Part of Tanzania, or not?
Sunday, July 22nd, 2007So we head to Zanzibar – I was very optimistic that this was a totally blown out of proportion place because everyone says this is a “must-see”. And it was like $35/pp/one-way just to take the boat. Actually it turned out to be kind of cool…
Unfortunately there’s this little thing called the ocean that we had to cross over for 2 hours to get to this island. On a boat. So I took my friend Dramamine which made me take a nap. Meanwhile John watched some funky movie with Lucy Liu and Antonio Banderas which looked mildy interesting for the 5 minutes I was awake for it.
So we get to Zanzibar and have to go to passport control even though we’re in the same country. They used to be 2 different countries since Zanzibar has been owned by a bunch of different people including Oman which used it as a slave market. Fun times, huh? They would ship slaves over from the mainland in Bagamoyo and then sell them. Anyway, we get some taxi to drive us to the north side of the island to a place called Nungwi.
Our driver was talking about Zanzibar a bit and he mentioned that NGO’s used to send over foreign English teachers to teach in the schools but they didn’t do that anymore. And my thinking is – what happened to all people that learned English from those foreign teachers – can’t they teach English? I mean come on – when does the cycle end? I think that was kind of the recurring theme throughout the region – and really throughout Africa.
After we checked out one place to stay and decided to move on we went to the next place, Amaan Bungalows where we stayed for the next 4 nights. At this point, we were pretty tired of sleeping in twin beds but luckily on Zanzibar they have Zanzibarian beds which are a double. I have no clue but the bed could fit us both on it. Bonus!
For the next 4 days we wandered around – Nungwi is kind of funky because you really can’t walk anywhere on the beach unless it’s low tide. Once it’s high tide you have to go inland to get around or wade. The beach pretty much disappears except for a few spots. We wandered around the north to see the dhows – so cool – when it’s low tide all the fisherman are repairing their boats and all these dhows are just beached. And when the tide rolls in they just shove off and all of a sudden they’re just floating around. We wandered around the other way the next day to Kendwa and they actually had a legitimate beach that didn’t go away at high tide. But pretty much we just swam, sat on the beach, ate really crappy food (other than the place we stayed at all the other places had seasoning problems – either really salty or really bland – when you have to dump a ton of chili sauce on a pizza to make it palatable – well, it just isn’t good) and talked about where we’re going next.
After the 4 days of lounging we took a shared taxi back down to Stone Town, where we had landed previously. It totally looked like a Moroccan medina. Narrow, twisting streets and pretty much if it wasn’t so small you could get lost in there for days. We stayed at a guesthouse called the Flamingo – pretty nice except for the mosquitos – thank goodness for mosquito nets – very basic – anyway, we went to the baths in the middle of the town, John got a Thai massage, we went on a spice tour (totally a waste of time, but they had good fruit at the end/and the best curry I think we’ve had in Tanzania) – it’s a very cool little town – oh and the spice coffee was really good – normal coffee with a bunch of spices mixed in – yumm – and wayyyyy better food here. I didn’t want to hurl thinking of the word “lunch”. And it was totally funny – at around sunset all these guys jumped off the side of the “pier” (actually, it was really just into the bay) – I mean over and over again and all trying to outdo the next…
Speaking of hurling – that’s what I did on the way back to the mainland. They totally overbooked this boat we took back and about 20 minutes from the mainland I couldn’t take it anymore and I had to chunk up the 1/2 of a twix I had for breakfast. Luckily John had the foresight to get us to the back of the boat so when we finally docked we were one of the first ones off the boat. Otherwise, who knows what would have happened.
Back to the YWCA we went – we had to get a “flat” which meant we had our own bathroom. That’s all they had left. We also arranged to go get our tickets on Scandinavian for our 30 hour bus tour to Kampala. Boy were we looking forward to that. We also had the absolute worst Thai food at this really fancy hotel – it just seems kind of weird that they couldn’t do good Thai food since they had all the usual ingredients like Lemon Grass, ginger and stuff – the climate is fairly similar – but yes, overly optimistic like all the food in Tanzania. So for the last meal we had in Tanzania we had, yes, you guessed it, Subway. Our saviour!!!
So to sum up Tanzania, outside of the L’Oasis Lodge the food kind of sucked (except for while we were on safari and on our Leshoto trek). The people were super nice. The scenery was exceptional. The infrastructure was a little iffy (but better than expected!). The Tazara was way cool. Zanzibar was worth the trip over. Um, that’s about it! We would come back some day. I think they’re in for some pretty big changes in the next few years!
JohnCin