Christine and Keith's Travels: Pemba to Zanzibar, Wednesday October 15th

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After breakfast we farewelled the Norwegians, who would be flying out later. Jane gave me a copy of ‘Northanger’ Abbey by Jane Austen, which was really sweet of her. I am going to read it when I finish my French book, with both the subject matter and the language will make it a much lighter read. Mzee took us around to the dalla dallas and ensured that we squeezed onto one, despite this being the rush hour. We rode along, with the squeeze of people meaning that any move by one rippled along the entire side. A policeman stopped us to do a check of the number of passengers, and we passed. The banana palms, coconut palms and mud brick houses with little children outside them, totally unsupervised and near the road, waving cheerfully, formed our last impressions of Pemba. At the port at Mkoani, the bus dropped us near to the jetty where we could see our boat, the Serengeti, loading its cargo and passengers. A market was laid out near the bus stop, so we bought chapattis, oranges and peanuts to keep us going throughout the trip.

On board we were seated as in a bus. The lady in front of us was travelling with three children under four, and she had only bought a ticket for one seat. She kept the children happy for a while by buying some food from the vendors who came on board, selling something like mussels pushed onto a stick. The two older children had a few tiffs with each other until finally the little girl fell asleep draped over their suitcase. Not all the seats were taken, so once the boat was moving, the lady beside them moved, allowing the two little boys to share a seat. There were so many families travelling, and everyone seemed to be taking whole branches of bananas and sacks of sweet potatoes and other enormous and lumpy parcels. Neat suitcases were rare, with the stripy bag bursting at the seams being more the norm. I had noticed that swarms of family members seemed to have been required to put one person on board. This was the slow boat that we had warned about, with everyone vomiting if the sea was rough. Despite a bit of a roll developing, it was an uneventful and pleasant trip.

Once we arrived in Zanzibar, the tenor changed. The Lonely Planet Guide had warned us to beware of touts and dishonest taxi drivers at the port, and through the window, we could see a group of people who might have been them, being pushed back by a soldier using a baton. Inwardly we groaned. Having basked in the different ways of Pemba, we were not keen to mix it again with the grubby world of the tourist scammers after our nightmare experiences in Arusha and Tanga.

The hundreds of people on our boat were all keen to disembark at once, with only a one-person wide gang plank for an exit. On top of that, men were shinnying up a side plank and the mystery of how all the luggage would be managed was revealed when they came on board and engaged themselves to needy people as porters. They were all amazingly strong, and managed to carry four or five awkward bundles, plus a banana branch or small child. After a long time we joined the throng, and it was a relief when no-one approached us straight away, and that taxi drivers accepted a polite ‘No, thank you,’ for what it was.

We saw an immigration office, but we ignored it since Zanzibar is part of Tanzania and we had spent so long in Dar es Salaam getting our visas. So really we had no hassles and it was a dream run from Pemba to Zanzibar. The island commonly known as Zanzibar is actually called Unguja. Technically, Zanzibar refers to the archipelago of Unguja, Pemba and the many small islands. Zanzibar joined with Tanganyika after a violent revolution in 1964 to become part of the new nation of Tanzania. The islands were closed to visitors for a number of years due to political instability.

As always, arrival time means trying to read a map and orient ourselves in a new place. The first part, which took us past a market, the dalla dalla stand and an oval where we could hear what seemed to be a political meeting, was all plain sailing. Our difficulties arose when we entered the streets of Stone Town, where you cannot see out of the tiny part of the street you are in and the streets don’t seem to be going in the same directions that they do on the map. When we asked a man for help, he advised us that the hotel we were going too had a pilfering problem and that we should go to the one belonging to a friend of his. We were disappointingly back on familiar territory again, but at least we had our directions and the name of another cheap one if ours really was no good. When we arrived at our hotel, all seemed to be fine, and I particularly liked the little gardens on each floor, and thought that a management that was into gardening wouldn’t be into pilfering too.

We went out for a walk, and having already learnt how easy it is to become lost in the narrow streets flanked continuously by two or three storey buildings, our plan was to only follow one street and to not turn any corners. This was much too limited an approach here, where no street goes for very long before it dog legs with a couple of options leading off it along the way. But there was one feature that stood out - an enormous baobab tree, with an eatery built around its trunk - unmissable and easy to find our hotel from. Better than that, a very cheap and good restaurant stood near it.

A man turned the handle of a sugar cane crusher, with the juice falling onto ice in a bucket. Motor bike and bicycle riders relied on warning toots or jingles to keep from mowing down pedestrians they could never see around the next bend or corner. Many businesses operated at ground floor level, with computer shops joining a range of secretarial services, tiny supermarkets and rows of tourist shops. A flock of Muslim school students was just leaving class, and since it seemed late, we wondered if there might be two sittings to accommodate numbers, as in Egypt. We passed a mosque, a house with a canon outside it, a communications tower, cats, cats and more cats.

Our dinner that night cost A$4.00 for vegetable curry, beans and rice for two, a cup of tea and a glass of passion fruit juice. When we finally walked back to the hotel, the streets were full of people of all ages, out in the cool, with many sitting on the seats that are built in to the fronts of houses. We rang Fared, the tour guide that Jane had suggested, and arranged to meet him tomorrow. Keith went to the internet café and I typed us out of France and up to the first day in Tanzania for the blog. I have to admit that the call of my book was very great, and I read for much more time than I typed.