Tag: tension

  • The Tropical Beach Paradox

    Walk along Miami Beach in a string bikini, and you’ll fit right in. Opt for boy shorts, and you’ll probably feel overdressed.
    Now, do the same thing in Zanzibar, and unless you are on a truly private beach, chances are you’ll feel very uncomfortably exposed.
    That’s why many large resorts have private beaches. That, and the fact that nothing says luxury like owning your own piece of the ocean.
    Zanzibar is between 95% and 99% Muslim, depending on who you ask, and though local women express their faith in various fashions—some wearing full sleeved dresses and somber-hued veils, others donning brightly colored and fashionably tailored items, and still others wrapping vast kangas (traditional patterned fabric) around their bodies and heads—all of them do so modestly.
    Women don’t show their bodies in public, so men don’t see many bodies. Thus, as my partner once—rather rudely—pointed out, for local men, “seeing exposed skin is like porn.” Harsh, but not inaccurate.
    There’s a paradox here, because Zanzibar’s major industry is tourism.
    This industry packages Zanzibar as a remote, tropical island paradise escape and sells this vision to tourists looking for beach holidays, water sports and romantic adventures—for the most part. The people who populate the island, however, are Muslims, the female half of whom does not swim, does not frolic, lightly clad, in the surf (like the beautiful images on brochures) and seemingly finds it quite entertaining to observe the foreign antics of ever-growing hordes of visitors. (How they really feel about these foreigners, I will not presume to guess.)
    It’s a paradox because we are looking at a massive (and growing) industry built on a beach culture that never before existed and, in context, appears shocking and clumsily out-of-place.
    (A foreign woman visiting Zanzibar is left with three options. She can:
    A. Wear the swimsuits which would feel appropriate or even modest at any American or European beach and feel very uncomfortably exposed.
    B. Not swim. (Not a real option.)
    C. Find a truly deserted beach—as most of the coast is populated by fishing villages or mangrove forests, this last option is unlikely, unless she books her stay at an exclusive, gated resort.
    D. Why is there no D?)
    (It’s not as deserted as it looks.)
    This paradox is hardly unique to Zanzibar. If you follow the equatorial belt around the world, you won’t find many places where short shorts and bikinis seem appropriate. And still, as travelers seek more exotic, more remote, more different destinations, anywhere with a nice beach is liable to become “the next Thailand,” or the next “place you need to visit in the next decade.”
    Why the hurry? I think that’s a story for another day.
    Meanwhile, many of these tropical paradise escapes are rather unlikely and incongruous candidates when you really think about it. I mean, I want to comfortably lie on a beach without offending anyone’s religion, attracting large amounts of attention, arousing anyone’s fantasies of “Western Women,” or shocking anyone with different expectations of modesty… I can’t be the only one!
    Where’s the solution?

    I don’t think there is one… anyone have any better ideas?
    ***

  • The Paradise Mask

    Diani Beach, South Coast, Kenya, 4.3222° S


    “Everybody—everybody who is escaping from something ends up in Diani. Shady people, criminals, expats… everybody.”

    Such was the prognosis of a Diani resident and regular at the South Coast Backpackers bar (where I have been working for the last three weeks), and I am inclined to believe he is right.
    Though it doesn’t seem it outright—packed with tourist shopping centers and hotels as it is—Diani Beach is kind of a final frontier. A “la-la land” for expats and Kenyans alike escaping from their pasts—or simply fleeing the big cities (“Nairobbery,” I have learned, is actually a common nickname for Nairobi). A no-man’s land where many normal social conceits do not seem to reach.
    What does that mean? Allow me to illustrate:
    Here in Diani Beach you have the “beach boys,” the name by which everyone—and I mean everyone—calls the men who pass their time at the beach, either trying to sell something—coconuts, jewelry, boat trips, sunglasses, aloe leaves, safaris and anything else you can or can’t think of—or just loitering… or betting on a Roulette of foreign women. They almost always lose that bet… after all, only so many women will respond kindly to verbal assault: Hey! Beautiful-lady-how-are-you-Where-are-you-going? Why-you-don’t-want-to-talk-you-are-very-beautiful.
    Local bars, however, are brimming with those who have won. Young Kenyan men and women share cocktails and seductive glances with much, much older foreign women and men. The Kenyan men wear their good fortune with a touch of arrogance, while the women adjust their skin-tight dresses and scan the room for something better.
    Residents and long-term visitors prove a bottomless repository of stories—bar brawls, unsavory characters, intrigue—leading a new arrival to wonder how Diani manages to appear so… idyllic. The ever-swaying palm trees, smoldering white sand, jewel-toned water and algae, beachfront thatch-roofed restaurants and resorts, technicolor kites speckling the sky, two resident Diani Beach camels—it all belies a much less serene, much duskier palette of hidden shadows and secrets… Or so it would seem.
    She who ventures out at night must not walk along the road for pickpockets; must be wary of piki pikis and taxis for drunk drivers; must avoid matatus for questionable passengers.
    A guest in a five-star, gated compound on Diani Beach might easily—very easily; too easily—forget that Kenyan law allows for detention in jail up to one year on suspicion of terrorism; might refuse to acknowledge that police checkpoints on roads are no more than systematized bribery collection centers; might overlook the streets lined with garbage and the fact that most of the young local women at the bars are probably prostitutes.
    Here is a carefully imagined idea of a paradisiac tropical hideaway spread like a semi-translucent shroud atop the reality of Kenya: corruption and a starving tourism industry. At times (most of the time, even), I have certainly overlooked it all, lulled into la-la land by the breeze and the sun and the sand and the coconuts.

    But then again, Diani Beach is hardly unique in these regards. What earth-bound paradise is truly what it pretends to be?
    ***

    ***