2008-02-20 – 2008-02-25 Sight-seeing in Stone Town

2008-02-20

Summary

- Back to Karibu Inn and changed rooms

- Paninis at Buni Cafe

- Sticky Chicken at Living Stone Restaurant

- My new name is ‘Subai!’

On Wednesday, we arrived back at Karibu Inn in Stone Town. We asked to be changed from a twin room (as we’d had last time at Karibu Inn) to a double room. He said he had one available for 3 of the 5 nights, so we could stay in it for 3 nights, but then we’d have to change to a twin room. The room we got was on the 1^st floor as opposed to third floor, so less stairs to carry the luggage up. The room was much bigger (actually consisting of two rooms) than the one we had on our previous stay and actually had two single beds as well as a double bed. All the beds were still too short, so I still had to sleep with my feet hanging off the end; just as well I’m not too much taller. There were ceiling fans in the new room, which worked much better than the stand-fan we had for our previous stay. The toilet was a little cubicle room and the shower was a separate little cubicle room, which was probably also a positive compared to our last stay with a single combined toilet-shower room because now one of us could use the toilet while the other showered. Also just outside our previous room there had been this awful whining noise that would sound intermittently, which was quite loud and annoying from inside the room. This room was nowhere near whatever was making the noise. Anyway, in conclusion, this room was much better than our previous one. Karibu by the way is Swahili for welcome. Anywhere you go all you hear is “Karibu, you are welcome”.

After settling into our room and unpacking the necessities from our bags, we went for a walk to get lunch. We had run out of Tanzanian Shillings (TSH) at our beach accommodation (we’d had to rely on US$ as there were no ATMs or credit card facilities on the east coast), so we got some more TSH from the ATM, which was only 10 metres from our hotel. There were plenty of places to have food, which was a nice change from the beach. We had lunch at Café Buni, having patinis. I asked for no lettuce on the patina (lettuce is usually washed in local water), but alas, I got lettuce on my patina. We went for a walk through the narrow streets and alleyways of Zanzibar. You have to be very alert in Zanzibar or you will get cleaned up by a car or a bike. Motorbikes and bicycles are fair-game in the narrowest of alleyways. Zanzibar is famous for its doors. The huge Arabic and Hindu doors are quite common. They are solid wooden doors scattered with brass spikes (traditionally made from elephant tusks) and covered in pattern-carvings, with the Hindu doors shaped as an arch and the Arabic doors rectangular-shaped with a chain carved into the wood surrounding the door. We picked up a bunch of bananas from a market, then we passed by a small workshop and spotted some nice photo frames made form black ebony wood with animals carved into it; the shop owner told us they were US$10 each. We thought we’d have more of a look around first, before buying any souvenirs.

That night we went to Living Stone Restaurant for dinner. The restaurant was on the beachfront and we sat at a table outside on the beach. We had ‘sticky chicken’ for dinner. We were going to have some dessert there also, but asked for the dessert menu twice and waited an hour with nobody coming back with a menu.  After dinner, I went to the night markets that we’d gone to last time in Stone Town and had a banana and chocolate pizza. On the way to the markets, a guy had asked if we wanted a taxi (note that this is not included in the writing because it was unusual, people are ALWAYS asking if you want a taxi). The same guy saw me at Zanzibar Pizza stall at the night markets and started chatting to me. I was generally known as ‘Subai’ because the T-shirt I wore around that I had bought previously in Tanzania said ‘Subai’ on the back of it (which is Masai for hello).

2008-02-21

Summary

- Postcards and internet

- Burgers at Old Fort Restaurant

- Sunset dhow cruise

- Cocktails at Livingstone Restaurant

- Sayeed ripped us off at the night markets

The following morning (Thursday) after breakfast, we went to the post office to send off some postcards and use the Internet. I connected the laptop up to the wired connection and it took about half an hour to get the connection set-up and working. We had it for about 10 minutes to check emails, and then we lost connection and couldn’t get it working again.  We went to Café Buni to get fajitas for lunch, but again we were told ‘no fajitas’, to which I asked ‘why? When can we get fajitas?!” to which he replied ‘dinner time’. So we had lunch at the Old Fort Restaurant; I asked for no lettuce on my burger, but yet again I got lettuce. We checked out the local art vendors, one of whom hassled us for a good 20 minutes; who, disgruntled by our lack of interest, substituted his calling of me from “Subai” to “Mr No Thank You”. We passed a tour booking desk and booked a sunset dhow cruise for 5pm that night and a spice tour for the following morning. I asked our the guy at our hotel front desk whether we could get wireless Internet anywhere after wasting so much time trying to get wired working. He told us that Living Stone Restaurant provides free wireless…. problem solvered! We dropped by for some chocolate cake and soft drinks (they are served in a long thin bottle, which to me is reminiscent of the Masai: tall and thin), during which I posted a couple of posts on the blog. Mind you the connection was horrendously slow, but so was every other connection we’ve experienced since leaving Australia. We also saw that they had 2 for 1 cocktails from 6-8. On the way back to my hotel to get ready for the cruise I almost got cleaned up by some nutter on the roads. We didn’t get on the dhow until around 5:20; it was a sailing dhow with one huge sail. The crew took us out until the sunset just after 6ish. We ate tropical fruits and drank coconut milk straight from a coconut.

After the cruise, we headed to Living Stone Restaurant to get our 2 for 1 cocktails. Tonight was the first time a mosquito has gotten me. I had unzipped my pants legs (turning them into shorts so they wouldn’t get wet waded to and from the dhow. I had no repellent on my legs, only my feet and ankles. Bang, one got me within about 5 minutes after unzipping my pants, while I was checking out a menu for a restaurant. I quickly zipped my legs back on to cover up as there were mozzies everywhere here. We hadn’t seen a lot previously, but there were heaps at this restaurant, I gave an unaimed clap and killed 2 of them at once. We weren’t interested in the menu anyway, so we headed to Living Stone Restaurant for some 2 for 1 cocktails. We ordered Sex on the Beach for Skye and a Frozen Banana Daiquiri for me. They bought out 4 drinks, to which we said we’d only ordered 2 and he said ‘yeah, 2 for 1’. It turns out that the 2 for 1 only applies to 2 of the same cocktail. So anyway, we polished off 2 cocktails each, then we went to the night markets for dinner.

The same guy from the previous night (the taxi guy) saw us at the night markets and grabbed my arm, leading me through the crowds to the stalls I’d been by when I’d seen him the night before; his name was also Sayeed (so was the guy that I talked to on the bus in Dubai). He asked us what we wanted and we rattled it all off; coconut bread, and some veggie stuff mainly. He convinced me to try a deep fried banana and some sugar cane juice. The juice was nice, the fried banana was pretty ordinary. We sat and chatted with Sayeed for half an hour or so, then we asked him how much we owed him, already having a rough idea in our heads that it was maximum 9000 TSH so were ready to give him 10000 TSH. ‘15000’ he says as he turned his back to talk to someone else. Skye and I just looked at each other and shook our heads, knowing too right that it was not 15000 TSH and he was just taking an extra large cut for himself. We had asked the price of the banana and juice prior to getting them; 2000 and 1000 TSH respectively and we’d eaten the other foods previously so knew they were worth, maximum 3000 TSH per person. Fair enough that he should get something out of it, but 150000 was double what we would have paid without him. When we had his attention again, I said to him “isn’t 15 a bit high”, to which he crapped on about the falafels coming from somewhere else cos they didn’t make them themselves and blah blah. Anyway, it was clear he wasn’t going to budge, so we gave him 15000 TSH and walked away lesson learnt; never trust anyone when it comes to money regardless of how friendly they seem. In future we would confirm the price of everything BEFORE eating it.

2008-02-22

Summary

- Spice tour

- Bargaining for paintings

- Cocktails at Living Stone Restaurant

- Burgers at Café Buni

On Friday morning we got up a little earlier to have breakfast before going off on our Spice Tour. We ended up on a mini bus/van (called dala-dala here) that was full, so it was very cramped and very hot. This was our consequence for going with the cheaper tour company, but that’s what we had expected so it wasn’t too bad. We stopped by the remains of the Kidichi Persian Baths, then walked through the spice farms checking out all the different spices. We were showed a corkscrew palm tree, which basically had a trunk twisted in the shape of a corkscrew; I’d seen paintings of palms like this and I thought the artist was just being creative and abstract, but it turns out that some palms actually do look like that. Spices we saw and smelt included nutmeg, lemon grass, cinnamon, and peppercorn, just to name a few (ok… so I can’t remember the other ones right now). We also tried a variety of different fruits while we were there, most of which I also can’t remember the names of. I remember jackfruit which tasted quite similar to banana, then there were these furry red things, called Rambutan, with a grape like thing inside them, and a bunch of other ones which I could describe but have no idea what they’re called. The guide also showed us Annatto, which looks similar to Rambutan except on the outside, which is used for body painting and lipstick due to the red dye in its pulp; hence it’s nickanme, the ‘Lipstick tree’. They also had stink fruit there, although they didn’t give that out for anyone to try. We encountered lots of begging children throughout the spice tour. As a rule we generally don’t give money to beggars as it only encourages them to do it more, and we have no idea just how well off they are. We were told previously that it is better to give to a donations box where there is one or donate to a charity as then it is more likely to go to those who really are in need.

We had a traditional Swahili lunch as part of the spice tour, consisting of rice with curry sauce, spinach and some really yummy bread…. I think it was called palm bread. After lunch we headed to the beach. It was a beautiful spot with crystal clear water and we just about had the whole beach to ourselves (13 of us… that’s how many passengers would fit in the van). We had a quick dip and took some nice snapshots; at this point I was kicking myself that I’d forgotten my polarizing filter, as I would have benefited from it for almost all the shots I’d taken throughout the day (for those who don’t know: polarisers tone down reflections from leaves and trees as well as the water, and bring out deeper colour tones, especially blues in the sky and greens of the… well greenery).

When we got back from the spice tour, we decided to go back to a stall we’d visited the day before to get a couple of paintings we’d liked. I had seen a Masai painting with Mt Kili in the background, and Skye and I had both had our attention instantly directed towards a painting of the animals painted in the shape of the Africa continent the moment we had walked into the stall. We’d asked the prices the previous time we were there, which was $25 and $50 respectively. He said $50 for the Africa/animals painting as it was an obvious favourite and no doubt one of the most popular. This time when we’d gone back, I went in with a game plan. Now I should mention that the prices we’d been given were actually very reasonable to start with; usually the stalls would give ridiculously high prices with the intention that people are going to try to beat them down a lot, that way they also stand to make a lot of money from tourists who don’t bother haggling with them (our first purchases in Africa we got ripped off significantly… the price for a dyed canvas I’d bought started at US$40 and I’d got it for US$25 which I thought seemed like a good reduction, but then a guy was trying to sell the same dyed canvases to me for US$6 in Zanzibar!). When we walked into the stall, the game plan was going nicely as there was a different guy sitting in the shop today so he wouldn’t know that we already knew the prices of the painting. I wandered through not acting very enthusiastic and this guy at the shop was much more the style I’d hoped for, the style that follows you around the shop and points to different paintings, making suggestions and telling you what the pictures are of (the previous guy was more easy-going and less in your face, so seemed less eager to make a sale). When I got to the Africa painting, I just glanced at it and said “that one’s not bad”. I stood there for a moment as if pondering the painting and then pulled out a US$20 and said “20 dollars for this one”, the guy laughed and shook his head and I just shrugged at him and waited for a proper response. He said no and gave no offer, so I went up to 30. He smiled and shook his head again and paused for a moment then said ‘mmmm…. 45.’… to which I stood and pondered then said, then screwed up my face and walked along continuing to look at different paintings (this was my one mistake, I should have gone $35 and he may have gone to $40). Anyway, I made my way slowly along to the Masai painting I’d liked and stood there looking at it and then said ‘how about this one (*pointing to Masai painting) AND that one (pointing to Africa painting) for $45?’ Once again he smiled and then shook his head (had I got him down to $40 on the Africa one previously I could have started with $40 for the both of them at this point, but it seemed too ridiculous to drop the price and add another painting, so I went with $45. He pondered, shaking his head…. ‘$65’…. I pondered, shaking my head ‘$50’…. He pondered, no more head shaking ‘$60’. My goal had been $50, but I’d stuffed up not getting the first painting down to $40 first, so we gave the $55 offer and got it. Considering they were both very reasonably priced to start with at $75 for both, I think we did well to get them for $55 so we were quite pleased with our outcome on this one We walked through the streets of Stone Town, trying to trace our steps from our previous walk through as we wanted to get some picture frames that we’d seen at the workshop, but could not find the workshop, it must have been closed. It is a Friday which is a religious day for Muslims (80% Muslims in Tanzania), so may well be closed.

We had more cocktails at Living Stone Restaurant, this time ordering two of the same cocktail to avoid getting 4 of them. I let Skye choose, so we had Livingstone Sunset, probably the girliest one on the menu… it tasted just like a chocolate milkshake. We went to Café Buni again for dinner, determined to get our Fajitas. We got there at about 8:05…. a smile and a shake of the head ‘no fajitas’ to which I sighed and said ‘ahhh, why not this time?’…. yeah they stopped serving fajitas at 8:00… so we had burgers instead. It had been the same waiter all three times we’d asked for fajitas, so he said he’d put in a special order for 2 fajitas tomorrow at lunch time… hooray… these fajitas better be good!

2008-02-23

Summary

- No power/electricity

- Fajitas at Buni Cafe; a bug in my food, no apologies given

- Cocktails at Living Stone Restaurant

- Saw man walking monkey on a leash

- Saw Chris from Tanzania Trails tour

- Ferry ticket sales closed

- Bargained a pumba sculpture (warthog)

- Night market success

On Saturday morning after breakfast, the power went out while I was in the shower leaving me to have a pitch black shower (no windows). We bummed around all morning; I was mostly readying some shots to put on the blog. We finally got our fajitas for lunch from Buni Cafe. While we were waiting for them to come out, we’d made the mistake of picking a street-side table, so we had hawkers coming at us the whole time. We were quite rude to them, telling them to piss off or go away, but then I considered it rude for them to come over while we were trying to sit down for a meal. These guys sell all sorts of crap. There’s guys walking around with about 30 or 40 belts hanging from their arm, or at least 50 pairs of sunglasses on a foam tray, or bags of nuts, or spice packets, that’s just to name a few of the things they’d sell… oh and those bloody burnt CDs that seem to follow us everywhere. They were quite nice, however there was a fried bug (I think it was a cockroach) in amongst my chips, after which I stopped eating. I told the waiter when he came to take away our plates and he just had a look and walked off… didn’t say anything at all about it. No more Buni Cafe for us!!! While we were sitting there for lunch, we’d seen a man walking a monkey on a leash and another with a baby monkey on his shoulder. I’m not sure how common that is over here, but we haven’t seen it before!

We didn’t do much that afternoon and we were a bit bored. When we were back in Karibu Inn at the desk asking about the ferry, someone behind me called ‘Scott!’ I turned around having no idea who it could be, and it was Chris! Our tour guide from our Tanzania Trails tour. I had thought I’d spotted him earlier whilst having lunch, but only saw him from the back. I thought it looked like Chris but had thought ‘nah, what would he be doing in Zanzibar’. We had a quick chat and it turns out he was staying in Karibu Inn also and was there as a guide for another tour in Zanzibar. We walked down to the ferry dock to buy our ferry tickets for Monday to take us across to Dar Es Salaam. We worked out we needed the 10am ferry (options of 7am, 10am, 1pm, 4pm, 10pm) to get us to Dar airport in time for a 3:20pm flight (2 hours on ferry, half hour cab ride to airport). Different companies operate at different times. The company doing 10am, SeaBus, was closed. The next ferry was at 1pm, which would get us to Dar too late.

We walked back through the streets, trying to find that workshop with the picture frames we’d liked, but could not find it again. I started asking at market stalls, with no luck. In one stall I made the mistake of commenting on one of the Africa-animal paintings by saying that I liked it but preferred it in blue. Before I could say anymore the shop owner had rushed out to go and fetch a blue one. The other guy in the shop wouldn’t let us leave until the guy came back *rolls eyes*, so when he came back and held up the picture I had to say ‘yeah that one’s not as good as the other one I’ve seen’, then quickly changed the subject to the animal picture frames, he didn’t know where we could get them. We continued walking the markets when this same guy called us over, so we followed him to a market shop, thinking maybe he’d found the photo frames… nup, he took us to the shop he’d found the blue Africa painting from. Ok I see, putting the whole guilt trip on me. So while I was here I asked the owner of this shop about the frames and he said he knew where to get some and shot off. Meanwhile the other guy was still trying to sell us paintings, and we kept indicating we didn’t want any more paintings, we had enough already. The shop owner came back with the frames as promised; we picked one out and asked how much US$50. ‘There’s no way we’re getting one then’. We took the whole, we only have US$10 trip. He wouldn’t do them for US$10 and was blocking our way to the door and hassling us that we should buy something else then cos he had gone and got the frames and we didn’t buy them *rolls eyes*. Anyway, I figured it put me in a position of power in that he didn’t want us to leave with nothing. So I asked about a warthog sculpture; US$15. I said, we don’t have 15, only 10, but I was only willing to pay 5. He lowered to 12 and I stayed at 5, telling him it didn’t interest me enough to pay more. He hassled telling me I had to come up cos he’d come down… ok 6. ‘10’, 8 that’s my final offer, ‘8.5’, done. So I riffled through my notes and pulled out a 10…lol… I guess it was pretty obvious now I had more than 10. He gave me 1000 TSH (about $1 change) and said that’s all he had. “Ok, don’t worry about it then, I won’t buy it”…. “ohhh, I just remembered I have change in here, flicking to another section of his wallet and pulling out a 500 TSH… hehehe.

We went back to the night market for dinner tonight. I walked directly and confidently through the market looking straight ahead, which avoided all the guys coming over to you and trying to drag you to the stall) or guys like Sayeed who want to try to rip you off. We’d figured the best way was to deal with the guys directly behind the market table, not the guys in front, as they were Sayeeds. We got a stall, fobbed off a Sayeed guy and asked the guy behind the table for the prices of each individual thing we wanted. We then got it on a plate and dug in… 4000 TSH for the two of us and this time, and this time I had beef as well as the coconut bread and 2 vegie dishes. It had taken us until our third night market visit until we had it all figured out. The guys at the Zanzibar Pizza stall recognized me from previous times and said ‘ayyyyy, Subai!’ giving me a hand shake. We got a banana and choc pizza from them, which is when Sayeed saw me and I just gave him a wave. Whenever you tell a local that you’re from Australia, you’re guaranteed to get either ‘gday mate’ or ‘ahhhh, kangaroo’… usually the latter.

On our way back to the hotel, stumbling our way through the dark (still no power) we stopped off at the tour company that we’d booked our last tours through and booked a tour to Prison Island for the following morning. We were originally supposed to change rooms tonight but had not heard anything about it since check in, so I asked the guy at the desk and he said that we didn’t have to change rooms now as he’d sorted it out so we could stay, so that was very nice of him. That night was horrendous, no power = no fan and no air-con. The breeze in Zanzibar tends to drop off at night so an open window gave little improvement. I think it was at least 40 degrees Celsius in our room and there was nothing we could do to call down, so we had to sweat our way to sleep.

2008-02-24

Summary

- Prison Island tour; zipped us through too quickly

- No power/electricity

- Ferry ticket office closed again

- Bought the ebony carved photo frames we were looking for

- Cocktails at Living Stone Restaurant

- Vegetable Mchuzi and Ugali at Old Fort Restaurant

On Sunday morning we had breakfast and then went off on our Prison Island tour. There was still no power today. A representative met us at our hotel at 10-am and walked us to the docks where he arranged our snorkelling gear, dhow and packed lunch. By the time we got on the dhow it was probably around 10:30am. We were the only passengers on this dhow. The trip out to the island was pretty bumpy and we got a bit wet, as the waves were rolling in toward Zanzibar so we were going against the waves. We started off by snorkelling. The boat docked a fair way from the reef so we had to swim out a fair bit to the reef. Skye had forgotten our underwater camera, so went back to get it from the boat. It was an eary feeling being out there on your own, especially in the deeper sections. When Skye got back she was pretty out of breath, more than usual. So I stayed with her on the surface to make sure she was okay. After a few minutes she was all right and we started snorkelling. We finally saw clown fish, loads of them! Every time I’ve been snorkelling before (twice in Qld, once in Hawaii), I have not seen a Nemo. We tried to take some snapshots, but the camera had packed up; memory card error. So I swam it back to the dhow and got onto the boat to dry off the camera and took the memory card out and gave it a good wipe over. When I put it back in, I had to format the card and then it worked (there wasn’t much on there thankfully, just some shots of the Stone Town streets and night markets). The water was a bit murky and got choppier, so we got plenty of mouthfuls of water…mmm yum…. we took a few shots underwater, though we couldn’t see anything on the LCD whilst underwater. At one point I must’ve tried to zoom in on something and then forgot about it, so all shots from then on were fully zoomed in. Of course we didn’t know that because we couldn’t see anything on the LCD. We figured out how to do movies on the camera as well, but looking at it afterwards, it was very jerky movements since we were fully zoomed in and usually there was no fish in the frame, just coral, but nevermind. We saw a great deal of coral, heaps of zebra fish and clown fish, sea urchins and starfish, along with a whole bunch of other fish I couldn’t name. The reef was better than we’d anticipated as we hadn’t thought it’d be as good as the Great Barrier Reef, but it was. Unfortunately though, with all the camera drama we only got about 10 or 15 minutes of snorkelling time, which definitely was not enough. We were told we’d get a full hour, but I don’t even think we were given half that.

From there, we went ashore, which is a task in itself, fighting against the waves and currents to get the dhow into position. The guide took us through to the prison remains. Once again he went WAY too fast. Zipped us through the prison in under 10 minutes, hardly enough time to stop and appreciate the experience! We then went to see the massive tortoises on the island. Some of these things were huge! He gave us a handful of greenery which we held out for the turtles to come and eat. Meanwhile one of the turtles was mounting another and our guide was pointing and laughing telling us ‘jiggy jiggy…. Jiggy jiggy’. Anyway, we spent about 2 minutes feeding the turtles then we zipped over to where the babies were in a cage… yeap saw them, so then we shot off again. Went down to the beach and were told we could eat our packed lunch now and we’d be leaving the island at 1pm, this was at 12:40…. Great. So we ate what we could in 20 minutes, crunching on sand grains on our fruit…mmmm mmmm! Then at 1pm, we were boarding the dhow to go back. Just over 30 minutes to get back to Zanzibar. All up we were at Prison Island for under 2 hours. It was way too rushed and we felt very dissatisfied. All they were worried about was getting back to Zanzibar as soon as possible to take some more passengers across to get more money. Prison Island is well worth the visit, but it was just that we hadn’t had enough time for any of the experience to sink in.

We went back to our rooms to chill for a bit before walking down to the ferry docks again. We got there around 2:30pm… nup that company’s desk (SeaBus) is closed again! Along the way all these people come up to you trying to get you to go on their ferry, so you get hassled the whole way there. One of them who was trying to tell us to go with this other company (SeaStar) was then telling us that SeaBus was closed because it was ‘broken’. He also claimed that SeaStar was less than 2 hours whereas SeaBus was 3 hours. We knew that was bullshit, so we weren’t about to believe what anyone was telling us. When we got back to the hotel we asked the guy at the desk why SeaBus was closed and he didn’t know, he said they should be open. When I asked him if the ferry could be broken down he shook his head. When we ran into Chris, we mentioned that the SeaBus ferry desk had been closed and he said they probably had closed early as it was a Sunday. He too was going to change his departure from a later ferry to the 10am ferry and said he was going there at 8am tomorrow morning to change the ticket. We mentioned that a guy had told us it was broken and he shook his head and said ‘no I don’t think so’. So I asked whether the 10:00 would be guaranteed, to which he said “yes it should be guaranteed, if their ferry is cancelled they will need to make other arrangements for you”.

We thought it would be a good idea to confirm our flight times for tomorrow’s flight from Dar Es Salaam to Johannesburg. One of the many guys who comes up TELLING YOU that you will go to prison island, or the north beaches or the forest tomorrow with them (rather than asking you) asked us what we looking for…. Ok, so I can’t actually remember if this particular guy started out trying to get us on a tour or not, but either way he asked us what we looking for and we told him a phone. He thought we meant we wanted to buy a phone, and we explained we just wanted to make a call. He pointed to a shop just over the road, so we went in there to use a phone. We called the number we had for flight confirmations in Dar. No answer… the owner said it was probably because it was a weekend. I’d have thought they SHOULD be there 24/7, but maybe I’m expecting too much there.

Anyway, when we got back out the same guy was now tagging along with us. He was full of useful information. We’d started out trying to ditch him, but he just kept on following us. This is how I found out about the Arabic and Hindu doors and what the difference is. He also told us about the palace museum and showed us the [passageways overhead where the females would go through from building to building, so they would never actually have to go out on the street (for example they could walk to school via these overhead corridors linking the buildings. In the process of trying to ditch him we’d said ‘ok, we’re gonna go have a look at the markets now’ and walked in a different direction, still he followed and said how his brothers had a spice stall at the markets. Great… he’s gonna try to get us to buy spices there. Anyway, he kept following and I thought I might as well ask him if he knew where this workshop was that we’d been trying to find again. I described the photo frames to him and he said the whole ‘ah yes, I know where they are, follow me’. We followed him to a workshop which was not like the one we’d been to previously, but we thought it worth a look. They didn’t have the frames we were after, only different frames. They did however have a game whose box was made of black ebony with animals carved into it, so we pointed that out and explained to him that it looked like that, but it was a photo frame. He spoke to the workshop guys in Swahili, and then said ‘ahhhhh’. He lead us through the streets; we got to a point I recognized… the school we’d passed, the market we’d bought the bananas, and the same light blue building. This is the same areas we kept revisiting trying to find the workshop as we knew that’s the way we’d been on the first day. A few turns and alleyways/streets later and we were at some familiar looking workshop doors. They were closed. He called out to some guy at another door and he came out and opened up one of the workshop doors. He had several different animal carved frames there for us to have a look at and we each chose our favourites and paid US$10 each for them.

We were pretty pleased to finally get the photo frames, so we continued to follow this guy down to the food markets. We bought a red banana to try, which honestly didn’t taste much different to a yellow banana. I also tried a bango (sp?)….. SOUR! Very sour! We didn’t buy anything from his brother’s spice stall as we really had no interest, but he didn’t hassle us too much about not buying so that was good. On our way back I was getting out a tip for this guy as he’d been quite helpful to us. During this time obviously somebody else spotted money, so I had this guy trying to sell me a CD. This was the same CD I’d been offered at least 30 times previously. I told him I’d give him a $1 for it. He kept following and going on about this was his work and he wanted to sell this CD to me. I still said I was not interested in it, but I’d buy it for $1. The lowest I’d previously got anyone was $4, then they’d agreed to 50c until I got the money out, then they jumped back up to $4 so I told them to go away. So anyway, this guys then saying if I won’t buy this cd (the cds are burnt by the way) then could I at least give him a $1. I asked him why I’d give him $1 when he was annoying me, his reply was simply cos he needed food. I wasn’t buying it; his words or his cd. He followed and nagged for a good 10 mins, and I kept telling him if he needed money he should spend his time finding other tourists to buy his cd because I was not going to. Every tourist I pointed out he claimed was a local. He finally gave up, yelling Swahili… no doubt swearing at me. The guy led us back to our hotel and I gave him a tip and thanked him for his help. We effectively got half of a city tour for next to nothing. A lot of places seemed to be closed today, probably a combination of the weekend and the lack of power.

We shot over to Living Stone Restaurant who had a power generator, so it was cooler there with the fans on. My choice for cocktails this time: Beach Bums, the most potent sounding drink that was there Skye didn’t like it very much, but I thought it was great. It came layered, the bottom layer was sweet, whereas the top layer was dry and a tad bittery (bittery is now a word ). We stumbled our way to the Old Fort Restaurant in the dark (just to clear this up; we stumbled because it was pitch black since there was still no power, not because of the cocktails!) for tea that night, where I had Vegetable Mchuzi and Ugali, a Swahili dish consisting of maize flour porridge and vegetables in a thick coconut sauce. Oddly enough on this trip, and contrary to what most of my family would have you believe, I have been the more adventurous one when it comes to food, whereas Skye has been more conservative on her choices. We headed back to the hotel for another hot sweaty night without any fans or air con.

2008-02-25

Summary

- No power/electricity

- Ferry cancelled

- Flight to Dar Es Salaam

- Wrong tickets for flight to Johannesburg

We headed to the ferry dock just before 7:30am on Monday morning. As we walked there I dreaded that the company tour desk would still be closed. We got there and it was open, a little relief. We got to the front of the queue, “2 tickets for the 10:00 ferry thanks”…. “no 10:00 ferry today”…. ”WHAT?!”… ”there is no ferry at 10:00”. I pointed to the sign on the window that said 10:00 and asked “why not?” We asked him several times but he would only respond with “the ferry has been cancelled, you can get the 1:00 one”. A bunch of guys came over all telling us to go on their ferry at 4:00 of 1:00 or 10pm… NO, they’re all too late. So we walked back to the hotel. I couldn’t help pondering over why we had initially chosen to take the ferry; our original itinerary had us flying straight from Zanzibar to Johannesburg, but then our travel agent told us that the flights out of Zanzibar were unreliable, often getting cancelled, so we decided it best to get the ferry to Dar and fly from there to Jo’burg to avoid any hassles… the ferry was supposed to be the reliable option!

As we arrived, Chris was on his way out of the hotel to go to the ferry dock. We told him that there was no 10:00 ferry to which he replied ‘what do you mean’. “There is no 10:00 ferry, it has been cancelled”… ’I don’t believe it’… ‘neither can we!’. It was about now we realized we should have gotten a written note confirming the cancellation for claiming on travel insurance for any changes we’d now need to make. I told Skye to go to the ferry dock with Chris and get the written confirmation while I went up to our room to get our travel agent’s number. I called them up and explained the situation and said we needed their help in rearranging our plans, and they said they would call back when they’d sorted something out. As soon as I hung up, Skye came in and said that Chris had found a guy who could organize flights out of Zanzibar to Dar for us. We wrote down our details and gave them to the guy. I then got a call back from our travel agent who told us there were 3 flights from Zanz to Dar that we could take 9:20, 10:55 or 12:30. We thought the 10:55 one would suit best, but now had to wait to see what that guy came back with as we didn’t want to end up booking two different flights. We asked Chris to come to the ferry dock with us in case we had any trouble getting them to understand that we wanted a written confirmation of the cancellation, which he agreed to… very nice of him We got there and I asked the guy for it, and he said “no”… I was taken aback as I wasn’t expecting that response. I asked him again wording it differently, “no, I will not write you a confirmation”, I asked him why and he was very aggressively saying he would not do it… these people at SeaBus obviously don’t know how to answer ‘why?’… they couldn’t tell us why the ferry was cancelled and they couldn’t tell us why we could not get written confirmation. Hopeless… anyway, we gave up and got a taxi back to our hotel that had the flight organizer guy in the passenger seat. He told us he had booked us in for the 10:55 flight (which was the one we had wanted anyway) and that the current driver of the taxi would pick us up at 9:45 and take us to the airport. We thanked him and paid him for the flights and taxi to the airport.

We had some breakfast as we hadn’t eaten yet, then got everything packed up in our rooms and took it all down to the hotel lobby. Skye went to the ATM (she did not have Visa so had to go to a specific ATM) and I decided I needed an ATM as well, so went to the one 10 metres from our hotel. There was a queue… so I queued and waited… and waited… and waited. I’d queued for half an hour, got to 3^rd in the queue when the taxi pulled up, so I had to give up. We got to the airport, went to the check in counter and gave the lady our tickets. The lady told us that we had to take them to the Precision Air office and get them to print our tickets. We went to the Precision Air office and queued. When we got to the front the lady in the office said ‘these are the tickets’, so to avoid going back and forth again we had her sign that the tickets were OK, then took them back to the check-in desk and queued…. again. We checked in and went through security. This time I had to take my shoes off, it turns out they were setting off the metal detectors. We made our way to the departure gates… one medium sized room packed with people…no fans, no air con. We stood there and cooked… on the plus side we could buy water to drink there. When I went to the toilet the taps were not working, a lady came in and poured water out of a bottle into the sink for me to wash my hands, then stood in the doorway waiting for a tip…such is life in Africa… always have small change at the ready… I didn’t. We have also learnt not to let people help us with bags if we can, cos they expect to be paid for doing so.

The flight left Zanzibar at about 11:30am. I was not phased at all as I’d come to expect that it would be late. The flight only took about 15 or 20 minutes. We got to Dar in plenty of time, at around noon for a 3:20 flight. We swapped of TSH to USD before heading to check in. Check in wasn’t open so we sat on the floor against the wall and waited in a nice hot stuffy room again. After around an hour check in opened, so we went up to check in. Now here I should mention that we had no hard tickets for the flight, only a receipt for an e-ticket, which we couldn’t find but had been told by the travel agent that we didn’t need it anyway, we just needed our passports. We told the lady we had no paperwork for the tickets, only our itinerary stating the flight details. After a few minutes a guy came out and told us we should have paper tickets. I told him we definitely were never given paper tickets and that our agent had told us that they were e-tickets and only gave us an e-ticket receipt which we didn’t have with us, but said that I had a copy scanned in on my laptop which I had with me (I had scanned all flight tickets and receipts prior to leaving Australia). He led us through the back and upstairs into some office. We explained the situation to the guy on the office and fired up the laptop and showed him. Now he pointed out that the e-tickets were dated for 24 Feb and today was 25 Feb. I explained that we were originally flying to Jo’burg on 24^th, but it had changed to 25^th when our itinerary changed and our agent had told us that the old e-ticket could still be used as the receipt number hadn’t changed. Apparently this was not the case and today’s flight had paper tickets, not e-tickets. He said he would sort it out, and he did. He printed us off some tickets and sent us on our way, free of charge… what a legend, I love South African Airways! We took them to the lady to check in who questioned where we got them and why we had been given them… I don’t see why it matters to her, obviously management had sorted it our already. Through to the departure gate after a quick carry-on search to check my flask was empty and to figure out what the hell was in Skye’s bag… it was her head torch. The airport here was nice and cool and I wasn’t taking it for granted…ahhhh *sigh* We boarded the flight, no more dramas and were away. I even got a window seat.

Banana & Choc Pizza!

 

JAMBO!

 

Sailing Dhow

Sunset Dhow Sailor

 

Dhow Names

 

Jiggy Jiggy

 

Zanzibar Door