Stone Town, Zanzibar

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We got up at 6.00am this morning to head towards Dar Es Salaam, breakfast was omelette and toast which was really nice. The journey, although only 100km took over four hours meaning that we missed the boat we were meant to get, however we were able to get on the 11am boat. This gave us 15 minutes or so to get some supplies in Dar Es Salaam before heading to the terminal. Dar Es Salaam is a really hectic place but wasn’t like what we had expected. With it being quite a major city we expected it to be more built up and more city-like I suppose, however it was similar to many places we had passed through with litter on the sides of the road and a lot of smaller family run shops as well.

We headed towards the ferry terminal for our 11am boat, which didn’t actually depart until 12, as could be expected in Africa. I had taken travel sickness tablets and was happy I was able to sleep for the two hour journey. We arrived in Zanzibar and the first impression was that it was a lot bigger than we had expected. Stone Town, where we spent our first night is very beautiful for its architecture and is quite European to look at. We checked into our hotel for the first night, at $40 it doesn’t seem like much but we felt for what we got, and considering we are in Africa it was quite pricey. We joined our guide Daniel who was taking us on a tour of the spice plantations and taking us for lunch. The lunch itself wasn’t great, Daniel took us to his “friends house” where we got lunch which consisted of rice, some weird sauce and some horrible tasting green stuff. There was also a friendly mouse who tried to greet some of our group! We were hoping the spice tour would be better, which it was. We got to see all the different spices and then got a chance to try some. We tried different fruits which we had never had before, jack fruit, custard apple (very sweet but I really liked it), star fruit and some others I can’t remember right now. We also got to try some teas, I loved the lemongrass with vanilla essence – If you get a chance to try this concoction…do! After the spice tour we were told about the famous Zanzibar pizza which is on sale most nights at the night market in the centre of Stone Town. We all headed here, it had amazing atmosphere and we had a fantastic time going around each of the stalls. We chose our chef and for £1 we had a really nice Zanzibar pizza which had veg, mince, mayonnaise and an egg in what seems like a crepe and then they fry it up – we took pictures which hopefully explain better. For £1 it was delicious and we then had the desert Zanzibar pizza of banana and nutella.

If you ever get a chance to go the night market you need to be aware of the scams that are played. Some people will pretend to be part of that stall, or even a chef, and will tell you to go sit down and they will bring your food to you. When they bring it to you they try to charge a lot more than the agreed price, this happened to people in our group but they wouldn’t let him get away with it as he was charging a price five times more than the actual price. We were told, you should always agree the price and pay once you get the meal, then go sit down with your food.

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