Blogs from Zanzibar, Tanzania, Africa - page 3

Weird "Zanzibar" facts: 1. One of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby "road" movies had them taking a voyage with Dorothy Lamour to this mystical island. 2. Freddie Mercury, lead singer of "Queen", was born in its capital city, "Stone Town". 3. A skanky strip bar in downtown Toronto is called, "Club Zanzibar". 4. A flight on "Precision Air" gets you from the Tanzanian capital "Dar Es Salaam" in 30 minutes...15 minutes to get the passengers and the luggage loaded into the claustraphobic propeller plane and 15 minutes to actually fly to the island. It was however, a most magnificent ending to my first "African" journey. A visit to Zanzibar is in many ways, a time travel back into the times of sultans, fine silks and aromatic spices. It is a predominantly Muslim island and while I was ... read more

We got up for breakfast in the hotel before meeting our snorkel group – the boat was sooo rickety and stated it had a maximum of 25 people. Regardless, we counted 38 people plus four crew on our boat – we went so slowly. We watched all the other boats passing us. Africa again!!! We got to the snorkelling area two hours later and loved the experience. We seen lots of different fish and they all swam really close to us. All too soon, it was time to head back, stopping off at a different beach for lunch of rice, fish and bananas, basic but still nice. After our snorkelling trip we spent time at the restaurant with the rest of our group and went out for dinner to say goodbye to some of the members ... read more

Today Chris and I went in search of the internet café, this resulted in quite a long walk exploring the area but no internet was found. We ended up using the internet café next to the resort which was REALLY slow and we didn’t’ get to do much apart from reading some emails. We also spent time on the beach, read some, relaxed a bit and ate lunch. For dinner, we decided to splash out and head to one of the nicer restaurants that we had seen. Dinner came to less than £20 but for us that was a treat. We both had the fisherman’s baskets which was lobster, prawns, fish and calamari – very nice! We then went and sat around the campfire with some of the group before heading to bed.... read more

This morning we did a history tour of Stone Town, learning about the slave trade in particular. Lots of men were taken from Zanzibar as slaves to middle eastern countries. We seen the dungeons where they were kept for up to three days without food or water, just to test the strength of the man. The dungeons were not big at all, yet they would cram 70 men into one and 50 into the other. We also learnt about Dr Livingstone who is credited with helping to finally abolish the slave trade, there had been people before who had tried to achieve this but it was his negotiations with scholars at Oxford and Cambridge that ruled that the slave trade must be stopped. After our history tour, it was time to head north towards Nungwi which ... read more

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. ... read more

The Guerrilla Guide To Tanzania ,Zanzibar &East Africa- July-August-2012 To anyone whose watched movies like “ Out of Africa, Hotel Rwanda, Machine Gun Preacher, Gorillas in the Mist, Born Free ,Blood Diamond, Wild Geese, African Queen, Magambo, The Gods must be Crazy ,Cry Freedom ,Madagascar and The Lion King”… your perspective on East Africa could be a clouded. Sorry , But I’m gonna shatter a few myths and give you nothing but the facts…The truth is that its good , bad and ugly with all of that freedom, chaos and romance thrown in. I frankly don’t care if I piss off a few people along the way… they gotta get with the programme and make Afri... read more

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a man who seemed to know a lot about whats going on here in Zanzibar. He said- " The zanzibar ferry disasters could easily have been prevented had the boats not been overloaded and more onboard lifesaving equipment been available." Did you know the final tally for the first disaster of the ferry that sunk off the coast of Pemba just after ramidan two years ago...WAS MORE THAN THE TITANIC DISASTER!... 1972 people perished from a tally of over 2 200 people. That is incredible. And it was hardly even reported in the world press. To this day the vice president of Tanzania - Who is also the president of zanzibar- has said: " it was the will of God!"... Perhaps. But ... read more