Against the current

Paddling to the lagoon

During the “best honeymoon ever,” which is what Joanna and I jokingly called our trip together in January, we stayed at a tree-branch level open-air bungalow on the east coast of Zanzibar. While there, we somehow became good friends with the guests in the bungalow next to us, the sum of whose ages was still younger than us (they were 6, 7 and 7). Joanna and I tend to have unconventional “honeymoons,” but on this particular portion of the trip we whiled away the hours playing board games, admiring oddities found on the beach, and I spent a lot of time pretending to be asleep in a hammock. Maybe that's not such an unusual honeymoon after all.

I guess it should have come as no surprise that when Joanna and I announced we were going on an adventure, our three new friends announced that they were coming with us.

So the owner of the bungalows rented bicycles to us (luckily “us” included our new friends’ parents) and pointed us in the direction of the beach where we would meet fishermen who could take us to a place called “the lagoon;” an area where I was excited to try out my new snorkel and mask.

There were many things I wanted to see and share with Joanna, many of which I had sketched into the margins of my journal: giant fluted clams, Moorish Idol fish, needle spine urchins, and the unmistakable anemone whose Latin name is appropriately “magnifica.” So once we reached the lagoon, Joanna and I swam off to explore the coral, leaving our friends to splash around with their parents.

Or so we thought.

We were admiring several fish when everything seemed to scurry away. “Matt,” we heard a child yell, “MATT!” One of our friends had followed us, and apparently he had forgotten my name.

So two became three, and we snorkeled together, admiring the coral when there were no fish to see. Joanna realized she forgot to apply sunscreen and she returned to the boat, thereby leaving me to honeymoon with my seven year-old friend, who tended to yell "Matt!" whenever there was something interesting to see, thereby scarring whatever it was away.

We were floating in an alcove of coral, admiring its varying shapes, when the coral suddenly began to drift away beneath us, and quite rapidly. In no time we were in a channel of muddy water, which appeared to be flushing us out to sea.

“Grab onto my arm,” I told my young friend, but he wanted to swim himself, like adults do. “I’ve got flippers,” I explained, “so I can swim faster than you, and we need to go as fast as we can.” The more we talked, the further out we ended-up. Finally, he grabbed on and I began swimming.

I thought I was doing pretty well. I got us out of the strongest part of the channel, and we were in shallow enough water to see that we were making progress, although it was slow going – and of course there was no telling if the current would get stronger or suddenly change direction. “Rob,” he yelled, “there’s a boat coming for us!”

I lifted my head out of water, and he was right, there was definitely a boat headed in our direction.

As I understand it, this is the approximate exchange which had happened back on the boats:

Joanna: “Does it look like they are getting further away?”
Parents: “Nah, I’m sure they are fine.”
Joanna: “No, that is too far; Rob wouldn’t swim that far away, we need to get them now.”

The boat raced toward us on the current we piled in, grateful to be challenging the current in a wooden boat, even if doing so was extraordinarily more difficult than swimming.

It took us a long time to paddle back to shore: we paddled against the current on its edge furthest from Zanzibar, then crossed and got kicked back nearly to our starting point, but at least now on the Zanzibar side. We were dehydrated and hungry by the time we reached the shore where we disembarked, but we were grateful to all be together, and on solid ground again.

The pier near where we returned to dry land
(photo copyright Joanna T)