Category: zanzibar

we took the fast ferry from stone town to dar es salaam to catch our flight out, and it was quite nice! the first step was spending basically an entire afternoon sweatily trying to procure ferry tickets by pushing to the front of a large group of people much more skilled than me at the art of not getting in a line. definitely do this the day before, as multiple folks missed the last ferry that afternoon because this process is exceedingly inefficient.

in dar es salaam, we used some hotel points for a free night at the holiday inn, and i went on a run on the newly constructed seaside barack obama boulevard before our flight home. a great time in zanzibar!

about 6 km off the coast of stone town, zanzibar, is the fascinating little island of changuu. the first use of the island was as a prison for zanzibar. later, in the 1800s, it was used as quarantine facility for travelers during cholera and bubonic plaque outbreaks. (btw, did you know there was a bubonic plaque outbreak in india in the 1800s that killed over 10 million people?)

you can easily hire a boat from stone town to the island for about $5-10, about a 30 minute trip. the prison is interesting to explore. even more exciting are a population of large tortoises, the oldest of which are 180 years old! they were initially brought to zanzibar from the the seychelles, and when they started to be stolen, were retired to the island for their own protection.

we spent an amazing 4-5 days in stone town, zanzibar! zanzibar is a semi-autonomous archipelago off the coast of tanzania. for much of the last 500 years it was under the influence of the sultanate of oman – it was even the capital of the entire sultanate for a few decades in the 1800s. it remains almost 100% muslim. in the 1960s, it merged with the mainland colony of tangyanika, and the names combined to form the new country of tanzania. it was also the childhood home of freddy mercury of the band queen, and produces much of the world’s spices. though part of tanzania, it retains its own immigration policy and other laws.

the capital, stone town, is a maze of alleyways that one can wander for days! we stayed in a relatively inexpensive boutique hotel called the shaba. it was close to the beachside park hyatt, which ended up being a cooler place to hang out (both literally and figuratively), which they were fine with as long as we bought some refreshments.

the beachfront is where the action is, and the forodhani gardens turn into a street food market at dusk. we found the best restaurant in town – lukmaan swahili restaurant where one can chose any number of east african delicacies from a picture menu.