TawnZaniA

Yes... TawnZaniA.... Tawney and Zani in Tanzania...
It happened.

How we ended up in Nungwi, Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania is the craziest part about this whole trip.  It was total synchronicity and complete surrender - allowing myself to be guided to this place.

On the beach in the Maldives I had thought that I wanted to go to Mozambique because Shayne and I had always talked about going there and I knew it was beautiful and would be a good place to scuba dive I thought...

Upon returning to San Diego I was put in touch with the travel agent who would be making my arrangements for the Africa trip. Tawney would be in Kenya for 5 weeks prior to my arrival and so she could conceivably meet me anywhere.   The travel agent told me that all i needed to provide was an airport - wherever I wanted to go. So, of course, I pulled out my parents' old globe and spun it around dragging my finger across the embossed topography just like I have done since I was a kid...

I know that I love to be near the equator - I mean I lived at Latitude zero for a period of time in the Telos Islands in Indonesia - and the Maldives had been pretty darn close.

I saw that Tanzania was actually closer to the equator than Mozambique so on a whim, I just looked for airports in Tanzania and found two - one near Kilimanjaro and one near the beach called Dar Es Salaam... So I got my ticket to Dar.

I was told that it was crucial that I booked my first night's accommodation because my flight got in at 4am and it was not safe to be alone at night in Dar - especially as a woman - especially as a white, blonde woman.

I have traveled far and wide alone and have never particularly felt afraid or threatened as a woman - no more than I have in downtown LA or New York City or London anyway.

I wasn't scared, but I started to look online to see if there as a cheap place for me to stay in Dar... I let my search be 50 miles I think - just because I thought I wouldn't want to miss out on somewhere that was a little further out of town if it was amazing.

Hotel after hotel looked sad and dilapidated, crumbling and typical developing world accommodation in a big city.  Suddenly I cam across a picture that looked tropical - i clicked in and found that it was in Zanzibar - an island that was just right off the coast of Tanzania.

I really had no idea where Zanzibar was when I booked my flight to Tanzania... I don't know where I thought it was but not there.

I began to search photos of Zanzibar and found that it was stunning - tropical, white sands - all the things that make my heart go boom.  

A shock went through my body as the idea came to me and a typed in "Scuba diving, Zanzibar"... only to find that Zanzibar was a scuba diving haven.

I searched around and came across a scuba and yoga center called "Divine Diving"

...and thus... Tawney and I set our coordinates for Nungwi, Zanzibar - the northern tip of the island where we could dive and practice yoga and drink while waist deep in crystal blue water and laugh and be in AFRICA!

I emailed the center and told them I was coming and asked if they knew of any very cheap accommodation that we could stay at - backpackers vibe.  I was recommended a place that was only $20 US a night for both of us.

PERFECT!

In the weeks leading up to the trip, Tawney expressed concern about the place that I was taking us to stay - there was nothing on trip advisor and it seemed sketchy to her... Me being me was laissez-faire about it and said - Ah - if it's bad we will swap rooms or move somewhere else.

We arrived in the dark to the creepiest, rape-iest place in the world and basically cried ourselves to sleep... We were mostly crying from laughing so hard, but it was actually pretty bad.

In this video Tawney made for my birthday, it begins with our first night in Zanzibar so you can get a sense of what it was like for us.

But as you can see - if you watch the whole video - we are full on professionals at dealing with things when they are weird and rapey or uncomfortable.

We promptly moved to a beautiful resort-like hotel that was only $55 a night - but infinitely better with flower petals on the clean white sheets that were changed for us daily...

We were in heaven.

Unfortunately, on our second night I once again made the WORST call ever and convinced Tawney that she should eat at the dive bar we were playing pool at, because I loved the people there and didn't want it to stop... and Tawney promptly got violently ill and was basically sick the entire time we were there.
At least we had a clean bed and toilet?...

I stayed with her for the first day of her sickness - letting the dive center know that I wouldn't be coming that day - and instead stayed home to take care of Tawney and to study Spanish since I had a Spanish midterm the day I got back from this trip.  But of course, I forgot my spanish book at home - and had brought hte wrong binder.

After a day of doing nothing (which was actually pretty nice)... I decided to go dive because it was all I could think about. I got to the dive center in the morning and was told that I had to buddy up with a beautiful Spaniard. Tough luck for me! We spent the entire boat ride practicing Spanish - since my Spanish was about as good as his English we were a perfect team.  He was a dive master in training - so he was my guide and we had the most incredible dives - laughing underwater until we were nearly drowning and playing charades 80 feet below the surface.  It was magical.

The Dive Masters in Training became my vacation best friends and we played all week long... staying up until 5am lying on the beach listening to Spanish jazz after we closed down the local bar which had poisoned Tawney, but served up a mean Stoney and rum - (Stoney is the delicious ginger ale that comes in a beer bottle and mixed with rum is outrageous - i drank about 20 a night)...  Gilad, who we loving dubbed Gelato had a guitar and we went to serenade Tawney in her sick bed one night...

Every evening was an adventure with my new friends...

I went diving again on my last day and was once again buddied up with Jose Luis - who I now loved so much.  He and I both had an instant connection to one another - which had only happened to me once before when I met Mikey Mowgli at burning man in 2009.

I don't know what these connections mean... but Carl Jung says in the intro of his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections,

"Other people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind of recollection."

This is how I feel.
I don't know why or how I have known this Spanish dive master before, but I knew him... I have known him.

The week was purely magical - I saw two shooting stars - estrellas fugaces - and did four dives in the crystal clear reefs off of Zanzibar... I experienced Africa for the first time and will never forget the experience - because from the moment go, it seems, I was never NOT going to be there.
It was always written upon the scrolls of my destiny that I was going to Nungwi, Zanzibar to that particular dive center to meet these particular people and dive those particular dives.

How beautiful synchronicity is.

I believe I will go back to Africa once I am a doctor and do aid work there.  If it's written....

A video from tawney.....

http://web.stagram.com/p/740914640229684842_3174532

Dubai, India & Maldives

Whoops. I really blew it on documenting these past 6 months...

I'll throw it into reverse and go back in time to December 16, 2014.
My semester ended with yet another 4.0 and a deep sigh of relief.
With one day between my last final and the beginning of my next adventure, I did what anyone would expect of me... Go home, pack, get a good night's sleep? Hell no.
I went to see my ex-roommates/best friends/family play a gig in San Diego - it would ultimately be the last time I saw Mikey on stage with the Mowgli's which is weird but also perfect and beautiful.
Before the show, Mikey and I sat on his tailgate of his new car, ate granola bars and laughed.
My world which was once full of that excitement and wild super soaker blasts of color and vibrancy on the daily - is now a fun little dip I take from time to time and it feels so good to be surrounded by the love and blissfulness of my people.
I wore their love all the way to the airport the next morning where I would be flying to Dubai with the Rhodes family (who I nanny for).  They taking me along on their winter adventure.

At LAX, Kalpana and I sat and talked about the northern lights and how it was on our bucket list beyond anything.  She was saying how at this moment in time the northern lights were the most amazing they had been in a long time... We sighed and dreamed of abandoning ship and jumping on a plane to Iceland.

We boarded our Emirates flight and I promptly (as always) fell asleep.
I woke up a few hours later to Kalpana furiously waking me up and pulling me out of my seat and to the big window in the galley to see none other than the northern lights... Aurora Borealis - right outside our windows... we flew directly through it for about and hour and I just wept. I cried and cried.
So beautiful I didn't know what to do with myself.
I took this pitiful photo out the window and then wrote the following - posting it to instagram the moment I had internet:

"This is what I witnessed last night from my airplane window- Aurora Borealis as we flew over the North Pole... I sat weeping with my face smashed against the window for an hour... Staring in awe and wonder... And finally wrote what I could because I knew a photo could never capture what I was experiencing and I wanted to be able to taste it again.

Watching this symphony of lights cascading from pinks to yellows across the green shards of glass suspended in the sky...
Rippling like a windchime blowing in the wind - made of multicolored iridescent icicles

I just watched a falling, shooting star burn out right beside the lights- as though the beauty of it took the star's last breath away. How long was that star falling? How many light years away are these things I'm seeing tonight? For all I know that star's last breath could have been taken a million years ago and we can only see it now.
Time...
(Turns out there was a Leonid meteor shower happening too)

The bright green, snaking, undulating line of light, peeling across the sky like a wave... I can't stop crying.

What IS this?
What ARE we?
Could this all really be a coincidental collision of atoms?
No artist behind this masterpiece?
This could all really just be a magnificent organic accident?"

The memory of the aurora borealis experience did not face quickly, even with the wild surreal experience that is Dubai.
We were greeted at the airport by a fleet of Rolls Royces that drove us from the airport to the only seven star hotel in the world... The Burj Al Arab.  The masterpiece of Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is the shape of a boat's sail and sits precariously perched in the persain gulf's crystal blue waters. Ornate doesn't even begin to explain the gold encrusted, ostentatious explosion of wealth that is the Burj Al Arab.

 Our floor (where we occupied four of the twenty rooms) had it's own butler, sometimes two, who sat at a desk in the center of the curve ready at your beck and call for anything.
When we exited the elevator, our butler immediately shuffled to open our door for us and bring us inside the outrageous rooms.

My room which I shared with Kiran, the 14 year old was a two level palace with sweeping views from both floors of the craziness that is Dubai.

I keep referring to this craziness and I will try to paint a picture but it's difficult to do.

I feel like the Burj Al Arab is a good place to start. 

In this middle eastern fundamentally Muslim country, one would expect a sort of quiet reverence, all women covered head to toe, and a sort of asceticism that I have found in other Muslim countries.

But the front of the Burj Al Arab is just chock full of Lamborghinis, Maseratis, Ferraris, Aston Martins, you name it - and that car on the wall of the 12 year olds back home are parked here - with half naked busty, blondes in high heels and short skirts climbing out on the arm of these men.

 

Dubai just felt like an oxymoron the entire time somehow. I am certainly not complaining, because I was able to experience this bizarre world of infinite wealth and prosperity that only a handful of people in the world really get to see and live (even if we are faking it).

We went to dinner on the water and everything just felt like it was a movie set and if I could just creep behind the curtain I would see an empty desert with a few Muslim men pulling the strings.

The next day we went on a tour around the city and got to see real Emirati life.  I felt like I could see a bit more of what the United Arab Emirates was about, but it also felt like the Sheik had gone to painstaking measures to have the city appear the way it did... which was stunningly beautiful and immaculate.

We spent four days total in Dubai exploring the city, including a trip to the Mall of the Emirates - the biggest in the world, where we went indoor skiing at the biggest indoor skiing center in the world. The walls were painted to look like trees and the ceiling to look like clouds and sky, there were two chair lifts and lots of ice and snow.  It was very surreal for us especially since that very day we had ridden camels through the desert and "sand-boarded" down the giant sand dunes. The whole experience was somewhat mind-boggling but overall a really incredible experience that I still haven't really wrapped my head around all these months later.

We had a really wonderful group of people - the family of 6 that I work with, the father's brother George and his fiancee Keri, and his cousin Annie and her boyfriend Alex.

We all set out for India on the same Emirates plane. We took up the entire business class of the fairly small airplane and made it without a major hitch to Delhi.

I had landed in Delhi almost exactly two years before - but that time I was on an Air Asia flight out of Kuala Lumpur.  John E Ocean was sitting next to me.  We had brown skin, salty hair, and that island vibe permeating off of us.  We had no plans other than the first night that we had booked at a place called Cottage Yes Please that was going to be our resting spot for the night before we decided where we would go next. We were free, gypsies with months to play and nothing to do... no plans at all.

Upon arriving this time we were greeted by a group of tour planners and a tour bus which was chartered specifically for our group, which whisked us off from the airport to Agra to see the Taj Mahal.  We met up with the last member of our group - Shalini, the beautiful, powerful, amazing Indian woman who had spent the last few years as a politico in Washington DC working for the Obama Administration and carried with her the energy of "yes. We can get anything done here." She quickly became my favorite person on the trip.

Shalini and I shared a room at the Oberoi Amarvilla Hotel which literally opened up to the Taj Mahal.  It was breath-taking.

There was quite a lot of fog when we woke up so we couldn't see it right away, but Leela and I went to explore the grounds and then out of fog it appeared and took my breath away.
So stunning.

My previous trip to India, I had never made it down to Rajhasthan and missed the Taj Mahal all together.  Sometimes I feel like famous monuments in cities are kind of a waste of time - they look just like the photos and you are swarmed around a million people trying to get a picture that won't even compare to the billions that you could find on the internet.  This was different.  This was absolutely jaw dropping and amazing.

Next we took a bus back to Delhi and stayed at another gorgeous Oberoi hotel which bizarrely had a Gucci store in the middle of the hotel on a lake.

The air conditions were horrible and it was bizzare to think that I was in Delhi, the same city that two years before I had walked the streets of in Pahar Ganj and gotten a sense of what India was really like - poverty that was palpable... Dismembered and diseased children in the streets, animals everywhere, and hands - constantly hands reaching out for a penny - anything at all that you could share with them.

This was a much different experience, walled off from that world and safe inside a palatial hotel with a Gucci store.

Next, we flew to Rhishikesh - the city where I had spent a month and fallen in love in it and with it.  Rishikesh was my home away from home in India and I immediately felt nostalgia digging deep in my gut.  It was just as I remembered it but missing the giant Shiva sculpture since it had been washed away in the giant Himalayan tsunami that had happened earlier that year.  - I had spent my last days in India there... 

Being back on the Ganges - with the sunset aartis and the saffron colored robes everywhere... It just did something beautiful to my soul.

Saffron is for sacrifice.

We stayed at Paramarth Niketan ashram and spent three days doing the two youngest boys' thread ceremonies- ultimately a Hindu Bar Mitzvah on the banks of the Ganges.  The boys had their heads shaved and surrendered everything in their lives except a quest for knowledge.  These boys are already so intelligent, with such insatiable appetites for learning that it seemed to fall right in line with where they already were.   Swamiji brought us into his garden several times to talk to us about simple but profound things that you wanted to carry out with you and marinate on all night long.  We lived simply at the ashram, as always and it brought me back to how I had lived that last time I was there... Although I never made it back to tip-top to get my favorite pumpkin masala.

The ceremony was beautiful and all the symbolism of Indian culture just vibrates through my soul.  I felt so lucky to be a part of the beautiful coming of age ceremony of these two boys who I love so much.

In the blink of an eye it was time to move on again, and we flew to Udaipur - another Rajasthani city that I had missed on my last journey through the magical country. We had the incredible privilege of staying at the Lake Palace in Udaipur.... Yes IN the Lake Palace.The experience was another mind-blowing experience... We stepped off the little shuttle boat and arrived on the marble floors of the Lake Palace to have rose petals dumped on our heads from above.

We spent several days in Udaipur living a life of luxury and had the most incredible night EVER on a 600 year old wooden boat that cruised  us around the lake while a sitar player serenaded us, and divine dinner was served at a long wooden table... Our boat pulled up to Indo-Persian arches where we were told that the King who lived in the Palace used to come up to and women would dance for him with fire upon their heads... and that's just what they did for us.  I didn't take any photos, but there was this video before the whirling dervishes with the fire balanced on their heads came out - https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10153633101285621&set=vb.560885620&type=3&theater

Finally we made our last move in India and went to Mumbai which turns out is one of my favorite cities in India... it felt like a mix of LA, Padang and Sydney... I know that sounds like a weird combo, but being that I have spent an ample amount of time in each of those places, I found that I loved it.

There was lots of poverty (think Slumdog Millionaire) but it is on the ocean and there is a tropical vibe that I love, and a huge movie industry which makes me feel home, and just an energy that I really fell in love with. We were staying at a beautiful hotel, but really got to experience the city in it's entirety - and I honestly felt like I could live there for some period of time.

We left India (sadly) and went to one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen in my life... (And remember that I lived in the Mentawais and have seen some pretty spectacular places in my short life)...

Gili Lankanfushi, Maldives.

Shalani and I again shared a room -but our room was an overwater villa that was pure luxury - there was glass bottom floors that we could look down and see the aquarium we were living in and among.

We rode our biked along the docks which were perched in the reef among yellow tipped reef sharks and eagle rays and fish of every color known to man...

The older two boys wanted to get scuba certified so I finally decided to pull the plug and do it... I had been tempted to do it so many times in my life and always felt a fear of being trapped under water without air - but something in this place felt safe - and it was Shalini, the two boys Kiran and Ashwin and I....

The whole experience was life changing - I felt so scared and overcame it and eventually learned how to be one with the infinite shades of blue - the underwater world that I feel so connected to as a mermaid... I knew that I had just embarked on something that would be in my life for a long time to come.

Pretty much the entire week was dedicated to scuba diving and it was absolutely incredible... We rang in the new year all wearing white and eating divine food on the sand of the hotel with all the honeymooners - because this was the honeymoon spot that dreams are made of.

On the first, I was laying by the pool with Kalpana and received a text from Tawney saying that she was definitely going to Africa in a few weeks and that I should come and meet her there on my spring break in March... I sighed knowing that I would be too broke to afford a flight out there but began dreaming of scuba diving in Mozambique with Tawney to celebrate my 30th birthday.

Kalpana and Jamie looked at eachother and said that they would use their miles to fly me to Africa as my 30th birthday present....

AGH!!! I was floored...

First of all - planning my next trip while on a trip is my favorite thing ever - and also OMG AFRICA!!! with TAWNEY!!!  I could barely contain myself with excitement as we prepared to make our way back to San Diego.

I returned back to home after three short weeks and what felt like a million flights... and was already planning my next adventure to Africa.

It was truly the trip of a lifetime.

I am so grateful I was taken along with the family.