Live from Kigoma: Cloves for the road

Airborne over Zanzibar

I have two rules for flying: the planes must have two propellers, and there must be a pilot and a copilot. (A third, harder to enforce rule is not to fly on planes manufactured by a bygone superpower).

My plane to Pemba had only one propeller, but I was anxious to get to the island for a working Holiday, so I closed my eyes and pretended not to notice. I was of course surprised when I opened my eyes to find that my second rule had also been subverted: the copilot seat had been sold like any other seat on the aircraft, and was filled by an eclectic and potentially crazy man I made an effort to avoid outside the terminal.

The pilot – twenty-something and with a foul mouth to prove it – fired up the engine. The propeller spun, the plane jerking anxiously like a dog on a leash. The pilot let the throttle run, and soon we lifted into the sky, sliding from side to side on currents of turbulent air.

Zanzibar is the world’s largest exporter of cloves, producing a majority of the world’s supply. But as I understand it, most of those cloves are not actually grown on Zanzibar, but rather on their neighboring island: Pemba.

Pemba is a funny place. It doesn’t seem sure if it wants to be a river, an island or an ocean, the land constantly giving way to one body of water or another, divided and bullied by the waters from which it once rose.

But beyond its shores, cloves grow. The island looks like a field of cloves draped in clouds, strips of them drying in the dirt along the side of road and sometimes in the median. Cloves dry in front of shops, on porches of houses, often with someone nearby to turn them in the sun with a strip of cardboard. Wherever there weren’t already cloves is where cloves would be.

It was on this island that I spent New Years, reading, writing, swimming and eating clove-clotted foods. “Some people chew them to get rid of onion breath,” one cab driver told me with a hint of salesmanship. But I found it unlikely that people needed more excuses to consume the spice here.

I rang in the New Year while playing cards by kerosene lamp with two night watchmen, the rest of the world having gone to bed or slipped into the darkness hours before.

And when the plane lifted for my return, I knew it was an experience I would never forget. But just in case, I brought some cloves home to help keep the memory fresh.