A group of five of us traveled together to Zanzibar for the week right after the Mombasa CST. I think the flight was under an hour, although the visa process was slow. I was annoyed to see that my visa which I got in advance from the Tanzanian Consulate was only good for six months, but the one at the border was good for a year. Both cost an insane one hundred US dollars. Here we are at the Mombasa airport walking to our plane:
We stayed at a hostel on the eastern side of Zanzibar Island in Stone Town, which is like a much more beautiful Mombasa Old Town. The place was crawling with tourists and their money, and as a result is in better shape than Mombasa. A nice ocean view, nice restaurants, a semi-authentic nightly fish market/BBQ aimed at tourists, etc. The town also features really ornamental woodwork, especially on all the doors and doorframes. Mombasa in general doesn’t have wooden doors, as termites are such a big problem, so that was nice to see. Zanzibar apparently is known for its spices, so our first tour as tourists: the Zanzibar Spice Tour! Here we are eating food (with lots of spices in it) at the end of the tour.
The tour also took us into a slave cave, where the sultan or someone like that used to keep slaves. The tour guide spent most of the time talking about a magical talking snake so I’m not sure about the real details.
In Zanzibar, they use donkeys to pull carts… ingenious! In Mombasa I see carts just like this all the time, but they’re always pulled by men.
Zanzibar has matatus much like Mombasa, but additionally it has dalah-dalahs (which I’m probably misspelling), which you can see below. They’re small lorries with improvised bench seating.
There were also a lot of bicycles and motor scooters trying to hit us all the time, but no tuk-tuks. Anyhow, for the second half of the trip we stayed on the west side of the island at a small resort hotel. Check it out:
I ate a lot of seafood while in Zanzibar, but now I’m back in Mombasa and Ramadan has started, which I’m considering observing, at least by not eating when the sun is up. Many of my friends and coworkers here are Muslim, so if nothing else it would be best to be respectful and not gorge myself with giant lunches in restaurants, although from what I hear many of them will be closed anyway. It will be interesting to see how this affects day-to-day life.
Lastly, I alluded to some possible opportunities for me before the next term starts. During CST it was recommended that I help out the team who is developing the as-yet-unveiled Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) portion of the giant Kenyan standardized tests (the KCPE and KCSE), which I previously wrote about critically (but diplomatically) here. If this pans out it would mean a trip or multiple trips to Nairobi, I am unsure as to exactly what I’ll be doing, maybe just some tech consulting, but it’s right up my alley so I’m excited to be doing anything with it at all!