Celebrating Canada Day With Spices and Stones

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Distance Travelled Today: 79.9 km
Elapsed Travel Time: 12 hours 20 minutes (including time walking through the spice plantation and Stone Town)
Lodging for the Night: Mazson's Hotel

Today we sadly departed the beautiful beach and headed to the infamous Stone Town. Unfortunately, we didn't get a final chance to sleep in, as we had to leave the hotel at 8 (this means that we had to get up at 6:30 because it takes us awhile to shower and get ourselves organized). So after having a nice buffet breakfast by the water, we were on our way.

On the tour with us are people from all over: New Zealand, Japan, America, Germany, etc. When we got on the bus, everyone broke out into a chorus of O Canada, because today is Canada's birthday! We were quite surprised to find out that so many people knew the words to our national anthem - we were the only ones that knew it all, but they all knew bits and pieces. And, singing the anthem was their idea! Quite cool!

En route to Stone Town, we made a stop at a spice plantation somewhere in between. Zanzibar is famous for its spice production, and is a huge producer of cloves. So we took a tour through the spice plantation and saw many interesting fruit tree and spice plants. We saw: almond trees, jackfruit trees, cloves, cardamom, teak wood, banana trees, star fruit trees, curry, allspice, pineapple, red banana, rambutan trees, coffee trees, quinine trees, aloe Vera, cinnamon, custard fruit trees, tangerine trees, iodine plants, turmeric, nutmeg, papaya, pepper, vanilla, Zanzibar lipstick plants. They gave us samples (of most of them) to try as we passed each of them. Some of the samples of the plants were yummy, some were not. At one point they gave us a demonstration of how coconuts are harvested from the palm trees; one of the "spice boys" climbed the tree (yes with his bare hands and feet - crazy!) all the way to the top. He sang a song while he was up there, and he could really carry a beautiful tune!

At the end of the tour, they had us wear kings and queens crowns made of palm leaves which was neat, and they gave us some more fresh fruit to eat. Finally, the tour ended with them trying to sell us their spices. I know we're going to regret not having bought any, but we were feeling cheap, and since we never cook anyways (we still have the spices we bought last summer in Nepal), we didn't want to have to carry them around with us for another month and a half.

After the spice tour, we continued on to Stone Town, where we would spend our last night in a hotel (for now). Stone Town is really the old quarter of Zanzibar City. It's called Stone Town because most of the buildings were built of coral stone. Zanzibar was an early Arab/Persian trading centre (Zanzibar means Persian coast of the blacks). It was under Portuguese rule in the 16th and 17th centuries but was retaken by Omani Arabs in the early 18th century.

We first went to our hotel, Mazson's Hotel, that was right in the centre of Stone Town. The streets are very narrow and there was a lot of traffic on the streets you can drive down. The main shopping street is blocked off to traffic. Our bus driver dropped us off a few blocks from the hotel, and we had to lug all of our bags with us (it wasn't really that big of a deal though). The hotel was modelled in Arabic style, and had some different and intriguing architectural charm (with air con, which made Mike happy). G Adventures usually puts us in some interesting places with a lot of character.

After settling into our rooms, we went out as a group to find some lunch. Since it's Ramadan, most of the restaurants were closed and those that were open would only feed the tourists. Our guide Ali-G, brought us to a restaurant around the corner from our hotel and then he disappeared. The restaurant was just a little mom and pop place, and we were the only ones there. There were some kitties that were hanging around meowing for food. Made us think about our kittens and how lucky they are that they are so well taken care of. We both had an interesting Zanzibar curry with banana instead of rice and it was pretty good.

After lunch, we left the group in search of our own adventures. Apparently the best way to explore Stone Town is to just get lost, and so we did. We walked all over the place, along the narrow streets that were sometimes pedestrian only and sometimes bombarded with traffic. Stone Town is not unlike other bazaars or middle eastern souks that we've been to. We've seen this kind of thing in both Egypt and Jordan, and it's not that different. Maybe the only thing that differs is that Stone Town maybe is a bit more run down than the other places, and it feels more like a living city, not just for tourists (especially thinking of the Khan el-Khalili bazaar in Cairo). If you get away from the touristy streets with the stalls selling souvenirs, you see appliance repair shops, pharmacies, grocery stores...etc. Also unlike other areas like this (especially in Egypt), the people are very nice and smiley. We even found this different than from the rest of the country, where very often people stop to talk to you and ask you for money. There was still some of that in Stone Town (surprising that there wasn't more of it), but once you get away from the tourist area, people were very nice and everyone said hello. This friendliness reminds us of Alexandria, Egypt (not the rest of Egypt though), where the locals were less used to tourists, and genuinely wanted to say hi and meet you. It was cool because everywhere we went, children especially stopped us to practice their English, smile at us and to say hi. We never got asked for a hand out once, which was the most amazing part. In comparison to some areas in Nepal where we were last summer, children there were constantly asking for chocolate or some kind of hand out. The children here just blushed and said hi.

The other thing we noticed is how happy the children in Stone Town were. In lots of third world countries, the children also work very hard lives, and you can see it in their eyes. Here however, the children are out on the streets laughing and playing games with their friends. They were running, and biking up and down the streets. It was really refreshing to see such happy and friendly children!!

We didn't do any shopping in Stone Town either because we have a long way to go on our trip, and since we've done so much travelling recently, we are a bit tired of buying trinkets. So after we spent a few hours getting lost in the narrow streets, we decided to go meet up with some people from our group to watch the sunset. We were supposed to meet them at a restaurant on the beach called Bahari Restaurant, and we got there early to have a drink on our own. The restaurant was really nice and had a great ambiance on the beach, but the problem is that they do not serve alcohol! It's an Islamic hotel and they told us that they never have alcohol on the menu. Fortunately some of our friends showed up and we moved to another bar, the sunset bar in Africa House, to watch the sunset (and the others in our group were already there). Yes they had alcohol, but the unfortunate thing was that although we were high up overlooking the ocean, the sunset was only off to the side, so it wasn't the best view. The sunset view was definitely better at the first place! In any case, we sat up on the patio and had a drink (savanna dry!) and watched what we could of the sunset.

After sunset, we wandered back down to the water, where a night market had sprung up and the locals were now out eating. We tried some Zanzibar pizza, a small fried pizza in which the toppings we chose included some combination of Nutella, peanut butter, mango and banana. It was a lot yummier than it may sound, but I'm sure our Italian friends would be less than impressed! Then we tried some schwarmas, barbecue sweet banana, barbecue sweet potato and kebabs. It was all very good, except for the sweet potato (too dry). There were lots of stray cats hanging around, meowing at the people. Mike felt bad for one little kitty that was hanging out near us, so he bought a beef kebab and gave part of it to that kitty and another part to another cat. Very sweet. It really tugs on our heart strings to see such hungry kitties. We must be missing our little Bakerloo and Malo! Such spoiled kitties.

Overall, we were not overly excited by Zanzibar, despite people having such rave reviews of it. We found that Stone Town was very similar to places that we've already visited such as Jordan and Egypt, and the beaches were beautiful yes, but not necessarily any more beautiful than many other beaches that we have seen around the world. We sometimes feel that maybe the more of the world that you see, in many ways you start seeing things differently, and the experience may not be as magical as you imagined or as amazing as other people without your experience see it. Nevertheless, Zanzibar is a beautiful place and pretty cool, it just doesn't top our charts in terms of destinations (but, you have to go see for yourself!).

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Zanzibar
This one is on our short list but our short list is not so short. The spice plantations would be a great experience.

[mike and elysia]

Spices!
Yes, we weren't sure what to expect with the spice plantation - we thought it might be gimmicky, but it was actually a lot of fun, and we'd recommend it.