Zanzibar!

Another beautiful sunset here in Mtwara… I was just walking up the hill to the duka behind our house (to get “mayai” (eggs) for dinner), when I came over the rise to see a mushroom-cloud of a thunderhead towering over Mikindani Bay.

I swear I could recognize Mtwara just by the sight of her skyline (see the panorama below of a typical Mtwara sunset). Most days, the sky is filled with building thunderheads, as they role off the Indian Ocean – we only see the lightening and rain falling further inland in the late afternoon. Occasionally it rains hard in town for half an hour, and sometimes, like yesterday, you can be standing in the middle of a downpour, as the sun beats down upon you with its full intensity.


But whereas one might be able to recognize Mtwara from the horizon-up, one will never forget Zanzibar for the other half of the spectrum – the horizon-down. The water – that crystal blue ocean – can only be one place – East Africa’s famous spice island.


Merritt and I recently returned from our first real vacation, five days out on Zanzibar. Except for a Peace Corps training in Morogoro in December and Merritt’s business trips to Dar, we’ve been pretty much at site for the past seven months. While Tanzania is generous with their public holidays (about one every month and three for Easter), we were both in need of a break from the daily eight to four – and also perhaps the seemingly endless household chores that come with living in Tanzania (e.g., washing clothes by hand, filtering drinking water, cutting the grass around your house with a machete). It also happened to be right around our second anniversary, so some kind of trip seemed in order.

While the memory is still fresh, I have a few scenes that I want to describe for you, which I hope will at least bring joy to those of you for whom spring has not yet sprung and are in need of a little reminder of more tropical climes.

Leaving hot, crowded Dar es Salaam, after being hustled for a “deal” on a ferry ticket (“Hapana asante” – “no thanks”), you motor out through Dar’s busy port, littered with dhows and hand-hewn canoes – and as you relax in your bean bag chair (“kweli!” – “really!”), you’re glad you’ve made the effort to come so far already.

And two hours later, having left all the worries on the mainland, you arrive in Stone Town, where the water is so blue it hurts your eyes.


Ferry passengers, residents and tourists alike, burdened with the wares they’re bringing back from Dar and their overstuffed camping backpacks, throng to ferry railing. But there’s really no rush, at least for foreigners, who upon debarking are promptly corralled into a little “customs” waiting area – a set of wooden benches with tin roofing to offer pitiful relief from the eternally fierce sun. But at least there’s a breeze and the ocean to look at – and at least you’re in Zanzibar.

Why do you go through customs when your in the United Republic of Tanzania? Well, Zanzibar has found it advantageous to go along with its coastal neighbor, the former Tanganyika territory, which it joined in 1964, but hasn’t ever quite bridged the gap between it and the mainland,. So things are a little different in Zanzibar.

Anyway, so you finally get through customs, where you Kiswahili lessons pay for themselves, and then, just as in Dar, your greeted by a throng of just as numerous, but even more determined, street “touts.” I hadn’t heard the expression before (it’s British, apparently), but the touts of Zanzibar are a lesson in persistence (in Kiswahili, they’re called “papasi” – “ticks”).

Again, knowing a little basic Kiswahili saves you many a “shida” (problem). “Hoteli!” “Taxi!” “Safari!” They shout at you. “Hapana asante.” “Hatuhitaji.” “Hatuna haja.” You respond.

And when you’re free of the mass of people, you find yourself on the port street of Stone Town, walking in front of the Sultan’s Palace, the House of Wonders, and the Old Fort, and there’s no escaping that you’ve landed in another world, perhaps another time. The city is a combination of Arab, Indian, European, and African influences – big, square, two or three story cement buildings, with massive window-less fronts surrounding their famous carved wooden doors. Built side-by-side, these forts-unto-themselves leave only a maze of shadowy alleyways, in which one can spend the day exploring – every shopkeeper beckoning you into their store, and the occasional small coffee house or outdoor eatery where you can take a rest during the midday heat.

Counterclockwise from top left: House of Wonders (Zanzibar Museum of History); Old Fort; Tanzanian cat; baby basket; and three variations on the Zanzibar front door.

Merritt and I stayed at a bed and breakfast in Stone Town within walking distance of the port, called the Zenji Hotel. The ground floor of this three story building is divided between the hotel office and a coffee shop where the owners sell locally-made crafts, like Zanzibari woodwork and fabrics. The top two floors are small rooms, each individually named, like the “Taste of Culture,” where we stayed. The hotel serves breakfast under a canopied rooftop deck, where you can watch Stone Town come to life, as you have your morning toast (with banana-vanilla bean jam) and black coffee.

Speaking of food, Stone Town, apparently, has many great restaurants – from fancy Italian places to hole-in-the-wall, vegetarian-only Indian joints. However, except for lunch on the first day, Merritt and I wouldn’t know. Two nights in a row, we had talked about and chosen a restaurant for dinner, and both nights we got side-tracked along the way at Foradhani Gardens, a small outdoor park on the waterfront, which transforms nightly into a mecca of street food.

Table after table is piled high with skewers of grilled snapper, barracuda, shark, prawns, lobster and other fish, grilled vegetables, grilled bananas, chapati, nan. Men stand next to giant milling machines, grinding up raw sugar cane to make fresh juice. Then there are desert tables, where they make banana and chocolate pizzas.


After a vendor gives you the tour of his table and you have selected your dinner, they heat it on the grill and give you it on paper plates, so that you can sit out on the pier and watch the sunset, or moonrise if it’s later.

It’s a little overpriced ($1-2 per skewer of grilled fish, $3-4 for lobster or prawns, $2 for banana-chocolate pizza), and you’ll have to forget any questions about the sustainability of your catch, but it may be worth the trip alone.

Stone Town is on the southwestern corner of what is a fairly large island (roughly 30 miles long, 8-10 miles wide), and is in close proximity to several spice plantations that are popular for tours, as well as Jozani National Forest, home to the island’s remaining native red colobus monkeys. Merritt and I were planning on heading to the northern tip of the island, to one of the other major tourist destinations, Nungwi, so we used our one full day in Stone Town to go on a spice tour and to visit some of the other nearby historical sites.

At 8 a.m. the tour guide picks you up at your hotel and before you head out, the driver stops quickly at Darajani Market, where, because it’s so early, you never know what you might see in the “fish department”…

A man cuts up “pungu” (shortfin devil ray) at Darajani Market. Not pictured in this photo, the 12-foot high stack of swordfish directly behind the cameraman. The Island of Zanzibar, roughly twenty miles from the Tanzanian coast, offers its fishermen access to some of the deeper-water, open-ocean fisheries that produce East Africa’s bigger fish. In Mtwara, most fishermen can’t reach such waters in their dhow and dugout canoes, and so the catch is generally smaller.

But it only takes the guide a minute to buy the food for the group’s lunch, and your off to the “shamba” (farm).

The spice tour is, of course, very touristy – for instance, several locals follow the tour group around in the plantation, weaving palm straw necklaces (for the women) and ties (f0r the men), so that they can then ask for tips at the end. But the groups are small and the tour guides good.

As for the spices themselves – you walk along a path through what otherwise looks like the woods, and learn that basically everything you’re looking at – the trees, shrubs, undergrowth – has been specifically imported and planted for some special property. For example, did you know that iodine is comes from the sap of a tree? (This little tidbit proved useful within the hour of learning it.)

Cinnamon trees were another interesting stop – yes, the bark is used to make cinnamon, but who knew that the tree’s roots also contain the compound in menthol, also found in certain types of mint? Seems odd that the same tree can produce two such distinctive flavors.

From left to right: iodine, cinnamon, vanilla, and jackfruit.

Cardamon, nutmeg, black pepper, vanilla, cocoa, cloves – Zanzibar grows it all, and from what I understand, exports surprisingly little of it these days (a compliment to the local cooking).

Clockwise from top left: nutmeg, tamarind, cloves, and cocoa.

If you go on a spice tour out of Stone Town, there’s a good chance you’ll get to visit the Kidichi Persian baths, built by Sultan Seyyid for his wife in the 1850s. There’s not much to look at, but it’s still fun to imagine the sultan, his wife, and their entourage traveling out from their palace for their daily bath.

Our final stop of the day on our spice tour was Mangapwani caves, along the island’s central western coast. For much of the 19th century, Zanzibar was the capital of the East African slave trade. By one estimate, in the four decades before the British abolished the trade in the region in 1873, as many as 600,000 Africans were sold in the Zanzibar slave markets, destined for Arabia, Persia, and the Indian Oceans. After the slave trade was outlawed, however, an illegal slave trade continued on Zanzibar, and the Mangapwani caves were used to hold slaves until they could be smuggled out under cover of darkness. With a small spring at the bottom, slaves could be held here for weeks before being led out the two hundred meter long tunnel that leads to the ocean, where a boat would be waiting.


I think I’ve mentioned before that the remnants of the Colonial era are ever present in Tanzania – from German missionaries to massive sisal plantations to Mtwara’s failed peanut scheme. But Zanzibar, with its spice plantations, Persian baths, and former slave markets, offers a very different impression of colonialism – one of brute subjugation being used to support luxury and opulence.

After two days in Stone Town, we had had our fill of history, street hustlers, and fish kabobs – it was time to head to the beach.

Yet while I would love to be able to tell you more about Nungwi, I honestly can only describe what I saw from the taxi window, as Merritt and I were driving to Mnarani Beach Cottages, where we were staying. Nungwi is, by all appearances, a small fishing village – one that also happens to have several major resort hotels. Only here can you find a Double Tree Hotel in the midst of mud-and-thatch homes.

But Mnarani Beach Cottages is lovely…


Perched on the tidal cliff at Zanzibar’s northern pinnacle, Mnarani has a lighthouse for a neighbor (“mnarani” is “lighthouse” in Kiswahili). And though low tide exposes a half mile section of seafloor, at high tide, the swimming and snorkeling are considered some of the best on the island.

After finally picking up a pair of snorkel and goggles for Merritt in Stone Town, we finally got to go exploring out on the reef together, and Zanzibar did not disappoint. Though we never got a chance to get all the way out to the main reef, what we saw was still pretty incredible. Within our first two minutes, while still swimming out through the sea grass beds, Merritt spotted a beautiful bandit-stripped sea snake – calmly cruising through the sea grass on her morning hunt. We paused to watch her swim by and then continued on for deeper waters.

I must say that much of what we saw was overrun with sea urchin (a well-known sign of overfishing). Still amidst fields of sea grass and coral rubble, you could find these massive brain corals, teaming with tropical fish – wrasses, anglefish, squirrelfish, sergeants, sweepers, gobies, even the occasional puffer fish. And if you dive down to get a better look, occasionally you’ll see the eyes of a moray eel, peering back at you from his cave. Sometimes he’ll even swim out a little to give you a good look at his bald, brown and white-spotted head.

A morning or afternoon can go by pretty quick when your snorkeling. On one trip, it took us an hour to get out of the water after we discovered that the dock at the neighboring Italian resort was packed with bait fish – and barracuda and snapper charging through the schools. We saw more fish in an hour under a dock than we’d seen in three hours out on the reef.

So pretty quick, our two days in Nungwi were gone and it was time to return to Stone Town to catch the ferry to Dar, for the following morning’s return flight to Mtwara.

Anyway, it was a great trip, and there’s much of Zanzibar that we didn’t get to see – like the famous white beaches of the east coast or Jazani Forest. So if you feel like you need to see Zanzibar for yourself, “karibu” (welcome), and Merritt and I will meet you at the ferry (if not the Dar airport).