Arusha to Zanzibar

From the mountains in the north of Tanzania, we took a 10 hour bus ride to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania's largest City and the economic center of the country. Our bus was the semi-luxury bus from a company which advertised luxury and semi-luxury, the semi- fit our schedule (7am departure instead of the ungodly 5:15am luxury). Semi-, we learned, meant that we got Cokes (score!), they played movie videos during the ride, and we had assigned seats. This kind of travel makes for uneventful trips. We got to Dar around 4 pm without any mishaps. Thanks semi-luxury!

We spent one night in a YMCA in Dar and head to the ferry to go to Zanzibar. The ferry is bouncey, they hand out sick bags which we do not end up needing. We stay in Stone Town for two days, which is the tourist part of Zanzibar Town (the island is generally called Zanzibar, Zanzibar Town is the name of the main town on the island). Tourist spending is a very big part of the island's economy which means there are at least 2 times as many people selling to tourists as there are tourists in Stone Town. (It's called Stone Town because, as a British Protectorate, all the Brit administrators decided to make that little part of Zanzibar the main British area, so they got rid of all the mud-huts and only allowed stone buildings.)

One funny attempt at parting us from some money begins with a salesperson (who are nicknamed "touts") approaching on foot and saying Didn't I see you yesterday in Stone Town? To us, this seems like a terrible opener. We still haven't figured out where a successful pitch goes from there.. We typically replied with No no, we were not in Stone Town that day. Once, we replied with, Yes! I did see you yesterday, and you told me you were going to give me some money. That is my favorite turnaround on street sales folks.

So, Zanzibar is full of people who will fall in step with you as you walk to try to figure out that you might buy. Taxi, t-shirt, tour guide, spices, etc. We tend to engage these folks in conversation, brightly talking about how much we are enjoying our stay, how beautiful the island is, Obama is our president (a good topic for Americans!) and then our next topic is the World Cup. We have found much less than universal interest in the World Cup in Tanzania. We just met a tour guide nicknamed Striker who was not very interested in the Cup. Weird.

While on Zanzibar, we took a spice tour which was fairly interesting. The island used to be dominated by spice plantations - vanilla, cloves (which smell AMAZING in the wild), nutmeg. We took a tour with 4 other people to a farm and as we began to walk around the place, which was planted with such a wide variety of trees and plants that it looked like a wild garden, we were followed by some local teenage boys - The guide said to us in English right in front of them, that they would follow us around but that we should not accept anything from them (they make rings and bracelets out of leaves) because they would expect payment and they were truants, bad boys, and smoked weed, their reputations were destroyed! The nutmeg plant was the most interesting to me, the guide noted that a woman has to know a lot about cooking with it to be a good wife (in too large quantities it can make an eater very ill) and that men like it to be brewed into some kind of drink because, only after drinking it would women dance and their eyes would become "open" as he put it. Oh my. Here is a pic of nutmeg, inside the red pit, below.





We also visited two large Indian Ocean beach locations, one called Jambiani and the other called Kiwengwa. These days we mostly spent reading, hanging out by the ocean or pool (in Kiwengwa, where we stayed in a fancy resort!), and playing games.. While these are very fun activities for us, they do not translate to the blog very well, so instead of the play-by-play, I have put together some random bullets for your enjoyment in the next post.