Pemba

Greeting to the degree it tires you, and you do not know which side to look and answer first, exchanging the standard news, which can be good, peaceful, about the journey, your home or work. Children shout “mzungu” after you, and there are many children in Pemba, until your ears hurt, and you instantly hope that some “mzee”, an elderly respected person, will tell them to stop on the spot. When you do it, they will not stop.

Deep green rice fields, oxen in the evening light, the sun settling through the mangroves into the sea. All over, the island is planted with clove trees and coconut palms; still it looks green and surprisingly natural. Idyllic Pemba.

The women are beautiful and tall, wearing high heels und moving elegantly, carrying their children on the arm and never on the back. Sweets, fresh bread, tiny little cups of coffee served under mango trees, and spices dried along the road – the seemingly small but fundamental differences of Pemba compared to mainland.

12th of January, shooting in the middle of the night, we are lying in our beds in the local guesthouse, expecting a bullet to cross over our heads. It is only the day 43 years after revolution, when the islanders, upset by a little educated Ugandan, had evicted their sultan colonialist regime from the island back to Oman. The next morning, almost all shops are closed. Even our old gentlemen with his little coffee and coconut stall along the road, where we usually had a stop before and after our bike rides, had allowed him self a rest to celebrate revolution; All the children wore new cloths, walking up and down the main road on the hand of their fathers, having sweets; Little girls with happy expressions on their face tell us that for this one day they had meat and no fish for lunch, spicy Pilau but no rice, and even a delicious cake!

It is a desperately poor island. An island without cars, most villages linked one to each other by sandy bicycle trails only. Sails of the dug out canoes are hand stitched, the bikes have only one gear, and chains are never oiled. Has a man a little money left, he buys a second wife. In ancient times already, it had been a place for retirement for the rich traders, and then the Omani made it a centre of their slave trade. The historic dimension of the island is underestimated and nowadays hard to imagine – while people today live as basic as a hundred years ago, carrying the rubble of the former palaces away to build their shacks and huts, the place at times minted its own coins; The political hand is heavy, the smaller and poorer island among the two, Pemba, with a majority of CUF voters and a lot of remaining Arab roots, is dominated by the bigger and richer sister island, Unguja (generally called Zanzibar), where the main land backed CCM has everything under control. The elections have just past, with a surprising victory of the ruling party CCM, even on Pemba. Hundreds of mainland soldiers leave the island again on crowded boats – they get their tickets first, tourists and citizen only second. The system is corrupt through and through to a degree people do not perceive the problem any more. The old man trying to sell us completely overpriced tickets to enter a historical palace of which not much more than a few piles of rubble is left, has no problem at all with the tiny detail that the prices are rewritten several times by hand…while we clearly had a problem it, even more as the ticket for the museum we had bought in the island’s capital was said to allow us free entry to any sight over the island already...

Pemba comes highly recommended for bikers – there are hundreds of trails and tracks to follow where the locals are biking, and in every village there is some coffee served somewhere under a palm tree, and bikers are welcome to join. There is little infrastructure on the island, tourism has hardly touched, and kids in the villages will be excited about the appearance of Wazungus! Clove plantations carpet the island and are a feast to the sences, when they are dried in the sun along the roads. Beaches are a little difficult to access, due to well maintained and extensive Mangrove forests surrounding almost the whole island – but for great swimming and snorkelling let yourself transport to the protected Mesali Island by the staff of the Jondeni Guest House in Mkoani – it is a great place.

The Jondeni Guesthouse (Tel. 024 245 60 42 or 0777 46 06 80; jondeniguest@hotmail.com; 30US$ for a double;) five minutes above Mkoani comes highly recommended. The locally run place has a fantastic sun set terrace, simple seafood dishes are delicious and plentiful. The owner of the guesthouse Ally Seif is extremely friendly and will tell you what ever you want to know about the island. He also can pick you up at the ferry terminal, organize ferry tickets and the trip to Mesali Island.

In Chake Chake accommodation is available in the Le Tavern Hotel (Tel. 024 245 26 60 or 0777 42 90 57). They also rent out motorbikes and serve good Swahili Food on their roof top terrace overlooking all Chake Chake.

Alternatively, and if you do not mind to be surrounded by divers only, which count the different species of fish they have seen every evening, Swahili Divers (Tel. 024 245 27 86 or 0784 80 86 92; Swahilidivers@zanlink.com; swahilidivers@intafrica.com; www.swahilidivers.com; 55US$ for a double;) offer accommodation in an old and beautiful Quaker Mission House equally overlooking the town. Besides the obvious diving Swahili divers also offer kayaking in the Chake Chake creek. Their barbeque dinners are excellent.

The museum in the Old Boma in Chake Chake is well worth a visit. The various archeological sites on the island however are rather disappointing. They are little protected and villagers over time have carried and continue to carry the handy stones away for new constructions.

Just a couple of kilometres North of Chake Chake centre, there is the Pemba Essential Oil Distillery, which can be visited, and sells excellent clove oil.

Ferries from Dar to Pemba stop in Stonetown in Zanzibar, and take about five hours. Sepideh and Seastar run three times weekly a speed boat to Pemba, leaving Dar at 7.30 in the morning, and returning to Dar in the evening. Schedules however are changing frequently. For the latest information and for reservations, you better call James at the Ferry port in Dar es Salaam, Tel. 0713 34 65 43. He is also very helpful in buying tickets.