Musings from Zanzibar
Personal Journal and Photographs, Day 6
Wednesday, 29/08/2018
Today we made an excursion to Stone Town, the main city in Zanzibar. It required rising at 7:50 since we’d be taking a taxi for the hour drive, plus a personal tour guide to navigate that labyrinth, which meant leaving at 9:00. That left us with just enough time for breakfast, except almost the moment we sat down at 8:30 we received a message from Haji, our dolphin guide from Monday, saying he had already arrived with our driver. Hakuna matata, my friend. We finished our breakfast first before hitting the road.
You’ll forgive me if I lack basic details, like the names of sites we saw, architectural information, and so on since I didn’t have really read up on this place, having booked the trip a mere 11 days before departure. Our guide was affable and seemed to know the twisty, unnamed and unnumbered streets like the back of his hand.
After a quick tour around the gardens that border the waterfront, just across from the House of Wonders, named as such for being the first building in Stone Town to have electricity. We were hoping to visit but it was undergoing renovations at the time. Next stop was the childhood home of Freddie Mercury, who was born in Stone Town and lived there until he was 8 years old and then moved to London.
It had a strong Arabic influence, especially in terms of decor. A nice touch, I thought, were these square panes of glass above the main windows that were the colors of the rainbow. Lovely. Portraits of Freddie as a rock star seemed a bit, well, inauthentic, but who am I to judge?
I couldn’t locate anything on a map if you asked me. Normally, I prefer to figure out a city on my own terms, but as we were only there for the day, I was happy to have our guide leading the way. While D. browsed a store, I asked him how long he’d been a tour guide. He said for four years. In low season, he goes to work at his family’s farm, where they harvest yams and other local crops.
Eventually, we wound up at the East African Slave Trade Museum. While not harrowing in the way one imagines Auschwitz or other historical monuments that attest to the depths and depravity of human cruelty, this nevertheless gave a sobering reminder of the impact slavery has had on the whole of humanity and Zanzibar in particular.
Right where we were standing in a small cramped subterranean room, the ceiling so low you had to mind your head, the guide told us seventy-five women and children had to wait there for three days before being auctioned off. The adjoining room looked to be even smaller and for fifty men. Everyone was chained. There were no toilets. Indeed, on days of high tide, the water would enter the slits that were ostensibly windows and wash all the waste away.
In the mid-19th century, change came with the arrival of the English abolitionist, Daniel Livingstone. I’m not going to go into a huge historical recap for the sake of this journal, though I did do a voice recording of our guide, who gave us more info about Livingstone and the church built on this ground, which served to baptize slaves before they were sent on their way.
After some more browsing through the streets, we stopped for a bite to eat near the port. It looked to be a tourist trap but the shawarma I had was simple and scrumptious, chased by a pineapple juice that was really more of a smoothie. Soon after, we took the taxi back to the lodge, where I jumped in the pool and had a chat with the owner here, who talked about being born in Stone Town and how almost 60% of the population has moved, either to different parts of the island, or other countries, either in Africa, Europe, or even further abroad.
He said Zanzibar wants to be free from Tanzania and that his parents’ generation made a bad deal with the government. He also mentioned starting an organization with other hoteliers about cleaning up the beaches.
Note before dinner: I am a bit scatterbrained today because I had a serious case of insomnia. I didn’t sleep at all before 5:00, and even from then it was very erratic and sporadic. I’m not entirely sure how I made it through the day. I had a false alarm instance of falling asleep where I dipped straight into a waking dream. I was running along the beach when a whale surfaced, then dozens of others. Hmm…not dozens but several at any rate.
I wanted to take a video or a picture but in this dream my phone kept changing to this app that wanted to identify the type the whales they were. Then i was driving along the beach to keep up with them. Then, I started wondering how could whales be so close to the shore and the absurdities continued to mount, so I opened my eyes and found only a few minutes had passed. At least I fleshed out ideas for a new story that I’ll have to work on tomorrow because I’m running out of light.
