Maasai Warriors, Swedish Lawn Games, and Barack Obama

Zanzibar might very well be paradise. It sure looks like it: And it certainly felt like it. The water was the most beautiful color I've ever seen, the sun was hot like only equatorial sun can be, and I have the best tan that I've had since college.

Our hours and hours of sun-kissed nothingness were punctuated by the scent of Zanzibari spiced coffee, learning to play Bao Zanzibar, which is similar to the West African game Mancala but with an extra 2 rows, and conversing in some Swahili slang, poa kichizi kama ndizi (cool like a crazy banana) and the ever popular hakuna matata (which means no worries for the rest of your days).

Highlights of the trip include: Nick finding the only wave on Zanzibar, 1 km off the northern coast, and borrowing possibly the only surfboard on the island to spend a day surfing; stumbling upon six Maasai warriors playing a really strange game with sticks in the sand that looked like a cross between horseshoes and bowling -- which we later found out is a Swedish lawn game called Kubb; and bumping into the president of Zanzibar for Barack Obama, a young man who is doing his best to support our future President from the island (we're not sure how, but if you're interested, Nick has his card).

And yet, despite the amazing vacation we had, it was hard to ignore the fact that right outside of Stone Town and back a little ways from the beaches a whole other world of Zanzibar exists that we never quite saw.

Unlike Kigali with seemingly endless NGOs, development workers, and aid money, the money on Zanzibar goes straight from the hands of tourists to the pockets of foreign resort owners while the vast majority of the island lives in poverty.

Only once, upon realizing the tide was too high, did we truly walk the "local" path -- as the nice Zanzibari man warned us (we asked, "can we get down to the beach from here?" and he replied, "yes, but it is very local path, not good, very local") while we scrambled through the bush attempting to get back to our bungalow. At first we didn't know how to interpret "local," but then as we almost accidentally walked through a nice family's living room as a dozen toddlers followed us chirping jambo, jambo and eventually enlisted the help of a seemingly drunken man to get us back . . . we realized what he meant.