Pandas in Africa: Day 65: 18/06/2011 – Johannesburg to Stone Town, Zanzibar

Thanks Panda for doing the East African blog for the last week.

Our alarm clock went off at 4:00: funny, when you are excited about going somewhere, that dreaded alarm sound is not as bad as when you have to get up for school. We finalised our packing, locked up the house, gave the pets a last love and were ready for our wonderful friend and neighbour, Al, to pick us up just after 5:00. We caught the 1^st Gautrain of the day into OR Tambo and had breakfast while we waited to board. The flight was delayed due to people booking in and not boarding on time, so we had to wait for their luggage to be removed – some are people are strange and then we had a technical problem with the plane which delayed us further. Due to a good tail wind we made up some time and only arrived ½ late. Gray had sent through messages wanting to know if Kirsty was ‘driving’ the plane (having recently got her licence, she is not exactly an F1 racing driver). Having cleared customs, eventually, as each passenger has to have fingerprints scanned for all 10 fingers, we had to wait for the manual offloading of our luggage (no turnstiles here). There is no place for people collecting passengers to wait, so we found a hot Panda waiting outside with hundreds of taxi drivers. It was so wonderful to see him, I missed him and I had only been away for a week, the kids hadn’t seen him for a few months, so it was an exciting reunion.

The first thing that struck us was how hot and humid it was here; the temperature when we left this morning was 4°C and here it feels around 40°C.

Gray introduced us to Mohamed, whom he had employed as a guide and we were escorted to our taxi and driven through an area with tropical vegetation to Stone Town. The taxi took us as close to our hotel as roads would allow, the rest of the journey was done on foot, following Mohamed, with our luggage. We really looked like tourists.

Stone Town is amazing, it reminds me a lot of Venice, just a lot poorer and dirtier, with a conglomeration of alley ways in no order at all. There are people all over the alleys and very few are wide enough to accommodate cars but scooters and bicycles whizz around hooting all the time. We have discovered that one of the biggest offences on Zanzibar roads is not to have a hooter on your bike, car or mode of transport, as you are required by law, to hoot so that people know they are about to be driven down.

Zanzibar - even the name sounds exotic, and exotic is what perfectly describes this land of palm trees. It was called ‘Unguja’ by the locals, which is Swahili for ‘So you came?’ or ‘Oh! You came?’ Visiting Arabs later called the island Zanzibar, meaning ‘land of blacks’.

Besides being a top tourist destination, Zanzibar has some events which have put it on the map:

· It boasts the shortest war in recorded history – the Anglo-Zanzibar war of 1896, which lasted 45 minutes.

· It was one of the most active slave slave-trading centres on the East coast.

· Farrokh Bulsara, better known as Freddie Mercury, was born here.

Our first stop was to drop off our luggage at the Zanzibar Coffee House and Hotel. The hotel is an authentic Arab house, deep in the heart of Stone Town and is steeped in history. It was originally the residence of Sir Tharia Topan, the Wazir of Sultan Said Bargash in 1885 (not sure what the hell he was bit it sounds pretty impressive). The hotel now contains 8 individually designed rooms, with four poster beds, mosquito nets and antique furniture. It is a unique place to stay and we are sharing a family suite, with Gray, Gareth and I in one room and the girls sharing the interleading room – we are really bonding! The rooms have exotic coffee related names like Moccachino, Espresso, Cappuccino and we are in the Bourbon and Caturra Suites. The house is 6 stories and our rooms is on the 4^th floor, the wooden stairs are narrow, worn and steep, we will be nice and fit after a few days.(Not a wheel chair friendly establishment).

Our next stop was Mercury’s Restaurant on the sea shore, where we had a wonderful lunch. We all had seafood, except our darling and fussy Princess Kirsty, who splashed out and ordered a Margarita Pizza. Gray finally has a drinking buddy and him and Ga made up for the drought while he was bonding with the missionaries. Many Kilimanjaros and a few cocktails later we headed off to the tourist/market area to check out the shopping, much to the delight of the girls.

Then it was time to head off home. We had been warned that all first-timers get lost in Stone Town and we didn’t disprove this. After about an hour of traipsing around the alley ways and discovering we had gone in circles, we asked for directions and then asked again and again until we eventually got back to the Coffee house.

We headed up the 6 flights of stairs to the open plan rooftop for an impressive 360° view of the sunset over Stone Town. Being higher than most of the town, we were afforded a bird’s eye view of mosques, an open plan classroom, with adult classes taking place and general life in Stone Town, slowing down as the evening descended on us. Surprisingly, very few lights came on in the town.

Kind of tied we headed back to our rooms – we were in bed by 7:30.