Stone Town, Zanzibar (10 February 2008).
Today is our last night in Zanzibar. After 5 nights at Karamba we moved to a Paradise Beach Bungalows, which is located in Paje Beach—on the east coast of Zanzibar. We picked PBB because it is owned and operated by a Japanese lady who cooks really tasty Japanese food. Unfortunately she was home due to a family emergency and none of the other cooks know how to make Japanese food. In general, the locals were not doing a very good job of keeping up the place. It seemed kind of run down, dirty, and unkempt. So we cut our stay short, and moved to Stone Town. We wanted to get away from PBB, but we also wanted to be closer to a larger town, with more facilities, restaurants, and so on. Plus this way we are a short ride away from the airport.
PBB ended up being a bit too rustic for us. We managed to survive, but Debby had a hard time sleeping because the fan in the room didn’t work very well. Plus the first night she got a lot of small bites on her feet—we think it was ants, but we are not sure. Plus the beach wasn’t very good for swimming. For one, they have blue bottle jellyfish (not sure if this is really a jellyfish or not). But also during low tide the ocean moves way out (we think it’s about a mile, but it’s hard to judge the distance without some points of reference) and during high tide the surf is quite strong. During low tide it’s easy enough to walk to other resorts on the beach, but during high tide one can’t walk on the beach. So we had to adjust our schedule to the tides.
The second day at PBB we rented a motorcycle (Honda 250cc) since we were a bit bored, and rode around the island. I wanted to see some of the norther beaches, especially Matemwe. But we didn’t get there because there was construction on the road and made the road very dusty (it is a gravel road). So we turned back around and rode around the southern part of the island. There are frequent police roadblocks all over the island. They made us buy a “permit” at the first one, but after that we never got stopped again.
We found that outside of Stone Town most of the resorts are really isolated. Which is great if you just want peace and quite and don’t mind eating all your meals at the resort, like we did at Karamba. But it doesn’t work so well if you want to get out. We met a British couple at PBB who was also frustrated by this. They went out to dinner one night and on the way back a “taxi” wanted to charge them $10.00 (USD) to drive them about a mile!
Being in Stone Town is a bit more fun. In the afternoon we went out for a walk in downtown, found an Internet cafe, and had a tasty dessert. We couldn’t have done so anywhere else on the island. On the other hand, there are a lot more touts here in Stone Town. There were none by Karamba, some in Paje, and a lot here.
We had read a lot about touts and about being careful while walking on the beach. Though our experiences with zanzibari have been quite different. One day I went to a small shop in Paje to look for a new sim card (we could not recharge our old Ugandan Celtel card). They didn’t have any at the shop I went, but they instructed a small kid (about 6 or 7 I guess) who was at the store to walk me to the other store in teh village where they sold them. He walked me all the way there, waited until teh store opened, explained what I wanted, and then walked me back to the first store.
We’ve tried to login a couple of time but have been unsuccessful. Both at the hotel and at the Internet cafe the connection was so slow we gave up trying. We’ll try again tomorrow. Apparently some of the underground cables got cut by a boat and they are repairing it.
R
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