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Thursday, December 23, 1999: Zanzibar
What a day. We woke up early and retained a driver to take us to the southern part of the island to swim with dolphins and do a little snorkeling, then to hit the beach on the East end of the island.
It took about 90 minutes to get Mkunguni, driving through some very lush tropical jungle that including a few monkey sightings off to the side of the road. Mkunguni is a dirt-poor village at the southern end of the island, inhabited mostly by fishermen. We hired a boat at a restaurant, where we placed our order in advance. The boat was a simple wooden affair with no cover, which is about when we realized it was sunny and we forgot our sunblock. More on that later. The southern end of the island has some beautiful volcanic caves. Most of the shoreline is eroded about 10 feet into the rock creating an overhang of land and trees along the shoreline. It was low tide, so we walked through a few of these while wading across the tide pools to the boat. We found a school of dolphins about an hour later. It was a school of about 20 bottle-nosed dolphins, making their way away from the shore. We spent a half hour snorkeling with them. At one point, they were right under us, staring up and ogling the tourists. I wish we had brought an underwater camera.
Lunch was fried fish and chips, a fresh catch. So fresh, our driver decided to buy a 10-pounder along the shore. Ivonne asked him to hang it outside the van because of the smell, so we had a huge fish hanging from the van's rearview mirror for the rest of the drive. It was another 90 minutes across 30 miles of road that hasn't been grated in a quarter-century to get to Paje, on the West Coast. Paje was a burst of adrenaline into the lifeblood of an already exciting vacation. The beach was about 20 yards wide of white, talcum powder sand so fine you sank an inch or two into the beach with every step. The water was crystal clear, aquamarine. The shore was lined with palm trees. And for miles in every direction... no one. There were a couple of small hotels about a mile up, where a room could be had for less than $10. But otherwise, there was no one around. Our own, private tropical beach on the Indian Ocean. We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing, reading, walking along the beach and swimming. We spent 1/2 hour trying to figure out if it was a shark or a large fish about 100 yards away from our swimming area, but he didn't seem interested in us, so eventually we just ignored him.
We got back around sundown and spent about 1/2 hour wandering the city looking for a good place to have dinner. We settled on an old hotel down an alley off Gizenga Street. We were the only patrons in the hotel, though the dinner and service were above average.
Afterwards, we put Courtney and Zoe to sleep and went bar-hopping. Most of the bars in Zanzibar are mixed with both tourists and locals, though all played western pop music. Our first stop was a streetside bar with tables on the road. We had a visitor for about 15 minutes in the form of a very drunk African truck driver who struck up a conversation. We had to beat a hasty retreat after a while, and landed at the Africa House Hotel. The Africa House Hotel is a ruin on the first floor, with rubble and stone spread everywhere. We made our way down the center of the rubble by the light of a bare bulb to a staircase to the second floor. There, down another bare hallway, we got to the bar, which commanded an excellent view of the Indian Ocean. The bar was plain but very nice, loaded with backpackers and the odd prostitute around the bar. The bar was tended by a guy from Santa Monica whose name escapes me. The ladies left at around midnight, while David and I stayed past 2 a.m. in the morning, getting thoroughly rocked on Safari beer.
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After swimming for a while, we decided to head back. We thought about stopping at the reef, but we were pretty sunburned at this point, and the sunblock was in the van, so we decided to pass and head back to the restaurant for lunch. We were starving.
Paje's a place we need to go back to to unwind. It's isolated, beautiful, warm and relaxing just to think about. Unfortunately, we were sunburned before we got to Paje, so we spent most of our time in the shade. Next time: sunblock!
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