Zanzibar

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I'm back!

Sorry it's been a little while between updates, but I haven't had a chance to even look at a computer in over a week. Lots to tell though, about the weekend and what's been keeping me busy since then.

So Thursday we made our journey into Tanzania to the island of Zanzibar. Just as some brief background, Zanzibar is an old stopping point for sea trade, used heavily by Muslim nations for centuries. It also happens to boast a large amount of beach coastline, most of which is only very lightly developed.

So, we went off by plane Thursday morning, landing in Dar-es-Salaam in early afternoon. We had a little bit of a mix-up at the airport there, as they would only accept payment for a visa in US dollars, cash only. This was the policy no matter where you're from. I hadn't done my homework before this, and so I was short on cash, and it took withdrawing Tanzanian shillings from the ATM, then exchanging them back to US dollars, to get through immigration (I would have exchanged Zambian Kwacha, which I had plenty of, but despite the fact that the two countries border each other, none of the exchange bureaus took that currency). So, we got a little delayed getting to Zanzibar, but we still managed to hop on a puddle-jumper over to the island.

After settling on lodging in Stonetown (the only legitimate town on the island), we found dinner for ourselves. Reputation had it that the best bang for your buck was the night fish market, and we were not disappointed. At each of the stalls, fishermen will have their catches of that day cooked, skewered, and on display for you to pick and choose. I essentially had an all-you-can-eat fresh seafood buffet at one stall for about 11 bucks. The sugar cane juice to wash it down was also delicious.

The next day (Friday) was spent exploring Stonetown a bit. For the most part, our time was spent in museum-type places learning about the history of Zanzibar and so on. Fairly low-key, lots of walking around. Dinner was at the fish market again.

Saturday, bright and early, we headed across the island to the east side, where we were told the "quiet" beaches are. The village we settled on was called Jambiani, and I think "quiet" is a pretty accurate description for the place. Our lodging was a low-budget type of place, but it was right on the beach. I was able to see about a half mile in either direction from where we stood, and there were typically less than 20 people in view total at any one time. And about half were locals, either kids playing in the sand or fishermen working on dhows.

Needless to say, Saturday and Sunday were pretty peaceful days. Basking in the sun, swimming, and going for walks down the beach encompassed pretty much my entire weekend.

There were a couple of odd situations though. On my beach walk on Saturday, amidst the usual assortment of locals trying to talk me into going to their restaurant for dinner, there was a boy about the age of 13 who walked with me for about a mile of my beach walk. While this wasn't striking in itself, the bizarre part was that he spoke about as much English as I did Swahili, which amounted to about 5 overlapping words in either language. Because of this, he just walked next to me in dead silence. I didn't want to be rude and shoo him away, since he wasn't doing anything, but we didn't share enough language to do it politely. So I just put up with it.

The second odd incident happened at dinner that night. We chose one restaurant-- the most legitimate establishment we could find on the beach, which wasn't saying much-- and ordered our food. There were two tables in the entire place, in spite of having a great deal of space available. One family joined us shortly, and when a third arrived, there was a scramble by the staff (all two of them), to find another table and set of chairs from ... somewhere. Anyway, after waiting about an hour and a half for our food, one person of our group went to the kitchen to find out what the deal was, and ended up in a somewhat awkward situation. It was another half hour before we got our food, and when we were done, we were glad to be out of the place. As it turns out, the reason why things took so long was because the restaurant doesn't keep ANY food in stock, aside from non-perishables. When we ordered, a boy was sent on a bicycle into the village market to BUY the food we had ordered, bike it back, and then it was cooked. So dinner that night was a little bit of an adventure.

Otherwise, things went OK for the weekend. We had originally intended to walk around Dar-es-Salaam a little Monday, but after enough people asked us why we were bothering, we ended up just grabbing lunch there on our way to the airport. Our plane was late-- a running theme among our African flights-- and we didn't get back till very late in the evening.

I'll finish getting things up to speed in my next entry, but since I have some time, I'll be doing that now.

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