Spices and beaches

I had decided to take a short trip over to Zanzibar before leaving. I take the ferry from Dar es Salaam to Stone Town (avoiding being lured into paying for the tickets at a bogus booth rather than at the official ferry office).

There’s a mix of people travelling – families going visiting, and more backpackers than I’ve probably seen in the entire time I’ve been here,  as well as women carrying chickens in shopping baskets. Sometimes they try to escape (the chickens, not the women).

As we near Stone Town, with its fishing boats bobbing in the water and its exotic-looking old buildings, it seems like a contrast to the relative modernity of Dar.

Zanzibar feels quite different to mainland Tanzania, with a stronger Arabian influence. Some shop signs and newspapers are in Arabic, and nearly all of the women and girls I see have their hair covered. The hotel I’m staying in is a former Arabian palace and (like many others places) doesn’t serve alcohol.

Zanzibar is famous for the spices grown here and so I go on a ‘spice tour’ to one of the spice farms. It’s not the sort of farm that has crops grown in rows, divided by fences.

Instead, it consists of a wood, with dirt paths winding through, and mud houses with women sitting outside in a group, washing clothes, while the spices seem to grow in clumps here and there. We see (and smell and taste) lots of different growing spices – cinnamon, pepper, vanilla, cloves, turmeric, ginger, nutmeg/mace and lemongrass.

Next we stop for lunch, on mats on the ground under a thatched roof in a small village. Later we head to a peaceful beach, with fishing boats at one end and a rocky outcrop at the other. Overlooking the beach is an outdoor bar area, with monkeys in the treetops above.

On the way back to Stone Town we find a snake in our minibus – yikes! – but it seems to slither away.

At night we have dinner at one of the more touristy places – right on the waterfront with an extensive food and cocktail menu. The food I’ve had in Zanzibar has been good - I’ve had some version of fish in a coconut curry three times here now.

Next morning I head back over the water to Dar.