Amazing island called Zanzibar

Since last Thursday, there are a couple of friends from Warwick visiting Tanzania, and I had a chance to go to Zanzibar -a big-ish island off the coast of Dar es Salaam. Well, I kinda drugged them out of bed after a very heavy night out (not me sadly I had a bad migraine), but I think it was worth it!

My stay was actually quite short. We left Dar around 5pm on Saturday, on the smallest plane I've ever been on (probably not so so sooo small, but still it was cool), so I only had an evening and a Sunday to enjoy on the island.. but that was enough to make me fall in love with this island.

To those who like to know.. a short overview of Zanzibar.

Zanzibar is a fairly big, sometimes politically a little unstable island (Tanzania is a "united republic of" Tanzania and Zanzibar has its own parliament, president etc). Mainland of TZ used to be called Tanganyka and when it merged with Zanzibar in 1964, the country was re-named to be called TanZania :)

In the ooooold days, Zanzibar used to be a centre of trade between Africa (at least East Africa) and Middle East/Asia for centuries, and also was a main town of slave trade. So, although the religious composition on the mainland TZ is Christian 40% + Muslim 40% + other 20%, Zanzibar is under a much much stronger influence of Arabic culture.

Ah, gotta mention - Freddy Mercury was born in Zanzibar, moved out when he was still a kid though.

Well well, here are some pictures of Stone Town at night... unfortunately I couldn't spend enough time in Stone Town to take many good pictures.. but it's a good town to get lost, lots of very narrow, winding streets with exotic arabic door and lovely small shops... aw.


The last picture is the night food market - I don't know if it's there all-year-round, or if it's a special ramadan thing. There weren't too many variations of food, mostly food stalls of "zanzibar pizza" (kind of like galette.. I liked it very much), skewed meat/fish/other stuff or sugar cane juice.

Then on Sunday, we went up to the beach resort area in the Northern part of the island (about an hr+ drive away) and basically.. just chilled. What else can you do when you have such a beautiful beach and the sea in front of you??


Ok, from what I managed to do this weekend, it's hard to convince you all why I loved this island so much. But on top of lovely Stone Town and the amazing beach, there are other attractions like spice tour, swimming with dolphin, prison island (with lots of big turtles?), snorkeling, diving and so on (I'm pretty sure I'm missing something). I would happily do a biiiiig holiday on this island.

...But no, as I wasn't on holiday (unlike my friends I went there with), I had to take a night ferry (which was a 2nd-hand Japanese ship ie all the instructions and stuff were in Japanese) from Zanzibar to Dar.

Zanzibar, I'll be back.