Zanzibar Part 2 of…2. Whoops.

As the title of my previous post suggested, I fully intended on posting several extensive posts on our trip to Zanzibar, but time is not on my side these days. So here's a brief overview of the rest of the midterm break trip to Zanzibar...

Zanzibar is famous for its local spices, so we went on a Spice Tour the second morning. What seemed like a boring activity on paper proved to be one of the highlights of our visit! A guide walked us around the grounds of a spice farm and let us try over 15 different spices, including ginger, pepper, lemongrass, vanilla, cinnamon, and the freaky looking one below.

Half-way through the spice tour, we stopped for chai (tea). The view of the farm was gorgeous and we drank the most delicious lemongrass tea. I just wish the teacup hadn't been baby sized.

On the morning of our third day, we went to Prison Island, which was only a 20-minute boat ride away from the mainland. The island is known for two things: prisons and tortoises. The Aldbra Tortoise below is over 100 years old. The tortoises were incredibly friendly as long as we fed them lettuce.

The skies cleared one night for a gorgeous sunset on the beach.


I wish I had the time and energy to write a novel about Zanzibar. It was an incredibly unique place, almost entirely different from Arusha in politics, culture, religion, architecture, and people... (no wonder Zanzibaris want to disintegrate from Tanganyika!). Violence has broken out on Zanzibar every election year since 2000, which seems contradictory to everything that I experience while I was there. The locals who we talked to were politically charged, but they all claimed to be peaceful people. The next elections are this October, so I will be keeping a close eye on them for the next year.

Admittedly, this post doesn't do justice to the trip, but I don't think a million pages could have measured up either.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

nahh dude. concise is good sometimes. i dig it.

-sheeeeeeeeeern


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