Touch down on Pemba – no not the one in Mozambique. The one off the east coast of Zanzibar, part of the union of Tanzania…
It’s the centre of juju witchcraft and traditional medicine that has people from Haiti and even the Great Lakes of Africa flocking to its shores to learn or be healed by the masters, so the story goes. But no ‘European’ is likely to be let into this very secret club; not helped by the fact that many locals on this Indian Ocean island believe white people to be The Devil. Perhaps we are, but it’s not hard to pick up on the magic of this place – more so, in my opinion, because it’s one gem in this great big planet that’s yet to be taken over by the modern, Western-dominated world.
I hopped in a taxi (pre-arranged) and made for the Manta resort: the little Shangri-La I’d call home for the next week. Driving from the airport to my hotel in the north is nothing like the eye-sore from Cape Town’s airport on the litter-lined N2 past cities of tin shacks, through construction work (cranes, trucks, barricades, damn orange cones). Think more Palm Tree Central: a world where people still live in nature, in huts made of coral brick dug out of the earth with thatch roofs harvested from the coconut trees surrounding them. A world where children run free, after soccer balls and chickens – not with the same purpose – and people meet in the midday heat under little structures to play cards or listen to the radio.
My taxi driver and I continued through wild, Jumanji land – the Ngezi Forest – to get to Manta. Sure there were fewer feral rhinos and men in pith helmets with guns running after me, as in the film, but there were bushbabies jumping out of the tree to nick my banana.
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