Random thoughts on things and places: Zanzibar (II.)

After the long and complicated arrival late at night, I woke up the following day in Stone Town in broad daylight with the sounds of a busy day, splashing water and people loudly haggling on the street. I checked the time, expecting to see late morning hours - and thought something must be wrong: my mobile said it was only little after 6am!? ... A different time zone that had escaped my attention? My mobile has gone crazy?

Neither of those, as it turned out: Zanzibar days (and daylight) simply start very early. Looking out of the window, the old dhow port in Stone Town was already bursting with activity:

Stone Town is the historical part of Zanzibar Town, the capital of the island. It has quite a charming mixture of African, Arabic and Indian feel to it (it's also listed under UNESCO), and I suppose the best thing you can do in there is to wander through the maze of narrow streets and get lost. Which is what we did (though it's also very practical to have someone with a sense of orientation, unlike me, for when you want to get un-lost).

All looked like a very normal day...

... until the moment when all of a sudden, without any warning, everybody around us started to run. Quite an unpleasant feeling when you sense panic all around you, people run, cars turn, and you have no idea whatsoever what is going on. My immediate reaction was, if the locals run, I also run - there will be time to ask why later. Not so easy to convince Javi on that point though, but at least I managed to drag him walking fast away, deeper into the maze of streets.

One maybe doesn't often think of a white-beach holiday destination in terms of their often complex political or social issues. As we found out later, Zanzibar has quite a vocal independence movement (Tanzania was created in 1964 as a union between the mainland Tanganyika and Zanzibar), and protests and clashes are quite common especially around the election period. This time it was because a leading cleric from an independentist movement disapeared for a few days, which gave ground to riots, fuelled by youth unemployment and lack of opportunities, similarly to the Arab spring protests. And we seemed to arrive right in the middle of them (but to reassure our mothers who I know are reading this, nothing happened and we were perfectly safe).

And perhaps at this moment I should also reassure - apart from our mothers - the potential visitors to Zanzibar. This doesn't happen that often, normally doesn't affect tourists (ok, just check whether it isn't election time before booking), and in spite of landing in the middle of riots we still could - and did - enjoy Stone Town. As long as we kept away from the problem areas around the market (on the photo above), we could stroll around the old town just fine. And when we returned there after a week on the coast, everything was quiet (well, almost - just that the trial of one of earlier riots' organizers was taking place just in front of our hotel) and we could even plunge into the market and get our spices!

Freshly squeezed sugar cane juice... hmmmmmmm

The traditional dhows

A view of the Indian Ocean... not bad!

The Zanzibar pizza, which - as they rightly point out - has nothing to do with Italian pizza

If there are two things that Zanzibar is known for, it is spices and slave trade.

Zanzibar was for long the main East African slave trade market and port, with thousands of slaves (as many as 50,000 annually in 19th century) being "exported" as a main "commodity" to Arabia, Persia and Asia. The small slave museum in Stone Town is interesting - and quite chilling. I think that from Europe we nowadays aren't much aware of the extent and brutality of slave trade, and of how recent it still is (in Zanzibar, for example, it wasn't abolished until 1873); but here its memory is still present in many places.

One of the slave chambers, where they kept over 70 people at a time for days as they arrived from the mainland, without water or food, before they were taken to the market

And as for the spices, you really can't miss those in Zanzibar. At the market, in all the typical food (which by the way is wonderful!) - or at least because locals offer you a "spice tour" at every step. We ended up doing one of those, and it turned out not to be as unpleasantly touristy as I had thought - and very interesting to see how things you normally only see packed on a supermarket shelf actally grow!