A Weekend in Zanzibar

Wei and I arrived in Zanzibar at around half past eight on Friday evening. Our plane had left Nairobi earlier than scheduled: as soon as everyone was seated, it simply headed for the runway and took-off. It seems some African airlines – especially the smaller city-hoppers – are more flexible and informal than their big and unwieldy counterparts. With the half hour we had saved, we had ample time to go through all the formalities at Zanzibar airport. We were apparently the last plane to arrive that evening, so a particularly motivated staff member did his best to rush us through the process, telling us to skip entire sections of the visa application form and shepherding us from one booth to the next.

As Wei and I had not applied for visas beforehand, we applied and paid upon arrival. We had also been apprised that we would have to pay for special tourist insurance to visit Zanzibar, which was introduced this year to make even more money off tourists to the island (unexpectedly, our hotel also asked us to pay an eight-dollar city tax for our two nights there). Some fellow passengers had clearly not been informed of this and vainly tried to argue with the immigration staff that they already had their own travel insurance.

I visited Zanzibar’s Stone Town the following day. Wei – who was still recovering from her disappointment in Lamu – chose to go diving instead. As we had chosen a hotel on the eastern coast, the taxi ride to town took over an hour and cost the standard rate of forty dollars, which just about wiped out the savings I had made by not travelling solo. The sun had risen behind a veil of clouds, and the wind rushed across the beaches, but by the time I arrived in the city, the wind had died down, and occasional blue patches showed in the sky. As the day wore on, the sky cleared up almost entirely.

My first stop was the East Africa Slave Trade Museum, which is located in the old slave market of Zanzibar’s Stone Town. Interestingly, the old market building stands right next to the Anglican Cathedral, which can only be visited through the gate to the old slave market itself. The cathedral was founded in 1873, some forty years after slavery was abolished in the UK, but a fair length of time before slavery was extirpated in Zanzibar as well. Still, the idea behind the church’s construction was to celebrate the end of slavery, with the altar said to stand exactly where the whipping post of the market used to be.

From the cathedral, I began to muddle my way through the city. Google Maps shows less than half of all the narrow alleyways that exist in the Stone Town, so it is easy to take a wrong turn and end up in unexpected places. I came across many hole-in-the-wall shops for locals, which gave way to somewhat more self-conscious souvenir shops for tourists closer to major attractions. I also saw a lot of election posters along the streets and in various nooks and crannies. From what I could tell, the candidate for the green-coloured party decided to focus on the outskirts, while the purple party’s candidate targeted the city centre with his campaign.

The Jibril Mosque appeared to be closed when I showed up, as were the Persian Baths, which were under renovation. I walked into a neighbouring building thinking that perhaps there was something I could see behind the scenes from there, but it was yet another unused and gutted house. The next place I found to be open was Saint Joseph’s Cathedral. I hesitated to enter, as I was not sure the interior would be worth the entry fee, but my gamble paid off: the whole interior was colourfully decorated, with the pillar cornices painted light blue and the red arches covered in vibrant ornaments. The Cathedral, whose patron saint is Saint Joseph, was built by French missionaries in the 1890s and continues to serve the local Catholic community.

I was surprised that there was no ticketing office or indeed any fee to enter the Old Fort, undoubtedly one of the most important and iconic buildings in Zanzibar. The square-shaped fort was built in the seventeenth century by the Portuguese and rebuilt by the Omanis in the eighteenth, serving as a prison, a barracks, and a railway terminal in different eras. Nowadays, the grassy courtyard inside the building has a few souvenir stalls, and at least one of the towers serves as a souvenir gallery. The main and best-preserved tower in the compound houses an information bureau and opens onto the seaside boulevard called Mizingani, which I believe refers to the artillery that once used to line this shore. Six cannons still point towards the sea from the promenade.

After eating lunch at one of the seafront stalls, I continued north along the boulevard. The House of Wonders – the palace of second Zanzibar Sultan Barghash bin Said – was still covered in a sea of green tarpaulins despite years of renovations. Indeed, I have read that the tower of the palace fell during these renovations, and there is no indication that it is anywhere close to being rebuilt. The Sultan’s Palace next door was also closed, and a man sitting on a plastic chair by the sidewalk told me the only part that remained open was a small museum. He walked me to the museum’s door on the far side of the compound, but I became rather suspicious when he knocked on its closed wooden door to have it opened. After a few very long seconds, a sleepy man emerged from inside and told me – clearly after a moment’s deliberation – that the entry fee was twenty-five thousand shillings. I found it difficult to believe that such a small, provisionally set up museum could charge twenty-five thousand for entry, and when I told him so, he began to negotiate with me. I turned around and left.

One interesting fact about the Sultan’s Palace is that it was renamed to the “People’s Palace” following Zanzibar’s 1964 Revolution against Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah. There had been elections after the British left Zanzibar in 1963, but the Arab minority remained in power over the island’s predominantly black population. On the 12^th of January 1964, the revolutionary John Okello led several hundred men in an armed revolt against the government and succeeded in deposing it, after which the insurgents massacred thousands of Arabs and Indians living on the island. Shortly thereafter, Zanzibar negotiated a merger with the mainland territory of Tanganyika, forming the country we know today as Tanzania.

Once I had passed by the island’s Old Dispensary, I was practically done with my list of sites to visit in the old town. I stopped by the Friday Mosque and the Malindi Mosque and wandered around until I arrived by the Dawoodi Bohra Mosque, at which point there was nothing left that I wanted to see. I returned to the seafront, where I had been approached by multiple taxi drivers just a few moments before, and sure enough, I quickly found a person to take me back to Paje. Since I still had a lot of time, however, I asked him if we could first make a stop at Jozani Forest, which I had originally intended to visit the following day.

Jozani Forest is notable for its large population of Zanzibar red colobus monkeys, a subspecies endemic to the island and classified as endangered by the IUCN, with only around six thousand individuals remaining. At the park, however, a tourist might form quite a different impression. Red colobus monkeys frequent the area around the visitor centre, no doubt because they eat trash left behind by humans, as do the many Sykes monkeys that live there. Having spotted a few monkeys early on during my guided walk, the guide took it easy and slowly walked me around the forest pointing out various trees and plants. When we were done in that section, he joined me in the car and asked the driver to take us to the nearby mangrove forest, where he went on explaining the island’s plant life while ambling along the boardwalk. The whole guided tour took rather longer than I had expected, and I thought it best to give my driver a tip for waiting.

Our second day in Zanzibar was not very busy. In the morning, Wei went kitesurfing while I walked along the beach, and in the afternoon, we made a trip to the island’s turtle cave. The visit was shorter than we had expected. We were each given a plastic box of seaweed to feed the turtles, after which we descended a flight of very steep steps onto a platform in the cenote-like cave. We gave away our seaweed very quickly and spent the next time watching the yellow weaver birds wondering what the whole fuss was about. Neither of us really wanted to swim with the turtles: Wei was afraid that they would bite her, and I did not want to get my clothes wet before my flight. We arrived in Zanzibar’s Stone Town earlier than we had planned, so we had a drink and walked through the town before eating dinner and catching a tuk-tuk to the airport.