Edyn's African Adventure

Anyway, she raved and gave me the name of a guy who helped her with getting good pricing so off I went. Turns out Zanzibar is an island off the coast of Tanzania. The flight goes from Johannesburg to Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, then a quick 20 minutes to Zanzibar.

The main town is called Stone Town and I spent two nights there in the hotel Chavda. The city is laid out with regular roads where cars drive, but the main way many people get around town is walking thorugh the many many alleys. These aren't alleys like at home that run behind a row of houses, but rather a network of narrow paved paths. Here is the view of my hotel from the alley to the side of it:

And here is the view from the hotel roof restaurant/bar balcony.


I spent the morning walk about along the water then over to an unofficial market. Here is the view from the park on the waterfront:

And I saw this man with a huge wooden cart piled with fruit. These carts are very very common around Stone Town. There are tons of vendors in the streets and they all seem to use these carts.

One thing I saw that was particularly funny was the Trade Ministry. One would think that maybe a government agency would have an official sounding email address, but in Zanzibar, nope. Cick on the picture to enlarge it and you will see...they use a hotmail address!!!

And here is the building itself:

Something else funny is the way the locals use Freddie Mercury from the band Queen to pull one over on the tourists. Mercury was born on Zanzibar and spent some of his childhood there. On my walk about, I had lunch at a beach front restaurant called Mercury's. Inside there are various pictures of Freddie and the band and inside the menu is his biography. Funny thing...his name on Zanizar wasn't Freddie Mercury...that's a stage name. There was also an art gallery that is called Mercury House, leading one to maybe think that was his house...according to my guide Jackson, it wasn't.

Stone Town is incredible and very very different from anywhere I had ever been. It was really settled by the Sultan of Oman in the mid 1800s and has a lot of Indian and Muslim influences.
Unlike South Africa that has a lot of black tribal cultural influences, Stone Town isn't and really has the flavour of the cultures that inhabitated it in the 17th C.

I did a tour in the afternoon and saw the town up close. Zanzibar was part of the stop on the spice islands/slave route back in the mid-1800s. On the tour we stopped at a church that was built over the slave market. The market is where Africans from central and eastern Africa were brought to be sold to other areas in the east. The first picture is the church and the second is the basement holding area underneath. Up to 80 people were held here at a time before being brought up for auctioning. The centre slot was the waste dump and when the tide came in, the water came in and washed it away. That water doesn't come in any more...it's a main street called "Creek Street".