Zanzibar “Dream the Life” (updated: photos fixed)

Yesterday we flew out of Kilimanjaro International Airport, leaving northern Tanzania behind. We’ve gotten to know the northern swath of the country about as well as we could in a month. It’s a raw place, mostly agricultural, subsistence farming for at least 85% of its people, growing maize, bananas, coffee, and vegetables. Chilly at night – the local people in Moshi dressed like it was winter – with red dirt dust all over everything, houses slapped together out of boards and concrete blocks, roads badly paved. Besides agriculture the other main industry is safari tourism, so there is some infrastructure and some prosperity that grows out of that; in Moshi there are many secondary schools, for example. And religiously, because it was thoroughly missionized by Catholics and Lutherans in the late 19th century, northern Tanzania has felt basically even-steven between Muslim, Christian, and Rastafarian. Some of the friendliest people we have ever met, and in Swahili greetings are part of the art of conversation to a high degree, so you end up conversing with almost everyone you pass.

Throughout the trip we have worked with a Moshi-based local tour company – a bit of a budget operation (as you’ve seen) but that has suited our style. We didn’t want to travel with (or pay for) high-end European standards and we wanted to meet and spend time with ordinary Tanzanians doing their ordinary thing. For the last leg of the trip, after the Meru climb, we asked our tour guy (“Ray”) to book us something seaside in Zanzibar so that we could get a flavor of the place and have some R&R before winging home.

Think he delivered?

(the view from our room)

At first we weren’t sure. The neighborhood for this place from the street side looks like nothing appealing and maybe even a little sketchy, with trash-strewn blocks of concrete apartments. It’s located about halfway between the airport and the old Arab quarter (Stone Town), near the hospital. And it wasn’t in any of our guide books. And Don was able to find out online that it was ranked 37th out of 50 for Zanzibar resorts, to which I could only reply, “Woo-hoo! Top 40!”

But it’s great, actually. Once inside the compound gate, it’s a self-contained village of buildings set all askew on a slope, with thatch-roof plank bridges connecting them and fun-house tilting sidewalks (you could never make this place ADA compliant) which are giving our mountain-sore calves a good workout, but our block of rooms is RIGHT on the water along a quiet stretch of white beach, and we’ve got two doubles, each with double-canopy beds with generous tents of mosquito netting, and there’s a fresh sea breeze and the warm Indian Ocean. There are plenty of private security guys strolling in orange vests, including one posted literally right outside our rooms. Our booking covers breakfast and one other meal in the buffet every day, so we’re really delighted. This morning the sand is full of local joggers; yesterday we saw school kids swimming after school, a fisherman checking his nets, and a group of people washing their cow, but otherwise we feel like we have this long swath of beach to ourselves. It's a midweek stay, so it's very quiet. Its slogan on its dilapidated sign reads “Dream the Life.” Ah.


(our rooms, seen from the water)

It seems to cater to Tanzanians, although there are a few non-Africans at the hotel. It’s got a conference space and is hosting a small UN conference this week, and at lunch most of the women were wearing Muslim headscarves. We enjoyed lunch which included calamari salad and fresh fish, several kinds of curry and a rice pilau and a stewed fruit salad for dessert. We played on the beach – shallow water you can walk out waist-deep at low tide for a long way (photo: our 3 men standing in the water behind Jacob), abundant bivalve shells all along the sand, and tiny sand-colored crabs that skitter along with unbelievable speed.



We then took a taxi up to Stone Town, and got dropped off near the old fort. Once we fended off half a dozen offers of “tours” from people and started wandering the warren of narrow alleys, curio shops like this one:



and mosques, we spent a pleasant couple of hours just walking, looking, and taking pictures of the beautiful carved doors, the people and the wares. Zanzibar is almost entirely Muslim, since its history is an Arab port along the spice/slave routes, ruled by sultans and omans. The integration of Zanzibar into Tanzania wasn’t entirely seamless. They share a common language of Swahili, but the island is currently holding a referendum to become separate again.



By 5:30 or 6 we were getting hungry and we found ourselves near the fish, vegetable and spice market area. We bought a fresh loaf of bread from a vendor and tore it into 6 pieces and ate it as we strolled towards one of the world’s great nightly outdoor street restaurants, Forodhani Garden, on the waterfront just outside the old fort.



Sure, it attracts droves of tourists, but locals too, and the food and energy of the place was amazing. We got there at sundown, with little fishing dhows bobbing in the water in the background, and stayed until about 9 at night when we taxi’d back to the hotel.

By sampling from many different vendors, our family of 6 consumed:

3 glasses of fresh-squeezed cane sugar juice run through a machine that looked like an ancient wash wringer. Incredibly refreshing and delicious.

8 mini-kebabs of spiced beef tidbits and one of very spicy chicken



3 seafood kebabs: something advertised as “baby shark,” marlin, and “lobster masala” purchased from a pair who called themselves King Solomon and Abdulli the Fisherman, accompanied by a salad of shredded cabbage, thin sliced tomato and shredded mint leaves

1 plate of thick chewy garlic/coconut naan, something like thin foccacia bread

1 bag of fresh-popped popcorn

3 cans of Strawberry Fanta, which sent Forrest into soda nirvana

2 “Zanzibar Pizzas” which are a local specialty. They are a kind of omelet/quiche wrapped in thin dough and fried on a cast-iron dish in ghee. Ours contained the following, which when cooked turned into one of the best street foods we’ve ever eaten: crumbled ground beef, a fine mince of red onion/carrot/tomato, a cube of soft cheese (like Laughing Cow cheese in America), a dollop of mayonnaise, all mixed in with an egg. Watching it being made was about half the fun, and eating it was definitely the other half. Wow.

1 dessert version of Zanzibar Pizza, which contained melted chocolate and banana. You could also get mango + Nutella. Yum!

We went to sleep lulled by the sound of the incoming tide outside the windows. Dream the Life.