Stone Town To Paje: Foreshadowing is Real

At Mercury's after the fish market in the Forodhani Gardens, the 5 of us had started telling random travel stories. It was super entertaining and really fun. There was the story of the 8 hour ferry to Greece that was actually 28 or so hours. Then I told a story about bed bugs when I traveled and how I left the hotel in the middle of the night and sat at the train station.

Door of the Bed bug room

Well... it turns out it was my turn to be awoken from sleep. Bites. Lots of them. We looked in the beds (which I usually always do). Nothing. Then we looked in the mosquito nets. Bingo. Bed bugs.
We went downstairs with evidence and woke up the night guy. He was extremely apologetic. The good news was we hadn't unpacked so we grabbed our stuff and he walked us to 4 hotels until we finally found one with vacancy. It was 2 am.

The new place we stayed repurposed everything

We turned on the AC unit and I went immediately to sleep. At some point during the night there was a blackout which equaled no AC for quite a while. It turns out that the new hotel room had all of the windows sealed and insulated so they couldn't be opened. The room was quickly a sauna. The next morning the night guy came back at 830 am to take us back to the original hotel (which is a great thing because after going to so many places I am not sure it would have been easy to find the way back). We ate breakfast there and booked the hotel in Paje where C and J were staying after again finding there were limited options for multiple rooms. At breakfast we met a couple who said that they had had a really great walking tour the day before. We decided that it might be nice to have some direction and history. We met our tour guide at 1030 when it was just starting to rain.

The doors of Stone Town are fabulous. Spikes on doors are supposed to dissuade elephants from breaking them down

We learned about Zanzibar and its political progression. Zanzibar is an archipelago and is "semi-autonomous" from Tanzania proper. This as you may guess occasionally causes unrest to put it mildly (I received an alert about the upcoming election from the State Department on my way back to the States). Zanzibar was a British Protectorate and Stone Town was a center of the slave trade until the 1870s. The average income in Zanzibar is $250 a year. Twelve percent of children have acute malnutrition. This is compared to Tanzania proper with 68% of the population living on less than $1.25 a day 16% of children under 5 years of age with acute malnutrition. Tanzania is 159 out of 187 countries in poverty.

Towards the end of the tour we visited the area where the slave market once stood which is now an Anglican Church. The rain increased and then approached monsoon levels which led us to ask for a place to purchase umbrellas. Our guide whose name was Ali took us to the big market for this which was also the spice market.

Umbrella bartering 

After umbrellas were procured, he and A helped me barter for spices. It is possible that for the next 10 years every thing I cook might contain saffron.

Next up the fish market, which has fish arriving throughout the day.

First the fish go through an auction area for restaurants and then they come to the stalls for individual sale.

After that there were a variety of fruits and vegetables including the "Mizungo" banana (a red banana which is named that because that is the color the white people turn when they get in the sun. Mizungo = slang for white people).

The price that was being asked for said bananas was outrageous at 30 cents a banana so we moved on. After the market more of Stone Town's history, a visit to a really amazing antique shop that had so many cool things including a tremendous variety of compasses and jewelry.

The tour concluded after a few more stops including the house were Freddy Mercury was raised.
Lunch was at Lukman's, a local spot that had cheap and delicious local cuisine.

Again we attempted to eat it all. We tried octopus, calamari, veggies, spinach and yam greens (which made my day. I have an obsession with sweet potato greens).  Then we did a little bit of shopping where everyone bought "African Pants". If you remember the elephant pants from Thailand and Cambodia (those were in Africa as well, which is fair because they too have elephants). The Africa Pants (which deserve capitalization because they are in a word spectacular) are so loud and bright and awesome they may make your eyes bleed, picture tribal with super bright beautiful colors.

After this we rushed back to the hotel with a random escort who we tipped to catch our car to the east coast of Zanzibar. It took about an hour and a half to get to Paje. The ride was quite beautiful and rural.

We arrived at the beach at high tide and the water was all of the way up to the sea wall.

We took a quick dip in the ocean and then walked along the beach. Several of the hotels had restaurants and evening parties. Dinner that night was fresh seafood and pretty good.  It took almost 2 hours to prepare, but at least the company was excellent. We missed William, safari cook extraordinaire.