Tanzania (Including Zanzibar)

Tanzania was my first vision of Africa.

I traveled there with my dad in 2008, long before I knew anything about points and miles, so we arrived in Arusha exhausted after flying coach halfway around the world. Almost immediately, I was aware of how far from home I was. I was suddenly and very visibly in the minority, surrounded by people, languages, landscapes, and ways of life that were completely unfamiliar to me. There were armed guards at the airport, traffic that made me certain we were either going to hit an oncoming car or run over a cyclist, and then, somehow, we arrived at one of the most peaceful places imaginable.

Our first lodge had individual thatched cottages with crisp white linens and mosquito netting draped around the beds. We took what may still rank among the most luxurious naps of my life.

Everything seemed big in Tanzania. Enormous leaves. Baobab trees that looked like they belonged on another planet. A river of ants that seemed a foot wide and went on forever. We could hear bees without ever finding them. And everywhere we went, there was the constant feeling that the wild was very close.

Our guide, Shadrach, was smart, ambitious, and endlessly knowledgeable. I remember being fascinated by the sight of him talking on his cell phone in the middle of the Serengeti—something that seemed almost impossible to me in 2008.

And then there were the animals.

We watched three cheetah brothers in Ngorongoro Crater that my dad later painted. We saw hundreds of wildebeest and zebras moving together in what felt like our own miniature migration. Lions sometimes appeared with no other safari vehicles around—a luxury I didn't realize at the time would become increasingly rare on my later travels. There were ridiculous-looking ostriches, genet cats peering down from restaurant rafters, hyenas calling in the darkness and, one night, the unmistakable roar of a lion.

At a tented camp in Tarangire, we woke to the sound of an elephant brushing against our tent. It was so dark that I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. There was nothing to do but lie there and listen.

We camped in the Serengeti, where a shower meant someone pouring a bucket of water into a tank above the tent and me trying to finish before it ran out. At night, we could see controlled fires burning on the distant horizon. A puff adder made its way into the camp kitchen. This was not exactly the Africa I'd watched on television with my dad growing up.

It was better.

Some of my favorite memories, though, aren't about wildlife. At Olduvai Gorge, my dad walked with an elderly Maasai man, the two of them talking as we made our way along the rim. We visited a Maasai community, danced with them in a performance that I'm sure was at least partly created for visitors but felt wonderful to me anyway, and for one brief moment I became the traveling pharmacist when someone had a headache and I produced some ibuprofen.

Years later, I returned to Tanzania, but this time with Vuong and only to Zanzibar—and it was an entirely different adventure.

We explored the island by scooter, sometimes riding through darkness so complete it felt as though we were the only two people left in the world. We rode jet skis out into the ocean, jumped off to snorkel, and were unexpectedly joined by a pod of wild dolphins. We wandered Stone Town, saw Freddie Mercury's childhood home, ate ridiculously good food, and occasionally wandered into places where we probably didn't belong—including a resort swimming pool with a giant inflatable flamingo that clearly needed us on it.

And then there was Syed, a fisherman who called up to us every morning while we sat on our balcony at the Park Hyatt Zanzibar, asking if we wanted him to show us around. For days we said no.

On our last day, we finally said yes.

And he showed us a Zanzibar we never would have found on our own.

Two trips. Two completely different versions of Tanzania. One with my dad, seeing Africa for the first time. One years later with Vuong, tearing around an island on a scooter.

I wouldn't trade either one for the other.

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