So, we made it to Zanzibar yesterday. Just a three hour ferry ride from Dar Es Salam and I'm in LOVE with it here. It might as well be a whole seperate country from Tanznia - or a whole seperate continent, because it's that different.
It's amaizngly beautiful -- blue/green water, white sand, georgeous architecture with heavy islamic influences. Beautiful details - my favorite are these intricately carved wooden doors. Walking around on the narrow streets here reminds me a lot more of walking in the old city in jerusalem then it does anywhere else in Africa that I've been so far. The place is alive with activity - especially along the water in the evening where street vendors set up shop sell/cooking everything and anything you can imagine (and maybe somethings you don't want to imagine). We found a guy who only does vegetarian food -- so we've been eating real meals for the first time in about three weeks.
Lucky for us - this week happened to be the kick off of the Zanzibar International film festival. For 5,000 Tanzanian Shillings (read: less than five dollars) we got admission to two movie screenings (one of which was really good) and a whole night worth of live music. It also means that the whole town is hopping with tourists -- and for the first time since we left Israel, we're not the only white people around. I thought that this might be a negative, but it's been fine and interesting to meet other foreigners, most of whom are either travellers or volunteers in Africa.
Today during the day we went on the famous Spice Tour. Basically it involves getting carted around in a minivan to different people's homes gardens & farms to see how/where we get spices from (cinamon, vanilla, cloves, tumeric, cardomon, etc) We also got to sample a whole slew of different fruits that they grow here -- some of which i've never seen or heard of before. We're getting ready to head out of Zanzibar Town (sStone Town) to the beaches tomorrow. Not sure if there will be internet out there (probably not) so I'll check in when we get back to the main land.
Speak to you then,
Hillary
