Zanzibar - the True Beach Paradise

***In addition to this new post we also updated some older posts with additional pictures and uploaded numerous new albums with captions on our Picasa site: http://picasaweb.google.com/TheKuehls

Enjoy!
Chad & Colleen

Zanzibar, we made it. After 3 months in Africa we have arrived at our final destination. From Kigali we caught a bus to the border with Tanzania, then bargained for a shared taxi to take us another 3 hours into Tanzania to the town of Kahama, the nearest town with a bus connection to Dar. After a night in small town Kahama we caught an early morning bus to Dar, arriving 13 hours later.

Sounds easy right? It would have gone relatively smooth if it wasn't for the horrible case of food poisoning I caught in Kigali. We ate at a buffet....first and last of the trip...enough said. Not the wisest decision and I paid for it over the next 4 days and eventually had to take a course of antibiotics to get rid of it. Colleen food sickness: 2, Chad (stomach of steel!): 0. We stayed in Dar for 3 nights, mainly so I could recover, and to be honest, there isn't much to do or see in Dar. It is the biggest city in Tanzania (although it is not the capital) and there wasn't even a supermarket bigger than the corner mini mart. It was a good place to recover though, and from Dar it is very easy to catch a ferry to Zanzibar. I said it was easy to take the ferry, unfortunately it was not easy to buy tickets. Tanzania is filled with touts, more than any other country we have seen so far. We were constantly telling people "no, we don't need your help. No we don't want to buy anything No you cannot carry our baggage. No, no, no". It is exhausting and buying transportation tickets of any kind is an experience as the touters jockey for position in order to claim a commission on your purchase (even if they did not help you to begin with).

After 3 nights in Dar, and I fully recovered, we fought our way through the touts dockside and onto the Zanzibar Ferry. We paid a premium to get on the high speed morning ferry and 2 hours later we were exiting on the shores of Zanzibar (had to get our passports stamped and go through immigration although they are technically part of Tanzania)...weaving through more touts on our way to a taxi. We checked into a guesthouse in historical Stonetown, the main town on Zanzibar. Stonetown is beautiful, with narrow winding alleyways and streets, you can get lost for hours there. The population on Zanzibar is mainly Muslim and the women fully covered their bodies and heads with beautiful materials, something we had not encountered since the small rural towns of Jordan. We spent 2 nights in Stonetown enjoying the old world feel before catching a mini bus out to what Zanzibar is famous for, the beach. There are many beaches to choose from in Zanzibar and one was recommended to us by a few people so we headed that way. We traveled by local minibus which meant exiting on the side of a road and hiking several kilometers with our packs down a marked dirt road to the beach side backpackers. We had a confirmed reservation at a recommended resort but upon arriving found that they had lost the reservation and their quoted prices were now inconsistent with what our reservation stated. We took it as a sign and headed out. Given the temperature and our heavy packs, we checked in just down the road for one night and spent the remainder of the morning doing a round robin of the neighboring resorts finding the best one suited for us and made a reservation there for the remaining 3 nights.

We chose to end our tour of Africa in Zanzibar because of a deal we found on airplane flights back to Johannesburg. It turns out the island was the perfect place to unwind and reminisce about the past several months of travel and prepare for the road ahead of us in Asia. The weather is perfect, not too hot and not too cold (think those warm San Francisco days we get a handful of each summer) with a light refreshing shower each afternoon. The beaches had the whitest sand either of us had ever seen and the turquoise blue waters were somewhat hypnotic as we spent afternoons gazing out on the Indian Ocean and the islands offshore. The nights were spent touring the local beachside restaurants sampling multiple curries, pastas and seafood for Chad. One particular night we gathered at a local open air beach pub to watch the Champions League soccer final between Manchester United and Barcelona. We arrived early and as game time grew nearer the crowd drew larger and larger. The bar owner had installed a new projection TV that day and was casting the game on an oversized (10+ ft) screen hanging from the rafters. As the bar was open air the crowd grew outside and it was a site to behold. There was a large group of Masai (the native people of Tanzania) decorated in their elaborate historical dress, in addition to locals ranging in age from the very young to adults, and of course the local touts and beachboys. It was a site to remember watching them sitting motionless and memorized on the beach in anticipation of the match. We did a bit of snorkeling on the last day on one of the many offshore islands and finished the night off with a glass of wine on the beach watching the sunset. Zanzibar is amazing.

We are in transit for the next few days, heading first to Johannesburg, then to Hong Kong before finally arriving in India. The flights will be long but after many hours on buses in Africa we are looking forward to the relative comfort of a plane.