The main purpose of visiting the east coast of Zanzibar is to see the dolphins. There's a place called Kizimkazi where you're basically guaranteed to find them, and you can go swimming with them. Excellent. And with Alicia's love of dolphins, this is an absolute necessity.
We use a shared taxi again to get out to a beach town called Jambiani, where we find a place to stay called Red Monkey - imaginatively named after the local...you guessed it...red monkeys. You'll see the pictures of Jambiani beach in one of the photo albums so you can see how cool it is. The only problem is that we've just come from Kendwa which was simply perfect so (as bizarre as it sounds, and as embarrased as I am to write it now) we're a little underwhelmed by our beach front villa!!! We find all sorts of faults - the tide goes too far out, there's seaweed left on the sand, Jambiani contains too many syllables - anything that isn't perfection. Clearly we have been spoiled by paradise and are in desperate need of a reality check.
Dolphin Chasing
We have to get up early to go swimming with the dolphins, so at 7am we're hopping in the van that's taking us to the boat. At 8am we're collecting our flippers and making our way to a tiny boat. Rich and I are the only passengers so we wade through the chilly water and hop in. There are 3 other small boats full of people eager to see the wild bottle-nose dolphins. We all head out in the same direction for about 3 min. and then we see them. A school of dolphins swimming up ahead. The captin tells us to put on our snorkels and flippers and get ready to jump in the water. Rich quickly dons on the gear, as the captin speeds up to get ahead of the dolphins. I'm trying to figure out exactly how this works and wonder what the rush is, when the captin says, "OK now jump!"
Rich throws himself overboard, while I try to take pictures of the oncoming dolphins. Within 20 sec. the dolphins have swum past us and Rich is floating in the water alone, having missed seeing anything at all.
Rich gets in and we repeat the above, only this time I get in the water too. I'm surrounded by bubbles from jumping in and by the time they clear away, I barely catch a glimpse of a couple flippers going by. Back in the boat and repeat...Ridiculus, I say. Not only do we not see much in the water, but we're also getting stung by small jellyfish.
Eventually we decided to watch from the boat and that was a much better view. As we get to the end of our trip, there are about 40 dolphins that join up and the captain races ahead of them, further then usual. I have to jump out. And finally get to swim with the dolphins and it's amazing. I heard them talking to each other before I saw them and when I looked underwater, it was a beautiful spectical, seeing so many of them together, even babies. There was one dolphin that kept looking at me and swimming close by. This last jump made this whole brief experience worthwhile!
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We spent another couple of days on the beach, trying to burn the whiteness off my skin (I think you can guess the author of this one) and returned to Stone Town feeling yet more contented.
