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Published: September 29th 2011
Hey Guys,
It’s hard to believe it has already being a month of me traveling. Tonight is my last night in Tanzania, very bitter sweet after the past month. I have being up to quite a lot since my last Blog, here goes the update.
I have ventured into Stone town two more times since I last blogged. Stone town is amazing and truthfully a lot more urban compared to the rest of Zanzibar, nice to eat different foods once in awhile. One of the days we went on a spice tour, which is around 20km away from town. How you get to these tours is basically just by asking a taxi driver to take you. Almost every cabbie has some kind of family that works for or lives on a spice farm, so they take you to their relative’s farm for a cheaper price. We went to quite a small, non touristy farm which was amazing. We saw and touched: Nutmeg, Cocoa, Henna, apple, green oranges, coffee, microphone, jack fruit, Dorian, cotton, cinnamon and iodine trees. Then we saw aloe, lemon grass, coriander, turmeric, pili-pili peppers, cloves, langi langi and pineapple bushes. This was such a fun experience, pretty kewl
seeing where stuff comes from. The pineapple bushes and cinnamon trees were my favourite I think. The pineapples grow right out of the bush ready to be picked and eaten while the cinnamon trees you just take a knife to its bark and you have a cinnamon stick. There was another bush nicknamed the lipstick bush,where the seeds can make red lipstick, nail-polish and used in tandoori chicken to give it its colour!
The Other time we went we traveled to the east of the city to Chawaka bay to the Unfufuma Forest. This forest is very remote and unknown to most of the tourists of Zanzibar. The forest has three caves, all of which are said to house their own sacred spirit for healing. This forest also contains a bunch of which doctors who use these caves for their practices. As some of you might know Tanzania is very superstitious so most locals do not go to Doctari’s but have a witch doctor on speed dial. A lot of the locals would come to this forest bringing animals or other forms of payment and have the doctors bless them or make them a concoction. One of the caves contains
water that they believe can heal people if the spirit wants it to. The weirdest cave to me was the last in which people-children would be forced to live in it for a set period of time to be healed. This is an interesting tour but very grass route, we had to communicate mostly in Swahili and find a local villager to do the Tour, definitely hard for someone not familiar with the area. After this our Cab driver took us to the local Zoo for 2000 each( like 1.20 cad) for a private tour. We saw basically every animal you would expect to see in Africa haha, the most memorable part was when we went to the Spotted Hyena cage. One of these massive dogs came over like a lil puppy whining to be petted by us. The guide let us pet him which was kind-of terrifying but amazing haha not sure I know many people who have petted a Hyena before.
Last week I got to take a two day kite-boarding course. This was a lot of fun but kite boarding is ridiculously hard haha. More because the kites are so powerful, I was being thrown around everywhere.
Ollie’s kite became tangled and got thrown onto the beach leading to a pretty nasty sand burn along his lower leg, which is still healing (TIA). The school we used was Kite-boarding Zanzibar so if anyone is coming out here and kites hit them up. We had a funny experience coming home from one of the kite lagoons where our car broke down in a small village around 8 at night. The car was all full of white people and the locals were treating us like just landed aliens, not going to lie when I say I was happy when the car started to work again.
I have also spent the last week enjoying some amazing local, European, and Indian food. Thanks to Ollie’s friend Sabrina we got a free night at La Gemma della’est, an amazing Italian 5 star resort. I basically stuffed myself with anything but rice or chapatti haha. Went to a few beach BBQ’s by the amazing Mnemba Island as well. We also have hit up our favourite Local Bar Mangi’s and on Ollie’s last night they gave him 2 crates of Nuduvu beer for everyone to party with.
The line of the week was from
Photo 4
Fox with Olliea beach boy where he said if I hooked him up with a white girl he would give me 500 cows!! Damn haha.
So now I have to go, a pitcher of sangria is awaiting me on the beach. Next time I talk to you I will be in India!! Hope everyone is doing well back home, sending my love to everyone.
Leash
xoxo
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