Day 21

The official program was more or less over, so for the last few days, we were free to make our own schedule. Together with a few others from our group I was picked up at the resort for a half-day guided tour in Stonetown, the main city of Zanzibar. When we passed a market square in the taxi, we saw a man sitting on the ground with his legs stretched out in front of him and a few police man hitting the soles of his feet with a passion. Obviously, this sight was quite shocking to us. I think the guide was hoping that we would let it go, but when it became clear that we were not, he explained that the city had decided that this former market place was supposed to be turned into a public transportation hub, so they wanted all vendors to leave. This beating was the consequence for people getting caught vending there after all.

Stonetown was quite different from the other cities we had seen so far. Throughout Africa you can find the same kind of small square concrete buildings with shops or houses made from various materials. In smaller cities the number of buildings, people, and animals is smaller than in bigger cities, but in essence they are all the same, just different quantities. It could be that some subtleties just were lost on our Western eyes, but it seems like character is missing in most of these cities. Unlike cities in other parts of the world, there is not much distinguishing one city from the other. Stonetown was different in that respect. It had clear Arabic, European and Indian influences, resulting in buildings and streets with history. And like every part of the world that had been dominated by others, some shameful scars remained as well.

We walked passed all the hot-spots and toilets. The latter because one of our group members had an upset stomach (as the euphemism so nicely calls it) and since quite a number of our group members felt that it’s better not to take immodium and take some homeopathic drops of some sort instead, her situation had not improved since that night. After about 5 toilets in less than 30 minutes she realized that that’s not really the way to go either and as the immodium that she had taken at that point had not kicked in yet, she took a taxi back to the resort. We continued our walk past the meat and fish market and were quite happy that the ‘weak stomach’ had left as you needed all your stomach strength to master that. Usually I can handle quite a bit when it comes to these things and I thought it was quite fun and interesting to be there and see them cut up all sorts of things with various degrees of identifyability on worn down tree trunks. However somewhere in the last few meters of the fish market I was hit by a smell that was neither identifyable, nor good so I quickly followed some of the others out.

As Zanzibar is known for its spices, we stopped in one of the little shops in the narrow shopping streets in the city for some spice tea. The number of people calling to get you into their store, or trying to sell you stuff on the street was not different from the other cities we visited. Since this was a quite a warm day, with some rain that had increased the humidity, and narrow streets that don’t allow wind to blow and since the busy schedule of the trip started to take its toll, I was done sightseeing when the tour ended around lunch time. Our guide did show us a nice local restaurant where we had a good lunch and then after some people of our group had done some final shopping we went to the resort where I spent the rest of the day taking it easy.

As this was the last evening for the majority of the group, we thought a group diner would be nice. Our guide knew a nice restaurant in the city that would be able to accommodate a group as big as ours if we send our order in advance (something we had done on more occasions, which was generally very effective). According to her this place was very well organized as it was owned by Italians :). I can see that European as opposed to African suggests some increased level organization, but Italian is the wrong kind of European to allow for this inference in my opinion. The place was very nice indeed, we ate on a roof top in the city center and for a while when the lights went out, it was upgraded to a candlelight dinner. I enjoyed the food as well, but when it came to organization the place was clearly run by Italians. When I’m on vacation in a place like this and don’t have to be anywhere any time soon, it does not bother me too much, but it bothered some of the others a bit more.