MENAI BAY – On Distant Sandbanks

The resolve of Patricia and the Italians for more adventurous sightseeing holds true and so for my final day on Zanzibar I decide to join them for the excursion they’re taking with the tour company Safari Blue, who operate in the Menai Bay Conservation Area on the south of the island. Zanzibar’s costal flora and fauna have trouble competing with the growing numbers of resorts elsewhere on the coast, so the protection of Menai Bay is all the more important.


Modern dhow heading towards Kwale Island...


... and not so modern canoe moored in the shallow waters closeby.

We start the day travelling by dhow from the beach at Fumba to nearby Kwale Island. It’s a journey carried out in traditional style… except, perhaps, for the outboard motor on the stern of the dhow. Conservation area or not; Menai Bay is another big business opportunity for Zanzibar’s tour guides. There are half a dozen other dhows racing across the open water to try and get to the prime beach and snorkeling sites on Kwale Island. I’m suddenly reminded why I do most of my travelling alone.

Tour guide Idris, though, obviously has a spider sense about him and so steers us away from the crowds and into some of the mangrove lined bays around the island. The mangroves, along with the turtles who visit them to breed and lay eggs, are one of the primary conservation projects on Kwale. At low tide, with their rocky bases slowly eroding, the statuesque trees look particularly stunning in their isolation.


The northern beach of Kwale Island as the morning's boats arrive.

We return to the northern edge of the island where it’s (yet) a(nother) stunning day on the beach and in water which is all kinds of shades of blue. Accompanied by (yet) a(nother) wonderful seafood lunch. It would be easy to spend days in Zanzibar and do nothing else if one so wished; be driven off to beautiful beaches everyday and do much the same thing time after time. Watching half a dozen groups doing the same thing around us, I found myself missing my dulla-dulla. I still had my lucky find copy of “All Creatures Great and Small” to read. Which had an added interest for animal – obsessed Patricia. Explaining the finer points of James Herriot’s writing style to an Italian on a white sand beach was a rather surreal use of an hour.


In the water off the coast of Kwale. Sea and sky... perfect blue.

At sunset, and with the prevailing winds allowing us to actually sail back to the mainland, we stopped off on a sandbar for final photos and to watch the waves in the gathering dark. Reflecting on the week, the day in Menai typifies a lot of Zanzibar. It certainly feels like a place where the ancient and the modern have collided and are looking to find an easy peace. The thing about Zanzibar, and I see this as a good thing, is that it doesn’t seem to do the modern very well. From what I’ve seen of the resorts and Stone Town, they’re at their best when dealing with simple pleasures and local seafood. The dhow motor breaks down a fair amount; the sail doesn’t.


Patricia and I on a sandbank in Menai Bay. We're squinting, incidentally, because the setting sun is shining directly into our eyes!

The trip to the airport the following day is typical. Air travel does not suit Zanzibar yet. Checking in is like living a newsreel of the arrivals at Ellis Island. Lines of passengers are everywhere, snaking in and out of the shack like terminal. You may or may not get checked in before your flight leaves, and even then all that enables you to do is to join one of the many other lines dealing with luggage, visas and immigration (of which there are many; all unmarked) There appears to be one computer in the entire building, as check in staff write information on pieces of paper and then disappear for ten minutes before coming back with boarding passes. In the days of large, anonymous airport terminals (and large, anonymous island beach resorts) Zanzibar’s is a lot of fun. It does things at its own pace and you just have to go with it. Of course, I my judgment here might be influenced by the fact that, after my check in attendant returned from his mysterious visit to the back office, he told me that my flight was overbooked and I’d been upgraded to business class for my flight back to Nairobi.

Well, you can take this whole ‘travelling on a shoestring’ thing a bit too far, can’t you?


Shell on the sand in Menai Bay.

CHUINI – Meandering around Matemwe

Typically, Mangrove Lodge guests go out on a series of excursions during the day. I’ve resisted so far, as I find tour groups all sorts of annoying and it’s never the most exciting thing in the world to be the only English speaker in a group. Yesterday, though, a new group arrived. Still all Italians; but this time with English speaking special powers. The best English speaker is Patricia, possibly because until recently she was engaged to a man from Vancouver. This sets up an interesting dynamic since she loves all things Vancouver but talking about them slightly depresses her. Luckily, kittens make her happy. So as long as we talk in the part of the dining area where stray cats wander in and out, things seem to go well. Some of her companions, who are also lovely, mention to Haji that they’re not fish fans on their first night. He looks worried. I know why; I haven’t eaten a meal in Zanzibar yet which doesn’t contain some form of seafood. Crab, lobster, octopus… It’s all here, and it’s all fabulous. The Italians end up eating a lot of fries.


The dining room at the Mangrove Lodge. In a rare, non-fish related moment.

That said, the majority of the guests at Mangrove this week are much older than Patricia or I and it quickly becomes clear that their taste in excursions extends to, well, the very dull. So I make my own plans to head over to the opposite side of the island using public transport. This intrigues Idris, the tour guide who leads most of the excursions. “How many people are you used to on a bus?” he asks, quizzically. I tell him about the time I once travelled to Foz do Iguaçu on the floor of an overbooked bus. Satisfied that I will not be mortified by Zanzibar public transport, he gives me the numbers of the dulla-dullas I need.


The bay outside the Mangrove Lodge.

East African public transport is, for my money, a lot more efficient than that in North America. First of all, everything tends to start in the same place in whichever major town you’re in. As long as you don’t mind scanning the numbers of several hundred identical vehicles (I pretended I was in The Amazing Race…) then you’ll find what you’re looking for eventually. Dulla-dullas (minibuses, or glorified vans) then leave when they’re full. Not when they’ve been waiting five or ten minutes. And not even when all the seats are taken. When they’re *full.* And, even after that, they’ll still stop to take on board more people. That’s rather impressive when there’s no more than 15 seats to begin with and there’s already 20 people on board. The most I counted was 26… plus luggage!

The slightly annoying thing about dulla-dulla trips is that they come in two speeds. Breakneck; or snails pace. The first trip across the island is one of the latter. Every corner must be stopped at, and everyone who gets in board seems to have some huge pile of vegetables, or planks of wood or even buckets of rotting fish with them. Amazingly, though, there’s always a space for everything. And with 26 people in a confined space, the smell of rotting fish is surprisingly not the most pungent around. The trip takes around ninety minutes. Mind you, for a cost of around 20 cents, I’m not complaining. (The trip back, incidentally, took about thirty minutes. Including several occasions of being bounced around and wondering how long it would be before my head bounced high enough to make skull crushing contact with the roof above…)


Matemwe village, built on the sands...

We arrived into Matemwe village just after lunch. Back in Chuini, the weather had been rather grey but Zanzibar’s reliable microclimates meant clouds on one side of the island gave way to clear blue skies on the other. Matemwe isn’t just close to the coastline; it’s built right on the sands of the beach. With turquoise water lapping on the coral white shore, Matemwe Beach is the definition of tropical paradise. It’s also a little less built up than other stretches of coast on the island, perhaps because of the proximity of the village and the dozens of dhows owned by the locals which are parked on the beach during low tide. It takes a good few minutes of concerted wandering down the beach until I find the first resort and snag a free chair thanks to the deployment of a few words of Swahili to the man who’s minding them. (Jo Russell taught me maybe half a dozen words of Swahili before I left the UK. Most of them variations on ‘How are you?” and “I’m okay.” For the first time ever in my learning of a language, every one of them was not only useful, they pretty much covered every eventuality)


A view from a beach chair. Blue skies, white sands and turqouise waters. Mmmm...

It’s an(other) easy afternoon on a Zanzibar beach; with a few breaks to explore the crystal clear lagoon and to watch the occasional soccer ball get pelted up and down the shoreline by the local kids… After my harrowing dulla-dulla ride back, I have a half hour walk from Chuini to Mangrove Lodge, watching farmers working quietly in the fields whilst an orange sun disappears behind the horizon. I arrive back in time for dinner (fish again, of course) and Patricia explaining the non-wonders of the day’s tour. Apparently the south of the island was grey all day. I try to downplay Matemwe, but after she gets hold of my camera and sees my day's photos, she demands to know how to get there. I explain dulla-dulla etiquette as best I can and draw maps on napkins. Her travelling companions look horrified at the thought of using such horrendous sounding transport, and resolve to do a more interesting excursion the next day to avoid the possibilities of bone crushing accidents, or having to share air space with anyone’s bucket of rotting fish. It leads to a good night for all; with a momentary moment of cultural horror for Brit, Italians and stray cats alike when a Swahili remix of “Who Let the Dogs Out” starts playing on the stereo.


Looking down Matemwe beach; white sands stretching into the distance.

STONE TOWN – The Cautionary Tale of Princess Salme

Among the many displays in the questionably named House of Wonders museum in Stone Town, there’s a stamp dated from the 1960s entitled ‘Religious Tolerance.’ The stamp has images of several of Stone Town’s major places of worship, including both the Anglican and Catholic Cathedrals as well as several mosques, all closely packed together on the same street. It’s a stylized representation of how life in Stone Town seems to operate. This is a tiny piece of land, filled with buildings from several centuries and different cultures (particularly Arabian and Portuguese) built within a few feet of each other. With the differing colonial influences also came different faith groups; so as you wander around the Anglican Cathedral you can quite clearly hear the midday prayers being broadcast from the mosque across the square.


The Zanzibar religious tolerance stamp. Postage should always make good statements.

And it works. It has to; there just isn’t any room for anyone in Stone Town to get territorial about their religion or anything else for that matter. That’s especially true during Ramadan; when many of the city’s eateries close for most of the day and the usual East African occupation of relentless selling seems oddly muted. That may either be because the island’s mostly Sunni Muslim population is spending all their time in prayer, or possibly because even in the cooler season in which I visit, it’s still warm enough to make twelve hours of fasting a day a rather tiring thing to do. And relentless selling is rather hard work. That means I’m relatively unhassled as I wander around the narrow rocky streets (and it is wandering; using a map sort of misses the point of the possibilities for discovery in the maze of Stone Town) The only thing I end up buying is a battered copy of “All Creatures Great and Small”, and the seller simply *insists* on giving me a discount which I hadn’t even bargained for.

So, what to do in a slightly sleepy East African version of Morocco? Well, there are two cathedrals in town… The Anglican Church arrived in Zanzibar in the middle of the nineteenth century, just as slavery was being abolished. So much so that the Anglican Cathedral is built on the site of the old slave market; with the altar being on the very spot where slaves would be whipped and beaten. That might seem rather distasteful, but then I could tell you a thing or two about some of the more gruesome pagan sites on which English churches got built… Also, it’s fairly clear to me that the choice of location for the Cathedral was intended as an act of healing rather than an expression of colonial power. That’s a response which fits right in on an island of outstanding natural beauty which religious tolerance is a way of life. Here, figures like David Livingstone are regarded with a great deal of affection (his campaign against the slave trade and time of residence in Zanzibar make him much revered) What’s left of the slave markets themselves are two small holding cells across Cathedral Square underneath St. Hilda’s Youth Hostel. They’re just two dark rooms with iron chains still in place. But it’s enough to make the point.


Anglican Cathedral with mosque just around the corner.


One of the sobering holding cells underneath St. Hilda's hostel.

After signing the Anglican Cathedral guestbook on behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada, I headed over to the much more gothic looking Catholic Cathedral. After reading a tip in the Lonely Planet which mentioned a perennially open back door, I headed inside to be greeted with a garish pink and yellow paint job, and a local resident playing extremely slow praise music on an electric keyboard. The whole atmosphere was too surreal; I had to leave before anything weirder happened. I ducked into a local Internet café for the first e-mail of the trip and found a rather large selection of pirated DVDs for sale whilst I was waiting. If you had any doubts about the influence of tolerance weighing against the local conservatism, it all fades away when you find a copy of “John Tucker Must Die” on the crowded shelves. E-mails away, I then continued on the British-tourist-abroad trail and hit up the local museums.


The Palace Museum viewed from the balcony of the House of Wonders. Top marks for museum naming!

Of all the local heroes, none seems more revered in Zanzibar’s public history than Princess Salme. Born to the life of a Sultan’s daughter in Zanzibar, she left to Europe to marry a German merchant. After his death, she seems to have made some attempt to return to Zanzibar but (to the obvious regret of whoever wrote the displays in the Palace Museum) was never quite accepted back. I wonder if it’s because, by that point, she was neither one thing or the other. Not quite Arabian, not quite European. Zanzibar’s tolerance, perhaps, requires a little loyalty to go along with it… Neither the Palace Museum or the House of Wonders are quite as exciting as they should be. The former has a number of rooms decorated in the style of the former Sultans over the course of their rule. By the time Zanzibar was approaching the end of its independence, the palace living room was looking suspiciously like a middle class British sitting room. It was probably best they unified with Tanzania before the eighties fashions arrived.


The Sultan's sitting room. Where I can imagine the Sultan and family gathered around to open Christmas presents and listen to the Queen's Speech.

The best thing about the museums is their top floors, which open out onto large balconies with views across the crowded town. You can see where buildings are almost falling into one another because of their proximity, and where power and clothes lines weave in and out of multiple residences high across the streets below. For a confusingly designed cityscape, Stone Town really does make much more sense than it lets on.


Painter on a balcony in front of the towers of the Catholic Cathedral.


Old Fort ampitheatre and the rooftops of Zanzibar.

ZANZIBAR - Why Did God Create the Sinus Cavity?

Obviously as an act of revenge for my covering up my cough when I entered the country, my head was aching as I boarded my plane for Zanzibar. Having travelled when all kinds of sick in the past, I didn't think anything of it. We flew south east, on a surprisingly overcast Kenyan morning. The only sight - and what a sight - was as we entered Tanzania and Mt. Kilimanjaro poked up through the clouds. I happily snapped away at that, and the Tanzanian coastline as the water became bluer and more beautiful. And then comes the descent. Anyone who's ever been on a descending plane with a blocked sinus will be able to tell you something of the plane. Here's my version. Imagine your head feels like it's going to explode. You're there, right? Okay; now imagine a tropical paradise island is below you which you are desperate to photograph from the air because you are an enormous geek. But everything about operating your camera makes this pain feel many times worse. And, yet, with beautiful coastline being joined by stunning town, you just can't stop snapping...


Mt. Kilimanjaro; the landmark in the cloud between Kenya and Zanzibar.


The stunning west coast of Zanzibar, as seen through my stunning sinus splitting headache.

By the time I'm through Tanzanian immigration (who issued a Visa upon which every piece of my identity was recorded incorrectly) and baggage claim (four burly guys throwing luggage from a truck onto a table and folks clamoring to grab it) I realize that, although the sinus pain has eased, my ears which haven't popped are not going to do so for quite some time. This makes communication with my new cab driver (on Zanzibar, they are called Stephen) somewhat difficult. In fact, it makes all conversation somewhat difficult. And considering that English is the third language of Haji, the manager at the Mangrove Lodge, check in promises to be rather difficult.

Thankfully, though, this is East Africa and not the US or Canada. Can't hear because your ears are hopefully blocked? No problem; just head over to your bungalow on the beach, relax and come deal with the hotel register when you're not so deaf anymore.


One of the bungalows of the Mangrove Lodge. No editing necessary on a photo of a place like this...

I tend not to get into long explanations or recommendations of accommodation when travelling. Because, really, there's nothing more boring than someone telling you about how wonderful this place-you-aren't-at really is. But I'll break my rule for the Mangrove Lodge. Ten beautiful bungalows nestled among palm trees and mangroves; just a stone's throw away from Zanzibar's western shore close to the village of Chuini. (Quieter than other parts of the island, but no less beautiful) Great service, good meals and for a ridiculously small price. It's owned by Italians, and Italians are mostly the ones who stay there (Haji informed me that they did have Canadians from Vancouver just a few weeks before; but I tend to hear that a lot in East Africa so can't vouch for his veracity) but considering this was meant to be the wind down / decompress part of the vacation, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I spend the rest of the afternoon and the next day on the beach ploughing through pretty much every book I brought with me (note to self: yes, children's books are almost always the most satisfying of reads, but they're always going to be short. Remember that!) and chatting with the locals who pass by. "Pass by" is a nominal term since, given that everyone speaks perfect Italian it's clear that this is premiere tourist interaction territory. But there's none of the Brazilian beach style hard selling going on here.


Sunset on the beach outside of the Mangrove Lodge.

I get chatting to Mustafa, a teenager who lives just down the beach. He tells me how he's looking forward to leaving Zanzibar to go almost anywhere else. That's, obviously, a strange thing to hear when you've just stepped off a plane into paradise. But when you look at it logically: a small island with one major town and a whole lot of tourists to flash their wealth and tell you about the wonders of the rest of the world, I can see where the urge comes from. It's probably less enchanting than it looks fishing all day or hauling rocks up and down the beach via reluctant looking cows.


Cattle with rocks being driven down the beach. Daily life on Zanzibar's shores.

I wander down the beach to the next resort; passing the fallen ruins of a Sultan's palace on the way. This resort is called Hakuna Matata. It's owned by Germans; and costs twice as much as the Mangrove Lodge despite (from my cursory glances) looking roughly the same. Perhaps slightly less beautiful. There are locals here as well, doing the same beach bound occupations which look staged but which really aren't. Except here, they speak German as their second language, instead of Italian.

NAIROBI - On the Street without my Breathalyzer

(These are the journals I took whilst travelling in August and September 2009. Not wanting to spend all my vacation in Internet cafes, I decided to handwrite them and then type them up when I got home. I hope to post regularly over the next few weeks, but that depends on both time and discipline. But we will get there! We begin in Nairobi on the evening of August 23rd.)

Things get off to a less than promising start when the promised cab is not at the airport to pick me up. They may be avoiding meeting flights because of the imminent danger of swine flu; as well as the inevitable visa forms I'm asked to fill in a questionnaire to ascertain my probability of having H1N1. "Are you suffering from any of the following?" it cheerfully asks before reeling off a little list including "Headache", "Sore throat", "Cough", "Sneezing" etc. etc. You know; the sorts of things which you might get from, say, sitting on a plane for twelve hours. I answer no, and stifle my coughs as I hand over my Yankee dollars to purchase a tourist visa. (Don't worry, world, I didn't have swine flu. But more on my exciting illness later!)

Thankfully, East Africa is full of cabs. Really. They're everywhere. So twenty minutes later I'm driving through the cold Kenyan night in the company of my first of many drivers called John. He's typical of most of Kenyan cab drivers. Not only because he's called John, but also because he's unerringly enthusiastic despite it being 10pm on a Sunday night. "This is the worst night to be driving," he tells me as he weaves round some questionable road users, "everyone drinks all day on Sundays, then don't think about it when they drive." That strikes me as a slightly odd statement to make. "Don't the police catch on to that?" I ask. John shakes his head. "They know. But they can do nothing. They do not have those..." He then begins to make a Darth Vader style heavy breathing mime. "Breathalyzers?" I offer. "Yes!" he slaps his hand on the wheel with great enthusiasm.

After giving me his business card with both work and home numbers, he leaves me at my first night's stop; The Kenya Comfort Hotel. I mostly chose this place because it's cheap and right in the heart of the city's central business district. In the middle of the night, the area is somewhat seedy ("That's a lot of women just hanging out by themselves...") but the hotel is really rather good. It has doors; which lock. It has a shower and a toilet; which work. And it has a 24 hour restaurant; which is good. They are using their immensely large flat screen TVs to play an episode of Oprah. But I can forgive them.

By the morning, the hookers have left the corners around the hotel and have been replaced by cab drivers. They stand. They wait. And then they pounce on anyone who wanders out of the hotel. It doesn't take long to be whisked back to the airport by another John who, also, is extremely enthusiastic and keen to hear all about the mysterious country of Canada. This is my first chance to talk about Kenya's current favorite son: President Obama. I tell John that his first international visit was to Canada. This makes him very impressed. I don't have the heart to explain that it was just a hop over the border for him.

For just one night's stay, Nairobi has been somewhat exhausting. Everyone is interested, and intrigued. You don't want to disappoint anyone by not participating fully in the conversation they offer. You will, of course, eventually disappoint nearly everyone if you don't buy the inevitable service offered by conversation's end. But I'm getting ahead of myself; the true touts of Nairobi aren't in full swing at 6am on a Monday. And in Zanzibar during Ramadan? Well, they have other things to think about...