The trip to Zanzibar, although long, was reasonable enough, and aside from four hours spent (as probably the only haram dhimmi kafir infidel types in a surreal windowless Nairobi airport basement sleeping lounge — $42 for four hours — thoroughly uneventful. The only real excitement came when we learned Kenya Airways had lost Karin’s suitcase.
As it turned out, this is a routine event, judging by the three other furious tourists at Zanzibar airport, the researcher at the Kenya Airways office in Stone Town, and the Canadian couple on our flight to Arusha who had all seen their luggage vanish at some point during their trip (twice in a row, in the case of the livid Irish couple stomping about outside the lost luggage office.) Dozens of phone calls and a trip back to the airstrip finally yielded results after three days of effort, along with the discovery that bags are regularly shoved aside somewhere when one of the handlers is slightly confused about their tags.
While I wish we hadn’t wasted the hours trying to track down the damn thing, we eventually got it, and still had a chance to do a reasonable amount of exploring around Stone Town in the three short days we spent there. The city is an in-your-face explosion of culture and color, mixing (mainly) Muslims, Hindus, and Christians, between black Africans, Arabs, and Indians, as well as the usual complement of confused-looking tourists, unwashed backpackers, and the occasional expat causing wide-eyed surprise among the locals with the fact that yes, mzungu knows Swahili.
Photography in the city was a little bit intimidating, as we had been enjoined by numerous people to always ask permission before taking anyone’s picture — something I try to do anyway. I gather that the usual developed-country tenets of particularly elbowy, assertive photographers that “it’s a public space, so you’re fair game” wouldn’t apply here anyway. I was told “no” a number of times, so hooray for telephoto lenses and long distance snapshots. Discretion is the better part of valor, after all. And no point in being torn to bits by an irate indigenous crowd, not that I could really imagine the locals ever putting together much of a credible lynch mob. I would have loved a shot of some of the muslim men at prayer, and could possibly have pulled it off with a bit of nice-like wheedling, but in any case, I’m too chickenshit to bother.
From our beautiful top floor room at the old Emerson & Green hotel (now 236 Hurumzi), with a view of the city and harbor, we regularly heard the muezzin calling to prayer (at least 4 times a day), church bells, the enthusiastic clanging of Hindu prayer bells — the stout, sari-clad women who ring these make an enthusiastic racket vastly out of proportion to their small numbers, and miscellaneous shouts, crows, drums, cats, Vespa horns, and other noise. Not to forget, of course, the gay Dutch couple with the tower room across from ours, professing loudly to each other that “you look as sexy from the inside as from the outside.” It probably wasn’t very nice of me to yell “TOT ZIENS, DOEI” out the window before we left the first evening, but it did at least remove that mildly disturbing mental image for the rest of our stay.
Next to the rooftop dinner at our hotel, with its spectacular 360 degree view (interesting during breakfast, when the wind blew away chunks of my omelette — never seen that before) and the Monsoon by the harbor, food was pretty rich at the Forodhani market night food court. A hard-core Rastafarian barker piled a towering mix of brochettes, chickpea balls, bready thingies and other “stuff” on a paper plate, performing some quick mental random number theory to calculate the bill. A contact of mine had recommended we “enjoy the market, but avoid the fish”, so no matter how much the giant grilled octopus tentacles tempted us, we couldn’t help but combine his caution with the heaps of the day’s catch we’d seen glistening in the sun at the Darajani market that afternoon and stick with something a bit less potentially harmless.
The Rastafarian above, by way of note, was frequently about town on his mountain bike, sporting a little backpack and wraparound shades, with a chubby, tanned, Northern European blonde college girl type clinging to him. While he was friendly enough at the food market, his sneering treatment of his girl-toy brought to mind the most stereotypical pimps-and-hos c’mere-bitch 1970s blaxploitation films imaginable. Good times. Whatever floats your holiday boat, I suppose.
The market itself is a good sight, and had there been a bit more sun, the photos I took there might not rely so much on adding some color saturation in post processing to make them look as bright and happy as what you see in picture books of Zanzibar. Then again, the smell from the seafood and meat sections would probably have been really overpowering. The fruits and spices here are outstanding, though, something that was confirmed to us during a tour of a cooperative spice plantation our first morning in Zanzibar. We paid extra, on the assurance from online reviews that our agency actually supported some worthwhile causes with the cash as opposed to the numerous touts who advertise such tours, and our guide was a good type anyway, so money well spent. From what our hotel’s portly Canadian manager, a longtime resident of the island, told me, everything having to do with government and official infrastructure is so rotten and corrupt anyway, that a few dollars extra to support good service and entrepreneurship are just fine.
Apparently the corruption is one of the main factors preventing greater investment in Stown Town’s crumbling architectural legacy; since a lot of the old Indian and Omani merchant houses are built from coral, failure to maintain the roofs leads to the walls becoming sodden with rain, resulting in the unfortunate collapse of these beautiful houses. More than one open space in the otherwise densely packed old quarter was obviously the sad outcome of such neglect. Since many of the large buildings were expropriated from their wealthy Omani and Indian owners, who were often sent packing in the 1960s, lucky to get out with their lives.
I had the privilege of watching a Hindu religious service at the temple (whose entrance, while well concealed, nonetheless sported several large “WELCOME, COME IN” signs) on Hurumzi Street; a highly welcoming elderly Indian gentleman explained that only about 400 Hindus remained on Zanzibar, active in two temples, after the persecutions and expulsions in the 1960s and 70s. All this despite the oft-proclaimed citation of the presence of Hindus as an example of the island’s religious and cultural diversity. Our hotel was once actually the residence of one of the more prosperous Indians in Zanzibar — before it was rebuilt by its founders, after expropriation and application of a few years of revolutionary economic planning, I assume. Likewise, many buildings were confiscated and turned into tenements for large numbers of poor peasants under misguided social equality programs.
According to the Hurumzi manager, restoring them is a major pain in the ass, since, in addition to innumerable palms that demand greasing, every single tenant has to be individually bought out, and inordinately, unrealistically severe historical restrictions apply to what can be done to old houses. Assuming, that is, that thats not something that can be solved through a bit of baksheesh in the proper quarters. With a lot of tourism development potential, mixed in with the corruption, I can easily imagine that hotel operators will opt for the “easy” way out of just bribing a few officials to build sprawling resorts on the coast rather than investing in navigating the tricky process of really turning the city into the jewel it should be.
236 Hurumzi Hotel
236 Hurumzi St.
P.O. Box 3417
Stone Town, Zanzibar, TZ
+255 (0) 77 742 3266
www.zanzibar.org/236hurumzi_hotel
Monsoon Restaurant
Opposite Forodhani Gardens
Stone Town, Zanzibar, TZ
Eco & Culture Tours
Hurumzi St.
P.O. Box 1390
Stonetown, Zanzibar, TZ
+255 (0) 242 233 731
www.ecoculture-zanzibar.org
