Tanzania part 2: Zanzibar and Usumbara Mountains

When I blogged last I was super tired from walking around a very hot Stonetown all day and just realized that I didn't tell you anything about it. 

For starters I needed much more time to learn how to navigate the city.  After 1 day, all the streets still looked exactly the same (just like they did in Old Town in Mombasa).  It was called Stonetown because the original walls of the town were built from stones and coral.  They look beautiful, but they didn't realize how much damage they were doing to the ocean at the time by using the coral.  The streets seemed to all wined into each other.  If you walked around the main road (the waterfront) it was easier to find your way.  Of course that wasn't the way the guide took us, so I was very confused.

 After dinner, we went to the night market.  It would have been nice to go there for dinner but we went for dessert instead.  I shared a sugarcane juice with Kathrine....so yummy! They add lime to it so it's got an amazing taste.  The other options at the market were Zanzibar pizza (mince meat on fried dought, no sauce-kinda like a meat beaver tail), pizza with banana and chocolate (more like a beaver tail) and random meat (probably beef and goat) kababs.  I'm happy with my juice selection.  I love sugarcane!!!!  It was nice to see how dressed up some of the women were at night.  Zanzibar is about 90% Musilm.  The women were still mostly in traditional dresses, but the hajibs were beaded and coloured so beautifully.

The next day we went on a tour of a spice farm.  Erase any image that you have of a farm from your brain.  No plows, no sectioned off parts of land, no pesticides.  Now, imagine a forest and you just know where your plants are.  Everything is organic.  They had pepper, cinnamon, cardomon, tamrind, vanilla, yilang yilang, curry, lemon grass, ginger, something I can't remember the name of but the dye from the seeds made lipstick (there are some funny pictures), and more.  We got to smell them all as we walked around.  At the end of the tour, they picked some coconuts from the top of the tree.  They cut them open and we drank the milk and ate the meat.  It was the best coconut meat that I've ever had!  I couldn't get enough.  They also gave us fresh passion fruit and orange (aka greens- all the oranges in Africa are actually green), ginger tea, masala tea and lemon grass tea.  All amazing, but the passion fruit topped everything else.

For lunch we went to someone's house in the area.  They made us fish, curry and pilau (spiced rice- one of my favorite dishes) with some papaya for dessert.  At this point, I'm used to getting served a whole fish.  Face, spine, skin, and all.  It was such a delicious lunch.  The curry was so good!  I couldn't get enough.  I also hope the pilau spicesI bought from the farm can compare to theirs. 

After kicking the soccer ball around with some local boys, we took our very full bellies to the north coast of Zanzibar.  The hotel rooms here were much nicer than the last place.  In the Stonetown hotel, Dawn, my roommate had a single bed that was ready to collapse and I had a king size bed.  Both of us were concerned about bed bugs, but we got out bite free.  On the north coast, the rooms were much bigger and cleaner.  We each had a single bed with mosquito net.  The sheets on 2/3 beds in our room were clean (good thing we only needed 2 of the beds) and I couldn't touch the floor when sitting on the bed.  There was air conditioning, a nice big balcony and a fridge.  After tent life, having access to cold drinks is luxury!!

The next two days were intended to relax.   We started with a day of snorkeling.  It took 2 hours to get out to the reef.  Unfrotunately, most of the coral was already dead, but the fish were still beautiful.  The zebra fish (may not be the correct name) swam right up with us; the parrotfish (correct name, i think) were always eating; the sea lice stung our skin; and I just avoided something that looked like a jellyfish (I only touched the top...phiew!).  After an hour in the water, they took us to a beach where they had a baracouda lunch waiting for us.  The day was great until the way home.  It took almost 3 hours to get back to the hotel.  Everyone from my group was feeling sick and Dawn was burned to a crisp (her malaria pill was making her photosensitive).   Even after befriending some of the staff from the boat at our hotel, we still don't know why they refused to use the motor.  We assumed they ran out of gas cause they laughed at us when we asked them to get us home quicker.  Instead, we inched forward with the current for the entire way home.

The following day was much more relaxing.  The day was spent swiming in the very blue water, reading on the beach with very white sand, getting a henna tattoo on my foot (from my big toe all the way up the outside of my leg), getting a massage and partying at the hotel bar that night.  This day will how I will always remember Zanzibar.  Relaxing. 

It was really hard to leave Zanzibar.  There was nothing there that made the place that special but I had to face the reality that this was going to be my last visit to the Indian Ocean during this trip.  My trip is now much closer to the end than the begining. 

We spent that night at a campsite in Dar es Salam with the intention of driving up to the Usumbara Mountains
 the next day.  That is where I am right now.  I'm in the town of Lushoto in the middle of the mountains.  This morning we went for long a long walk in the mountains.  We passed lots of children yelling "JAMBO" at us, people working in the fields and women carrying everything the needed on their heads and their babies on their backs.  This isn't an unusual sight anymore but it was much nicer to see in the lush green mountains.  When we reached the farm we were walking to, they served us a delicious lunch.  It's a dairy farm so there were delicious cheeses, jams and avocado spread that was fresh and devine.  It was a nice change from our typical lunch of processed cheese sandwiches.

Tomorrow we head to the base of Mount Kilimanjaro and we'll be visiting an orphange.  I'm sure we'll have many more kids jumping on us.