Zanzibar Safari ya Nje

Despite first appearances, my trip to Zanzibar was intended more to be an educational trip rather than a holiday, although it always helps to have a friend who has an apartment! My overriding mission was to practice my Swahili as much as possible and see whether I could get by. Zanzibar is the birth place of Swahili and the place where it is spoken the most purely. 

With the help of a few friends of Colin's, and a huge gulp of bravery, I was soon fairly independent, talking to anyone and everyone that I met. Muslims, Masai, and tourists, chatting away to shopkeepers in the spice market in Stone Town and the man who worked for the BBC who sold Kiswahili story books. I walked into town to change money, and go to the pharmacy (toothache!).

I didn't feel in the least bit worried. Even the people touting for customers on the beach understood a "La, asante" and left me along or chatted about other things, mainly my ability to talk to them. I had a happy afternoon with two wonderful ladies from the mainland of Tanzania, first having a massage and then, somehow, my hair braided; not so much cultural appropriation, but cultural appreciation. Like women everywhere, we put the world to rights.

I was invited to eat with a family of Muslim women as they broke their fast for the day during Ramadan. While the men were off praying at the local mosque, the ten women, who had twenty five children between them, made the food in massive, massive cauldrons on fires outside. The children, who were playing, soon came to investigate me, watching videos of horses and the post-banging in machine over and over again - shouting tena! tena! when one came to an end. One little girl tested her English out on me and I added in some new words to her collection of fruits and trees and food.

A visit to Jozani Forest, conducted entirely in Swahili, was extremely pleasant in the shade, looking at black and white Colobus monkeys and the rarer Red Colobus monkeys known as Kima.

Jozani also has mangroves which are crucially important to ecology. Thankfully they are protected, and like the Forest itself, no development can take place. Everywhere else hotels and apartment are being thrown up to satisfy the Blue Economy which is vital to the island.

My other mission, of course, was to see if I could find any camels, and I learned that there are only three remaining, all imported from the mainland. One is in a zoo at Stone Town but these two live at the hotel I went to last and they live on the surrounding trees and can get right down to the sea. 

Mission accomplished although the grinding poverty behind the party beaches is hard to witness and yet everyone remains friendly and polite, whatever they think of the tourists, their livelihoods depending on it.  Zanzibar has banned the plastic bag but the litter is mainly made up on single use plastic drinking water bottles - that will be down to the tourists too.