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Published: February 22nd 2012
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Some Stone Town scenery. It takes less than three minutes to form an opinion about someone you have just met. I believe that something similar must be true for places as well, because it didn't take long for me to decide that I didn't like Stone Town. I'm not sure what, exactly, made me decide this. It might have been the anti-tourist man who shouldered into me so violently, and deliberately, that at home he'd be arrested for common assault. It might have been the eight year old girl who ran up to me and Rebecca and groped us. It might have been the cockroach in our room. It might have been the smell of old fish and sewage that roiled through the streets and choked me when the breeze picked up. Or, I don't know, but it might even have been the guy who offered to sell me marijuana, or the local man squatting over the harbour wall to go to the toilet in the sea.
Not, of course, that all this happened in the space of three minutes.
I started out doing a tour of Stone Town with two Australian girls, Sarah and Rebecca. The rest of the group were doing
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One of the markets - and our guide in front of the camera, on his phone, naturally. the same tour later that day combined with a spice tour, but we had other plans for the afternoon. Our guide took us from our hotel, through the maze of alleys and streets, stopping occasionally to point out Indian style doors with gold coloured spikes jutting out from the wood to fend off elephants. The current elephant population in Stone Town is somewhere around zero, so I don't know when this business with the elephants was going down. Our guide was more interested in his mobile phone than in telling us useful things.
Whilst he chatted on his phone about the football scores (all the men in Africa seem to support Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal or Everton, but maybe I'm being unfair and he was trying to find out more about these elephants for us), we followed him to the local market. Fruits, vegetables and spices are stacked artfully on the stalls, whilst the next door fish market smells so terrible that I just sailed through it as quickly as I could without being blatant about my distaste for either the stench of the fish or the flies that covered them. I thought briefly of the fish counter at
Tesco; it's never looked as beautiful as it did in that moment in my mind.
Stone Town is famous as having once been an outpost for slave traders, so our guide took us to the former chambers where men, women and children were kept in their dozens, shackled together to prevent escape. It was cold and dank down in the stone chambers (a relief from the heat, which by that point was painful), but it was so cramped that I felt claustrophobic with just the four of us there. A cathedral stands next to the museum, but if it has any relevance to the slave trade, I can't say without asking Google. Our guide was back on his phone by then. It's pretty poor when you need to mentally make a list of things to research yourself, because a guide you paid for couldn't be bothered to do his job properly.
The day improved significantly in the afternoon, when I took a dhow boat over to Changuu Island (more commonly known as Prison Island) with Sarah, Rebecca and the three Argentinian boys in our group. The colour of the sea was unbelievable. The open waters were a generic
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The slave chambers. dark blue, sparkling in the sun, but the waves that lapped at the postcard perfect islands dotted around were the palest azure I've ever seen, and the sand of the tiny beaches was pure white. Prison Island was a typical paradise island, and we just stared at it in silence, none of us really able to believe what we were seeing. Even coming from Cornwall, I've never seen anything like it.
We paid a quick visit to the island's giant tortoise sanctuary (that's a sanctuary for giant tortoises, not a sanctuary that is giant), where the adult tortoises and the peacocks roam freely. Well, to say that the tortoises roam about is a bit misleading. They don't do much in the way of roaming. They just sort of sit there and eat leaves. But if they were so inclined, and capable, they would be able to roam. The purpose of the sanctuary is conservation, and the people involved with it seem to be doing a good job; there were around thirty adult tortoises and fifteen or so babies.
The rest of the afternoon was spent indulging in some much earned relaxation on the beach. We had a swim
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The Stone Town Cathedral. in the beautifully warm water, and then I think we all just fell asleep on the sand. Opportunities like this don't come along very often on our tour, so we made the most of doing absolutely nothing at all. In a few days, all of this will be a memory as we go back to bumping along dusty African roads in our truck, stopping for lunch at the roadside, stocking up on bottles of water whenever we can and ending a day's travel feeling grimy and sweaty. It's a good feeling to know that, right now, there's two days of blissful nothingness ahead of us.
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Nicole
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Oh well, can't all be good! Pretty crappy tour guide by the sounds of it - I always think it's better to wander around by yourselves but I suppose for three western girls on their own that's not the brightest idea there by the sounds of it. The beach always makes things better though! xx