Tripping Africa I - Leaving Zanzibar

After living in Zanzibar for 3 years, I thought attending a small eclipse party on a nearby island in Northern Mozambique was going to be just a little exciting break in my already very tropical life.
It was August 2016.
I thought I was just gonna have a quick adventure. Only for a week.
Meet new people, have a blast, and then come back to my man and my life as if nothing happened.
Silly silly girl.

It should have been clear to me from the beginning that this was just my power of manifestation about to hit me in the face like a boomerang.
All those dreams of adventure and wild freedom, those cravings for independence. Everything I had been asking for was being given to me on a silver tray. And I was still blissfully trying to ignore it, maybe just have a little taste and then turn around.
How naïve.

In fact, I didn’t turn around for literally 4 months and 6 countries.
This blog, starts as a space hosting the story of the incredible journeys that little "eclipse party escapade" has led me to.

It’s a story of courage first of all. It’s a story that will tell you to just go for it, embrace transformation, change, loss and challenges and turn it into something epic.
It’s one of the many stories I wanna tell you in the future, so I invite you to stay tuned.

Jump in the rabbit hole with me.

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
Rumi

So there was this annular solar eclipse happening on the 1st of September last year.

I was living in Zanzibar with the only man of my life I’ve ever shared everything with. No need to say, I was quite fond of him. Let’s say, I loved him madly. But we were struggling. Our love had always been a struggle, in one way or another, and we all know that shit always happens for a reason. We were being clearly invited by the Universe to learn a few big lessons from each other and then keep going separate ways, but we didn’t know, back then.
We didn’t wanna listen, not being able to let go of what could have been.
We were still trying to make it work, sometimes more graciously than others.

How does the planetary alignment connect with my unstable romantic life? Well, if it wasn’t for Clint, my now ex, and his past in Malawi, I probably would have never known about the event at all. And if it wasn’t for the eclipse I would be probably still sitting in Zanzibar painfully trying to make it work…

It was a very special eclipse, but one that the main stream media didn’t seem to really give a shit about. It was an annular solar eclipse, and if you don’t know what that means, welcome to the club, I took a while myself to find this link.

So because the Moon was not going to be just as close as the big public would have expected, nobody had bothered to organize any big party, anywhere along the totality line, that I would have known of.

But there were Reza and Kimma and the Tripping Africa dream and Clint was my only connection to them.

Kimma and Reza on the beach in front of their beautiful home by Lake Malawi

Kim and Rez are a couple from Malawi which you are gonna meet extensively if you keep reading me. Like they will be your best friends, by the end of this. For now, I will just put you in the shoes I was wearing at that stage of the story: all I knew about them was from Facebook.

Here the page of the eclipse event that Reza was organizing.

It will give you a quick insight into the potentials that were suddenly becoming available to me, through what was mostly Reza’s vision a few months before the eclipse...

My ex Clint is one of my heroes for the hell of a ride that he has always managed to make out of his life. One of the rides I’ve always been most jealous about, is the one he had in Malawi, in the Nineties, when he lived young and wild in a still semi untouched Cape Maclear for a few years. This is the time he shared with Reza, who grew up by the lake’s shores and was naturally around. This and a few psychedelic parties in Cape Town.

So Clint got invited to the eclipse by Reza. I remember Clint and I, sitting in our home office, each one doing his own thing, but often sharing thoughts, links and laughter. I remember when Clint told me about this Eclipse party, a small gathering of an impressive selection of people I didn’t know yet, happening a couple of hours flight and a few months ahead of us. I remember feeling an overwhelming excitement at the thought of it and immediately trying to make Clint sign with his blood that we would have done anything in our power to be part of it. I used to get quite intense when dealing with this emotion.

It’s that mix of exhilaration for a potentially mind-blowing experience suddenly becoming available, and the fear of possibly missing it.

I didn’t miss it. Clint did. By the time the decision was made, I was personally in contact with Reza.

I remember booking my flight to Mozambique in the middle of a fight with Clint and thinking how painful it was to see how very different our priorities actually were and how this man - which I thought was the only one in the universe - didn’t really care about sharing something so special with me...

I flew from Zanzibar, by myself, on the 28th of August 2016, with a suitcase full of colorful hippie clothes and the most basic borrowed camping gear. And let’s make a point here: I had never been a big camper in my life before. Never went to a big European festival, for one reason or another - and this is gonna end this year! - and never been a raver either. I mean I had always been one, deep inside me. But it never really happened. So no camping gear and, oh yeah, a couple of Afrikaburns, on my CV.

But this eclipse party was definitely a unique one for me. I was excited. I was ready to go BALLS.

And I had a return ticket back to Zanzibar exactly one week later. On the 4th of September, which also happens to be the day of Clint’s birthday.

I met the first tripping hippies at Dar Es Salaam airport. We were all on the same flight to Pemba and we had already shared a few stories by the time we got there. We landed after dark in the small and crowded airport and immediately had our little issue with the customs because Malik was carrying 2 huge speakers from Europe, the epic Soundboks. We managed somehow to get away without paying any fee and with both the speakers.

Note: Mozambican customs are terrible and this will not be the last time I will have problems with them. Be aware of Mozambican customs!!

The party was already on, when we got to nZuwa lodge, the meeting point we would have all left to the island in the next few days.

nZuwa Lodge's beach bar... where dreams come true!

There were long, warm hugs and pure joy of being reunited. A bar on the beach, a bonfire, loads of Tequila and a bunch of very excited people, most of which already had to go through a pretty adventurous trail to get there. There were people from all over the world and the group was not at all complete yet. A few old friends who had shared a lot in the past, were now seeing each other again after years spent in different continents. Only a few of us were new to the group and I was the only one that was traveling alone to meet a whole crowd of completely new people.

The majority was south African and included a small clutch of unconventional celebrities: the Dagga Couple from Johannesburg and Simon, one of the "Strain Hunters" from the Transkei. Had no idea of who they were before meeting them. Now I hope I will get the chance to visit them next spring and tell about the very interesting work they are doing…

I was still very much Clint’s girlfriend back then and was mostly introducing myself as such, since nobody knew me, but most people knew him.

However, I quickly had to realize, Clint wasn't the most important character in everyone’s world as much as he was in mine. After a few conversations with Reza about their past in Malawi, he was present only in my heart and thoughts.

Soon, it was only me left, a bubbly Italian photographer, traveling alone, because her boyfriend couldn’t make it..

We slept an excited sleep, scattered around Nzuwa's dorms and bungalows and the morning after we started packing a whole festival and survival kit on the few 4x4 cars we had available.

The car ride from Pemba to the islands was bumpy and 4 hours long.

When we got to the "harbor" and started moving our loads from the cars to the speed boats, I finally got my camera out.

Keep following the White Rabbit for the first (visual) story on our Island Set Up and Epic Eclipse Party...!