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Zanzibar 3
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15 June
Now for a very very brief history of Zanzibar and Tanzania:
Zanzibar has a long history of trade with the Arab world, reaching a peak between the 12th and 15th centuries. Through that trade Islam reached the islands. The Portuguese arrived in the 16th century and they were eventually supplanted by the Omani Arabs. To this day Oman still plays a big role in trade with Zanzibar. In 1964, Zanzibar signed a treaty of unity with Tanganyika (mainland Tanzania) and the union became today's Tanzania. Zanzibar remains predominantly Muslim, which explains why most of the women go around covered from head to toe. Anyway, that was making a very long story very short. If you want to know more about it, just google "Zanzibar history". Oh, I nearly forgot to mention: Zanzibar was also a very big transshipment point for slaves.
Now that I've been on the island for a week, I've pretty much seen all I want to see - at least of Stone Town. As such, I have turned my attention to meeting people - both locals as well as other tourists. For example, at the café at which I have my lunch daily, I met the local owner and his Australian wife. They have been to Bangkok many times and there is some overlap in our experiences there. Also at the café, I met a local computer specialist, Mohammed, who is working for one of the local mobile phone companies. Mohammed was able to tell me a lot about Zanzibar that only a local would know.
At my hotel, I met a very nice Swiss father and son who are celebrating their 75th and 50th birthdays, respectively. They are a real pleasure to talk with. The father is a retired newspaper photographer and the son is an artist (oil painter). One of the pleasures of traveling for me is the interesting people I meet. I find that people who travel tend to have worthwhile experiences to share.
Also at the café I met a group of American students who recommended a restaurant to me. It is a small, family run restaurant actually in someone's home. They apparently do a delicious five course meal for about 8 bucks - or the price of a pizza. The restaurant is called the "Two Tables Restaurant", as they only have two tables since it is in their home. This afternoon I went by to make a reservation (which is required) by ringing the doorbell and shouting up to the son who stuck his head out of the window from the third floor. He told me that dinner would be served at 7:30 p.m. Arriving promptly, I rang the doorbell - to be greeted by the father with some bad news: The family was out at a wedding all day and only just got home, so there would be no home-cooked dinner tonight. I wonder if the son didn't know that. In any case, I was left in a bind and had to scramble to arrange dinner for myself. Luckily, the Swiss father-son duo had arranged to have our hotel cook dinner for them and they were kind enough to allow me to share in their feast of Red Snapper, french fries and a salad. I'm glad I didn't have to go all the way back into town for dinner as I was already very hungry.
That group of American students also showed me their hotel, which seemed a little nicer than my current one. Also, I just feel like I need a change of scenery, so I think I will move into their hotel tomorrow. Their group of ten left today, so that should free up lots of rooms. The only disadvantage of their hotel is that it is near the port - in a not so nice part of town. The good thing about it, aside from nicer rooms, is its lovely roof terrace with sea views in two directions. Unlike the roof terrace at my current hotel, that terrace is nice enough to spend time sitting on reading and writing. I have been looking for a café with such a view for spending my time but I hadn't been able to find one.
Again today on my walk around Stone Town I got into a bit of an altercation with one of the papasi. He started with the usual story about having seen me before so I asked him if that now made us friends, in which case could he give me some money? As usual, the direction of our conversation took a turn towards him asking me to buy a local music CD. I got angry with him and asked him how he would like it if every person who spoke to HIM tried to sell him something that he didn't need. He said "I'm doing business. It's either this - or I have to steal." I guess getting a job didn't occur to him as an option. In any case, I certainly don't like thinly-veiled threats of "If you don't buy something from me, I'm afraid I'll have little choice but to steal something from you." Primarily because I seem to be making more enemies than friends among the locals, it won't be soon enough that I leave town.
It might seem like all locals are irritating like that. In fact, I would say that on average, the people here are rather friendlier than most people elsewhere. But those touts take 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 always a sure sign of a scam when only cash will solve their problems. In the end, this guy started shouting at the girl and became threatening. There should be a way for tourists to report such people to the police.
16 June
Before I came to Zanzibar I researched its climate on the internet. I found that it rains, on average, 5 days per month in June - not enough to bother with carrying an umbrella for someone who values packing lightly as much as I do. And for my first week here, not a drop of rain fell - until it was time for me to change hotels. On the recommendation of that group of American students whom I had met yesterday, I had decided to move to the Malindi Guest House, a place that is also recommended in my travel guide but that I didn't manage to find before. Anyway, given that I had acquired a big bottle of water and a few items of food and such, I decided to make the move in two trips. The first time I borrowed the hotel's umbrella and walked some of my stuff over but by the time I got back to the hotel for the second round, it was raining so hard that I decided to take a taxi. If I would have known that I was going to have to take a taxi anyway, I could have done it all on one trip.
I spent most of the day at the new hotel just hanging around in my room reading, having a nap and such because I was not feeling so well. I had a head ache and was just generally feeling "off" and down.
17 June
Started the day with breakfast at the new hotel and got into a conversation with the new manager of the place, the niece of the current owner. The current owner is in her late 70s now and she doesn't want to see the hotel die as it is a nice place with lots of history, charm and potential. The niece, although born in Zanzibar, had spent most of her life in England. As such, she acquired a western way of looking at things and is looking forward to the challenge of resurrecting the hotel. She solicited my ideas for suggestions for improvement and I was able to give her some right away. For example, fix the holes in the mosquito nets! There are holes big enough for a bird to fly through. Mosquitoes have nothing else to do all night but to find these holes. Their survival depends on it. On my trip to Africa last year I don't think I suffered a single mosquito bite. On this trip, I get at least five a night - probably in the morning when I go to the toilet, by which time my mosquito repellent has lost its effectiveness. I can only hope that my anti-malaria tablets are working!
Somehow after using my brain to think of improvements for the hotel, I started feeling better right away. I then went out for a bit of shopping before going to meet my tour group at the hotel at which they will be staying tonight in Stone Town. My tour officially started this morning with the departure from Dar es Salaam athough actually some people joined it as long as a week ago in Nairobi. So basically there is a core group on the tour and along the way we add and lose people according to where people need to start / finish their tour. I find this to be a very clever and flexible way to run a tour: Starting at Point A and ending at Point Z and letting people join or leave at certain major points along the way.
The disadvantage for me is that, at least for now, I am the last one to join the tour and everybody knows everybody else already, so it's like joining a party in progress. Surely cliques and alliances will have formed and it will take me a while to find my place.
I spent the afternoon showing some of our group around Stone Town as I am somewhat of an expert on the place due to having been here for a week and a half already. I essentially did with them what I had been doing every other day since being here: a walk around town followed by watching the sun set from the balcony of the Africa House Hotel. The bulk of the group went for dinner at the outdoor seafood market, which I don't like due to the number of touts hanging around it. Instead I went for a pizza with one of the group members, a 21-year old chap from Scotland whose accent I could hardly understand. At dinner, we got into a conversation with a couple of Swiss young women at the table next to ours and ended up moving to a table together to continue our conversation. We ended up continuing the conversation after dinner and had a really enjoyable time talking about a variety of topics, with the interplay between the English and German languages being a big part of the conversation.
I was finally able to drag myself away from this pleasurable evening at 22:30 and arrived at my hotel after a scary walk through dark alleys to find that the electricity was already off at my hotel. Crap! Dark and hot. I had to fumble my way around and managed to get under the mosquito net, eventually falling asleep after the heat subsided.
18 June
After checking out of my hotel at 10, I walked into town laden with my complete baggage - possible only because I am such a light packer. I stopped by the hotel where my group was staying to drop off my bigger bag for safekeeping while I went to use the internet and have lunch before joining my group for the bus ride to the beach resort town of Kendwe on the northern tip of Zanzibar Island.
While having lunch at my favorite café, I got into a conversation with an American girl who was staying at the same hotel from which I had just checked out. To my amazement, she told me that she had been jumped by a potential mugger in the dark lane leading up to our hotel last night - the same lane that I passed through not two hours later on my way home. I even remember thinking to myself that if I were a mugger, that's where I would attack someone. It was a completely dark (because of the electricity problem) alley through which tourists (usually carrying money and cameras, etc.) staying at the popular Malindi Guest House MUST pass to get to the guest house from the town. The girl said that she screamed and immediately the people from the neighborhood came to her rescue before anything could be stolen - or worse. But it was a good lesson for me to trust my instincts in this regard in the future and not take such risks again. I should think like a mugger and act accordingly. (By which I mean that I should hang out in such prime locations and rob tourists to finance my travels.)
After lunch I joined my group, which had just returned from a spice tour that I didn't join because I had taken a similar tour already shortly after my arrival in Zanzibar. We then boarded the chartered bus that was to take us to Kendwe. On the ride there, we were stopped several times by police officers who seemed to be sniffing for bakshish, but our driver managed to get through without having to pay. At one point, the van that was carrying our luggage got a flat tire and after realizing that their spare had been previously stolen the driver ended up buying a spare from a passing truck - a typical African solution to the problem - and one that I never would have thought of.
We arrived at our destination just in time to experience the gorgeous sunset before sitting down to dinner at our appropriately named beach side guest house, the Sunset Lodge. My dinner was a fiasco as I had ordered a chicken sandwich, which came with just a minuscule piece of chicken in it. After taking one bite out of it, my group mates suggested that I send it back to get it enhanced with a bigger piece of chicken (after I held it up between my fingers to show everybody how small it was). The restaurant took back my sandwich and offered me a pizza instead as a replacement. As I had been having pizzas nearly every day in Stone Town, I refused their offer and requested to have my original chicken sandwich back. After being very evasive about why they couldn't give it back to me, they finally admitted to having sold my (already bitten and fondled) sandwich to another customer - and I ended up getting a very disgusting little pizza that looked like it had just come out of the freezer and microwave. Needless to say, they won't be getting anymore of MY business!
19 June
After breakfast and a bit of housekeeping (i.e. doing laundry, with great gusto, in my portable kitchen sink), I spent the day walking along what was perhaps the most beautiful beach I have ever been on in my life. I had lunch on the beach and dinner at a little local restaurant-in-a-shack (in order to avoid eating at the shameful excuse of a restaurant at my guest house) with my Korean roommate Jace and a lovely young Canadian couple I had met, Shannon and Matt. Interestingly, we had much more enjoyable and meaningful conversations than I ever manage to have with my tour group mates, who are mostly quite friendly - if generally rather childish Brits in their mid- to late twenties. They tend to go more for drinking alcohol and playing games than engaging in meaningful conversation. Perhaps it's because they're on vacation. (Hey, I'm trying to be kind to them!) Or perhaps it's because we can choose or avoid random conversation partners, but we can neither choose nor avoid fellow members of a group tour that we are on.
Now I'll mention a bit about the organization/logistics of the tour for those of you who have never been on an overland truck trip. I don't know if all companies do things this way, but this is the way it is done at Acacia (with whom I am traveling), and I find it to be a very sensible system: To start with, this type of tour is called a "participation" tour. That means that the tour members have to do a lot of the work ourselves. In order to do this in a fair and rational way, the tasks that need to be done every day are divided up among teams. With a group of 21 tour members, we have four teams with four people each and one team with five members. Luckily I am on the team with five members, which reduces the workload for each of us a bit.
The tasks we have to do are: cooking, washing and drying the dishes, cleaning the truck, and loading and unloading the equipment from the truck. Since there are only four tasks - and five teams, each team gets a day off as well, although cleaning the truck is such light work that it essentially amounts to a day off as well. The least favorite task is washing the dishes. But, as the saying goes, many hands make for light work. Altogether, though, I have to say that the system is fairly well thought out and the chores are, over the long run, fairly evenly distributed, so it is not really much of a burden - if not a real pleasure. And on our trip, pretty much everybody was willing to do his tasks with little complaining or shirking.
Latest Comments (1)
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Z 3 (reply)
Jul 2, 2008 12:09 EST by zhallart
Sounds like OK stuff but a bit on the basic side for me. I don't need such detail to engage the experience.
Will you be back by Aug 2 - my ETA is 2 am NPL.
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