Zanzibar!

So far, Zanzibar has been my favorite part of the trip and here's why. It is ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS here.  We arrived by ferry from Dar es Salaam and found our hotel right by the ferry terminal, another very nice place considering we are in a third world country. On day 1, we went on two different tours, one of the markets here, and one of old stone town, where Zanzibar was first inhabited. We went to the old slave trade building, which was turned into a church by an English missionary.  The old whipping post was cut down and the altar was built in its place. They left the stump of the post to remind us all of the sacrifices those poor slaves had to endure.

Zanzibar has quite the interesting history. Arabs and the Portuguese were its earliest inhabitants. Currently, it is 95% Muslim and 5% Christian and Hindi. It is made up of 50 small islands and is roughly 100 mikes long and has about 1 million people total across the islands. Most everyone is friendly to us here on the island because tourism is their number one industry. It has been interesting to see how people respond to me here versus in America. I regularly get mistaken for a boy in America, but here, not one person has thought I was male. My hypothesis is that women present more androgynous here, and since I look more androgynous and not (definitively) male, they just assume I am female. Fascinating.

On day 2 here, we went on probably the coolest snorkeling trip I have ever been on. We took a little dhow boat (see pic) out to one of the little islands near Zanzibar called Bawa Island. There is a reef this surrounds the island and has tons of different types of fish and coral for us to snorkel around. We saw starfish, giant clams, and black nemo fish and so many more. I used my underwater camera for that so look for pics from that on my Facebook page. 

After leaving the snorkel island, we went over to prisoners island named because, you guessed it, the Zanzibarians used to keep their prisoners there.  Now it is a pretty nice beach resort that also has a tortoise sanctuary. Over 100 tortoises originally from the Sechelles Islands now call this place home. I don't think this species will be going extinct any time soon because we saw lots of tortoise whoopy happening (and have the video footage to prove it!). 

  

In the afternoon, we went on a spice tour. Now I know where a lot of our spices come from! We saw everything from lemongrass to coffee beans to cocoa beans to vanilla to ginger. A man named Butterfly showed us how he gathers coconuts by climbing up the palm tree in his bare feet, singing a song and dancing as he climbed. Then we got to drink coconut water right from those freshly picked coconuts. Awesome!!

On our last full day in Zanzibar, we went to the other side of the island to a village called Paja. There we learned about the seaweed project that the local women now work on to earn extra money for their families. They basically farm seaweed and the sell it directly to companies that ship it all over the world. They make about 50,000 shillings every two months, roughly $30. That's not much but it goes a long way to help clothe and feed their children. 

After eating the best meal I have had so far in Tanzania (red snapper caught just that morning and grilled to perfection!), we travelled back inland to Jozani National Park. There we saw red colobus monkeys that live in the wild. Above is one of the babies. I'm not sure they could get any cuter! And they were right next to  us - oh man!

The last thing we did was take a sunset cruise out into the harbor on this really cool boat. It cost us a little extra but it was well worth it to see the sunset. I'd heard that Zanzibar sunsets were some of the best in the world and I was not disappointed. It was the perfect end to our time on Zanzibar. Now it's back to the mainland and on to the safari!