of women moved around inside, their laughter and chatter accompanying the universal sound of cookery. I didn't go in but I wish I had, especially now that I'm older and I know the generosity of cooks.

These ladies delivered the cooked octopus to us for dinner that evening. It had been deliciously charred and blackened in crispy tendrils over the coals and served with coconut rice and beans, with thick bundles of spinach and tomato. We washed it down with ice cold beers from a cool box that took up all the electricity from the tiny kitchen, so all we could see from outside was the fire lit silhouettes of the cooks, moving swiftly and surely as they cooked up this feast. This meal left me with an enduring love of cooking on an open fire and it's definitely why I'm not phased by cooking in tiny kitchens on boats or on the road in my life now. It has stayed with me for years, though it's not just the food that has kept me enthralled to this part of the world or travelling adventurously. The notion of being on a trade route remains spellbinding to me. So many people and stories transiting the same route over centuries, each persons journey unique. The aching pull of common experience when sat around a fire or sharing food you have never tired before highlights the whole idea of being somewhere other, somewhere ‘foreign’. .

Maybe that is the power of a trade route. They can take you beyond geography, beyond topography and into the heart of humanity. These ancient routes, whether over land or sea, span a web of story and adventure. The tangible commodities traded in Zanzibar, such as rhino horn, ivory, coconut and tortioseshell are secondary to the intangible beauty of poetry, heartbreak and daring as people bring food, plants, spices and all the hope of stories and knowledge.

I didn't know, as I stepped onto that dhow, or ate the octupus that this journey was the starting point of a lifelong love of discovering food and cuture from other countries. This trip encouraged me to trade one kind of life for another. And thats the beauty of a trade route isn't it.