Zanzibar!

This is an exciting milestone for this blog (after all it is in the name) so please excuse the length of the post. I just didn’t know what to leave out.

Waking up at 5:45 wasn’t hard: since arriving in Tanzania I’ve adjusted to a very early schedule. I haven’t needed to get up early, but without anything for which to stay up late I have just continued with the early nights of the first day of jet lag. The convenient thing about this is that it was easy to wake up in time to shower and meet the taxi in time to get to the ferry by 6:30.
I read on the ferry ride, a book off the English shelf in our host Susan’s rather large collection (I didn’t want to read through the few books I had brought too quickly). It was an uneventful trip to Zanzibar, the bright blue seas quite calm in the sunny morning. We pushed our way off the boat and onto the shore, and went through customs (“for statistical reasons”) although Zanzibar is the same country as Tanzania (and the reason it is no longer called Tanganyika). As expected, a taxi driver was on us immediately offering us a tour of Stone Town, the main town of Zanzibar, and to drive us to a spice tour. We negotiated for the spice tour and, rather than the tour of Stone Town, which we would explore tomorrow, a drive to the beach. After some bargaining, we headed off and got in what turned out to be a seven-passenger van that my mother and I would have all to ourselves.
Stopping once for some sort of paperwork from the government for tourists, we drive out of Stone Town and north to the spice tour. The tour starts at a tree with vines climbing up it. Our guide crushes a leaf from the vine and, giving us each a piece, he asks what the vine is. The leaves smell somewhat spicy but I have no idea what spice this plant is. He shows us a string of tiny green spheres hanging from the vine, giving us each one to eat. “Pepper!” says my mother, biting into hers. I put mine into my mouth and realize that it is indeed pepper. Our guide explains how the pepper is made into different kinds, to be sold as black pepper, red pepper, green pepper or white pepper and we move on. Next he points out a tall tree with some spiky – or perhaps fuzzy – fruits growing on the large branches near the trunk. Our guide explains that this is jackfruit, which tastes like a mix between pineapple and ripe banana, while another man leaps up and begins climbing the tree. Apparently the fruit isn’t ripe, so we move on.
Next, vanilla. Another vine climbing up a tree in an interesting zigzag, the familiar dark brown vanilla beans hanging from a low part of the vine. We smell one and continue. Growing out of the ground are what could be palm leaves with very thin individual blades. “Lemongrass?” my mom ventures a guess. But no, it is ginger. Our guide cuts a piece of one of the roots and we taste it. Then we see cardamom growing at the base of one leafy plant and taste a piece of cinnamon bark. Taking his knife, our guide finds a root of the cinnamon tree and gives it to us to smell. As he had claimed, it smells just like Vick’s. He explains the medicinal qualities of the root and, showing us a bright yellow slice of the next root, does the same for turmeric.
The next spice is again cardamom, this time on the leaves of the plant, then curry leaves (pictured with my ma). We continue, seeing henna, cloves, lemongrass and pineapples. He shows us a small plant on the ground that shrinks from the touch but is good for nothing else. The man who had climbed the jackfruit tree climbs up a tall African coconut palm with a rope wound around his feet.
“Looks like it’s going to rain,” my mom commented. “Do you think it will rain?” she asked the guide.
“Oh, no,” he says emphatically.
We sit on a small bench, drinking some “tea masala” – a tea made with some of the spices we saw growing here today – and eating the coconut meat from a coconut that we just watched our tree climber open for us, letting us to drink the milk, which is better than I had remembered from the last time I tried it. It begins to rain very suddenly, an intense downpour that stops as quickly as it began.
Leaving, we are led past a table where they are selling the spices. We look at it all and my mom buys a small bag of pilau spices to add to rice. Paying the various people for the tour, we leave and head for the beach. Our guide was adamant that we see the beaches in the far north so we negotiate the price for the drive and decide to head up north rather than a beach nearer to Stone Town. (“The beach near Stone Town isn’t that nice,” my mom confided)
Our driver, Solomon, turns the van around and we begin driving north. As we drive, we are stopped a few times at police posts that block off half the road. Sometimes they ask to see the paper we had picked up in Stone Town and sometimes they simply wave us past. We drive up through the tropical landscape, through densely forested areas then out into the open. As we approached the north end of the island, Keep it Together in my ears, the plants were shorter, cultivated land interspersed in the wild growth. We leave the road and drive down a narrow and extremely bumpy dirt road through a small town until we arrive at a resort beach. The weather still does not look great: it has just rained and threatens to rain again. My mother and I wander down the beach, declining offers to go snorkeling or to have a tour of a neighboring island. We reach the end of the short beach and continue through a resort. We stop and lean on a fence on the edge of a 20-foot drop to the ocean and just admire at it, the turquoise waves hitting the rock below us. It isn’t sunny but it isn’t cold and a pleasant ocean breeze blows. Heading back, we stop at a restaurant on the beach to eat lunch.
While we eat, the wind blows to the north, taking the clouds with it and when we finish, we are treated with a sunny stretch of sky. The beach begins to fill up with the other visitors from all over Europe: the Italians seem especially well represented. I lie down on the beach and relax in the sun. The water is not very warm and I can see that we won’t have sun for long, and, not having a towel with which to dry off, I don’t dare go swimming because I would never dry off before the taxi ride back to Stone Town. We relax on the beach for the next hour and a half, through another cloudy stretch and again into the sun.
The drive back is uneventful. I sit watching the scenery pass and listen to music. Three times Solomon stops: once to check the price of some coconuts (too expensive), the second time to buy some and the third time he buys some fruits to make juice. The fruits grow in a bunch and look somewhat like oranges. He rips one open for us, revealing a harder peel than that of an orange and many seeds inside covered with a little fruit. It tastes extremely sour and Solomon tells us that it is called bungo.
We check into our hotel in Stone Town and then, asking Solomon where to find the spice market, we enter the maze-like streets of Stone Town. At first, the alleyways of Stone Town are utterly confusing and all of them seem to look identical. Not knowing the layout of the town or even where we had been to begin with, I could easily have gotten lost. Since my mother had warned me of the way that the alleys of Stone Town make it easy to lose one’s way, I was attentive and could easily find my way back after we found our way to the market and bought some Saffron and tea masala spices.
The next day, after breakfast at the hotel with what we decided may have been bungo juice, we head out to find our way through Stone Town. At first, we do not have any idea where we are or where we are going but, finding our way to a large street, we find where we are on the map and realize that we are not on the right side of town. Backtracking, we head up a road that we had come down and expect, as the map seemed to suggest, that the road would continue or connect to other large roads to take us to the ocean. In reality, the street ended in the maze of alleyways. We start out just randomly choosing what direction to travel but soon realize that since the sun was behind us, we simply had to continue the way we were going, taking the north and west alleys. Then we were suddenly out of the maze, gazing at the old fort, its tall walls and threatening towers blocking the view of the sea.
My mom and I went into the House of Wonder, a museum that, it turned out, my mother had already seen. It was all about the history of Zanzibar, which was interesting, but the tour was a bit too long for me. We then spent that day hanging out in the newly re-done park next to the ocean and wandering Stone Town. The town, despite the initial appearance of impenetrability, is actually quite small and we walk virtually all the way around it. Navigating the alleys is simple if the sun is out or with have a compass and even if we went the wrong way, we would soon get to either the ocean or Creek road, the town’s boundary on the East. I would love to spend more time in Stone town if only to explore its many alleys. For now though, we head back to the ferry and to Dar.