Onto Zanzibar

Trip Start Sep 04, 2008
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Trip End Oct 13, 2008


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Flag of Tanzania  ,
Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Today we travel from Dar es Salaam out to Zanzibar. First the day starts with a short walk to the local ferry/barge. There are 16 white people and about 300 locals. We are all crammed on inbetween cars, and bicycles carrying everything from coal to sweet potatoes. Out journey begins and we go forward, then we feel we are reversing. We are - there is an ambulance that needs to get on our ferry, so we make room for it for the 5 minute crossing to the other side of Dar. We then have to walk a good 20 minutes carrying our backpacks (We have mine full of all our clothes so we could finally get them washed on Zanzibar). It is a long, hot, dusty walk. Our ferry ride across to Zanzibar takes 2 hours. It is 80kms from the mainland and we arrive just after lunch. At the moment it is the holy month of Ramadan so we have to sneak our sandwiches to our mouths so to not offend the locals who are fasting from sunrise to sunset.

We check into our hotel and then head straight back down to reception for our Spice Tour. It started with a walking tour through some historic parts of Stone Town and the old Slave Quarters before driving out to the countryside for our official spice tour. Before our tour starts we have a lunch of fruit - delicious fruit. Passionfruit, orange, banana and the best pineapple I have ever tasted. We then tried 3 different types of tea - even Anthony tried them!!! Our spice tour was extremely interesting to see all the plants in their natural form and learning where things like pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, to name just a few come from - we even found the plant that has the colour extract for lipstick.
 
After the official part of the tour one of the local boys climbs a coconut tree (I'm guessing about 20 metres high) and chops down 3 coconuts for us. We have a drink then taste the coconut. Personally not my cup of tea, but it was still very exciting to watch him climb so high.
 
We arrive back into Stone town just on sunset, grab a quick drink at a posh hotel overlooking the water and then shower for dinner. It is Jess's (a member of our tour) birthday so we have Indian for dinner. Anthony and I have a big seafood platter which was the least Indian we could come up with since the appetizer blew our heads off. In the end it was very yummy. We all headed to a local bar for drinks but crashed about midnight.
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