Zanzibar Beach Hotel And Resort Matemwe

... by the hotel. The vessel itself is shaped like an outrigger with a mast, and everything about it looks home made, including the hand-sewn sail. It requires two people to operate it, one to steer and control the sail and the other to balance and stabilze the craft so it doesn't tip over. The speed of the boat is amazingly fast and thrilling.

On Tuesday we leave the hotel after breakfast and go on a ...

... I commissioned a piece in the local style called Tinga Tinga and are really happy with how it turned out.  

When we left the island we headed into Stone Town where we said good bye to ten of the people who had been traveling with us and we had a new group of ten join.  Three of them are from Canada, three are from Ireland and two are from Australia.  All of them had been traveling various parts of ...

... outside the main tourist areas Lesson - don't pull out money to pay for 3 children to enter the Fun Run and not expect to start a near riot! Duncan HIgh - Summitting Kili Low - getting to the summit Lesson - 'Clementine' is not a traditional African song, and should not be played by African musicians. Maddie High - youngest Canadian girl to summit Kili, the warm water in Zanzibar Low - the touts Lesson - hand warmers don't work at high altitude!

... be so entertaining! The next day I finished my book and needed to move around for a bit so I decided to walk across the lagoon and check out the reef about a half kilometer out. For most of this area there is a shallow lagoon close to shore that in low tide is only 3 feet deep. Seaweed harvesters and fisherman from the village come here during low tide to work and the tourists frolic in the warm water. I am sure at one time my mother told me not to ...

... back tomorrow. My little hut is a stone throw from the beach. In the excitement, I completely forgot to put sunscreen on. The Equatorial sun is particularly ******* white skin and in half and hour I was really feeling the burn! I spent a while wandering the beach, taking photos, reading my book. The beach here is very white, and the water is a light green/ blue colour. It is quite shallow for about a half kilometer where I walked out and water was no ...

... staff are like family, and take such good care of me I feel totally pampered. And the reception staff have found me cheap transport, and wonderful tours including a full day of snorkling off shore at Prison Island. I loved every minute I spent in the water, and at ebb tide, these reefs are comparible to all the other great ocean habitats in the world. ( Including the Great Barrier Reef which I visited 5 years ago). I lost track ...

Zanzibar Even if you have no idea where it is or why it's famous, you've surely heard of it. I hope very much the first time you heard of it was not in a Jack Black/Tenacious D song. Everybody's heard of it. Everybody wants to see it. Everybody was there when we showed up. Considering our Dar experience we attempted to make a reservation before disembarking from the ferry in the late afternoon. Our fifth attempt was successful, and our room would be the ...

... advantage of the situation by starting off with the normal friendly greetings and then end up in less friendly and even sometimes threatening tones. For example, one of the American college girls told me that on her first day here one of these touts tried first to help her before asking for money for his daughter who was sick with malaria. The girl (cleverly) offered to buy malaria medication for the daughter but the guy refused the medication, preferring cash instead. That's ...

... do in Dar, so I quickly hopped a ferry to Zanzibar, a place that seems so exotic that it's hard to believe that it is an actual island, in the here and now. My first two nights were in Stone Town, the old Swahili trading center. The place is magical. It was mostly built in the 19th Century by merchants and feels very Arab. Most of the town is inaccessible by car, and is basically a labyrinth of alleyways full of stalls, hidden courtyards, and beautiful old houses. Stone ...