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  • Day 16

    Day 15: Stone Town

    March 20, 2011 in Tanzania ⋅ ⛅ 27 °C

    Another early start, bidding a fond farewell to the Springlands Hotel. Although we've only actually spent 3 nights here, it's been our base of operations for the past fortnight and we're sad to leave. So off we piled in a bus for the airport with a bunch of noisy South Africans.

    The ride to the airport was enlivened somewhat by a pair of rally cars screaming past on the highway. An older 911 and a Lancer EVO III. Not far ahead, they slid off the highway and onto a marked rally course, meaning they were taking part in an official organised rally down a live public highway. Both cars overtook us on the wrong side of the road - madness!

    Precision Air lived up to their name, as for the first time ever in Africa something happened early! The flight left about 20 minutes early, and landed in Zanzibar approx 30 minutes. Amazing stuff.

    Stone Town is very different to Moshi and Dar Es Salaam. Our hotel is pretty nice - fresh paint and lovely furnishings. There are a lot more tourists about and the population is more obviously Muslim (though still 95% black).

    We spent most of the afternoon wandering and taking photos. It's not a pretty city, but attractive enough on an African scale I guess. I still felt very self-conscious but tourists are a very common sight, and aside from taxi/ferry touts nobody paid us any attention.

    Ate lunch in a nice cafe near the water and then did a tour of the local Anglican Church. The church was built in the 1880s on the site of the old slave market (Zanzibar was at the centre of the east African slave trade) and serves as a memorial to those who died. A couple of the holding cells have been preserved and they're pretty horrific.

    Back to the hotel, visiting the local market on the way. It was mostly a functional market for locals rather than a tourist market, and thus only had a few interesting items and it mostly stunk like rotting fish, body odour and garbage. We also dropped by the old Arab fort, but it was pretty decrepit and we didn't linger.

    In the evening we went out for a few drinks at a waterfront bar called Mercury's. Freddie Mercury is literally the only famous person to ever come from Zanzibar (he was born here and stayed until age 5 or so), and there's a few things named for him. They had City vs Chelsea on the TV, but we watched the sunset and the local children doing flips and playing football on the beach below us.

    Ate dinner in a large open-air market in Forohdhani Gardens. Seafood skewers and a banana choc pizza, all very nice but definitely at tourist prices. Impressed the two pizza guys with my Swahili knowledge - they pointed at a banana and asked me what the Swahili word was, and luckily it was one of the 15 Swahili words I knew! Ndizi!
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