It's a Spice World

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When I was a kid I remember that my mum had lots of interesting spices in her larder and occasionally, when my hunt for Wagon Wheels proved fruitless, I would pick up the spices and give them a good old sniff. in particular I remember there being a box of cloves in an old green box. On the box was a painting of an exotic island with a dhow boat sailing pat. It sticks in my mind because it also had a rather freaky picture of a sultan on it. The island was Zanzibar, the spice island, and it was Zanzibar that Kim and I found ourselves heading towards on a ferry from the mainland of Tanzania.

Stone Town, the capital has probably changed very little over the last 100 years. The slave traders and spice traders have now been replaced by curio sellers, hawkers and taxi drivers, but the buildings remain, albeit showing the kind of decay that suggest Zanzibar's glory days are over. Of course this all adds to it's rustic charm, and we had a great afternoon walking through the narrow streets and alleyways whilst locals chuckled at us for walking round in circles.

After a night in Stone Town we headed up to the North of the island and arrived at a fantastic beach. We got a speedboat across to another island and snorkeled around the coral reefs. Kim predictably managed to injure herself on the coral taking her tally of accidents to one every 4 days. So far she has cut of the top of her finger with a razor (It took 2 weeks to fall off), burnt her hand on a fire (she was seeing if it was hot), got hit in the face by a flying bottle of water (source unknown), smacked her head getting into a van, and then smacked her head getting out of the same van, lodged an acacia thorn 1cm into her heel (that was nasty), and lastly, and this is the best one, suffer some bad lacerations to her hand from a tortoise that decided her hand looked tastier than the banana she was trying to force feed it.

Apart from the snorkeling we didn't really do that much apart from lie in hammocks, drink cocktails and walk down the pristine white beaches........life was very good. (MD)

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