Putting the 'Zan' in Tanzania

Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous archipelago off Tanzania's coast; it joined with the mainland, then called Tanganyika, in the sixties, and the whole country's name was changed to include the "zan." I spent my three short days there on the main island, also called Zanzibar. It was a truly fascinating place that was just as Arab as it was African and just as Indian as it was Arab. (It used to be the seat of the Sultan of Oman, so the cultural influences there are vastly different from those of greater Tanzania.) Men in long white Islamic robes sat under intricately carved wooden doorframes sharing long-spouted silver pots of coffee, while women with only their eyes showing shepherded children through the impossibly narrow cobblestone alleyways. And of course a million tourists milled around, but that only marginally detracted from the allure. The place seemed to handle its glut of visitors with relative aplomb.

My first evening walk through the main city, called Stone Town, was positively magical--straight out of Arabian Nights--with the winding streets bathed in soft gold lamplight and the smells of cardamom and cinnamon and cloves wafting from restaurants and kitchens. I stopped at a little gelato cafe right on the beach (true, gelato isn't entirely authentic, but there is actually a large Italian population on Zanzibar for some reason), which was highly atmospheric. I couldn't wait to get started on my day the next morning, and the 5am wailing of the mosques made it pretty easy to get up early.

I found the next morning that the town actually lost a little of its mystique by daylight, but it was still great. I joined a spice tour that morning, which I honestly didn't find all that interesting. I was driven in a dala-dala with eight or so others to a spice farm a little ways outside of town that seemed to have been made specifically for tours, as there were several other large groups there too. Our guide let us smell and taste plants like clove and vanilla bean; I was really surprised to learn that cocoa bean pods are covered in a slippery, sweet gel, like lychee, and that the beans themselves are purple. I also got a whiff of cinnamon bark and fresh ginger root, and at the end they cut up several fruits for us to try--breadfruit, Zanzibar apples, jack fruit, some type of orange, etc. Then we had a really good lunch of rice and curry and mboga mboga (stewed greens), followed by a strange and unplanned trip to some slave caves. After slavery was abolished on Zanzibar, the slave traders used networks of underground caves to store slaves until they could be illegally sold and smuggled away by boat. We entered by descending two flights of stairs, and then the guide walked us back into the cave maybe about a hundred yards or so, which was funny because we were all wearing sandals and only the guide and his helper had flashlights. Walking was difficult, but I was most intrigued by the fuss that people put up about it. Their attitudes made an interesting contrast with the African perspective on walking; namely, it seemed to me throughout my seven weeks there that Africans rarely stumble and that they never complain about distance or terrain. Everyone--children, old people, sick people, pregnant women, everyone--was like a mountain goat in their sure-footedness, despite (or perhaps because of) always walking barefoot or in broken plastic flipflops imported from China. I was noticeably, remarkably clumsy by comparison in my village, even in my indestructible hiking boots. It was funny, in the cave, to once again be around people who slid and stumbled just like me.

After the cave, they took us (briefly, briefly) to the beach, a trip cut short by the encroaching tide. Zanzibari tides were the most dramatic I've ever seen--when they were out, they were way out, and when they came in, the beach disappeared all the way to the treeline. We hurriedly snatched our shoes away from the encroaching waves after only ten or so minutes there, which was fine with me, as I was excited to get back to Stone Town.