Zanzibar 2010

So the day has finally arrived, I'm meeting Helen at Dar airport today and then flying on to Zanzibar, can't wait. I'm feeling a little weary as I was up late last night celebrating Alisdair's birthday with Ben, Marte and Rosie. All VSOs other than Marte who is a diplomat with the Norwegian gvt and Ben's girlfriend. They are taking the train to Dar and the ferry over to Zanzibar so will be there roughly the same time as us. So I was little taken aback to see them in the cafe at the airport. It turns out that those kindly chaps at Tazara for no reason had decided to cancel the train. So after a bit of a mad dash they'd managed to get to Lusaka airport and get a couple of seats on my flight. So a few texts later Helen has managed to get them seats on the Dar to Zanzibar flight an we're all set.
Sadly the taxi driver booked wasn't waiting for us but we managed to score a deal with Omar who took us to "Red Monkey" in Jambiani our first stop.



It's a little run down but boasts a fabulous spot on the beach and our bungalow has uninterrupted views up and down the beach. This end of the beach is where Jambiani village is so we see a lot of fishermen action and get the local kids running around screaming and playing footy on the beach, which is great fun most of the time except earlymorning...



The first day was beautiful but short lived... the rain set in for a few days with brief spots of sunshine to tease us. Mind you when it rains it really does so at least the weather was quite exciting. Although frankly, it didn't really matter it was just great to be together again after 3 months. We spent 6 nights in Jambiani, the highlight being coming 3rd in the Pub quiz competition held at Coral Rock (Local Resort) and won free shooters, sadly with some pretty revolting names. From there we moved on to the Dhow Inn at Paje beach.



The Dhow Inn is a rather fancy boutique hotel with just 6 roomsbuilt around a courtyard, it's about 50m from the beach but has a pool to make up for it. The only problem we had here was that on Saturday night a bunch of students turned up at midnight to start a party, planned to go on til 6am. THere was a time I'd have welcomed this but sadly nowadays I'm the grumpy old git who needs his sleep (I know...) so after a number of polite requests failed to quell the excitement I let out Mr Angry which did the trick and closed the party down. To be fair it was 4am by then so I think they got a fair crack. We got a free dinner out of it so not a complete lost cause. The weather brightened up here and we had some rain free days.

By the time we got to Stonetown the weather was perfect, typical now we've left the beach. After a stroll around and a bit of shopping we end up at the Africa House Hotel for sundowners.





We stayed at the Southern Sun in Dar for our last night and had dinner next to "Tatiana" the runner up of Big Brother Africa and her entourage of flunkies which was entertaining. It seems that D list celebs act the same all over the world.
It's tough saying goodbye, on the positive side in another 10wks we'll be together for 3 months.