Zanzi"bore"

After finishing my Kilimanjaro hike and Tanzanian safari I was keen to get to the coast. I hadn't seen the ocean since leaving Canada in February. It was therefore with great anticipation that I departed by plane for the island of Zanzibar.

There is a lot of history to Zanzibar, having been a focal point for trade as far back as the 10th century. It was famous for its spice trade, infamous for its slave trade, and the place I'll always remember being at when I heard about the Dany Heatley trade. The Stone Town was quite interesting and there was a definite Arabic feel about the place. This was the first African town that I had been to which had some real character to it.

The beaches were postcard beautiful. The tide would go out several hundred metres and it was interesting to walk on the beach and watch the women tending their seaweed crops. Otherwise, there wasn't a whole lot to do. The beaches were dominated by Italian tourists on package trips who could really care less where they were as long as they could lay in the sun. Beautiful beaches don't hold my attention for very long so I ended-up doing a lot of reading.

While in Zanzibar I bumped into a VSO volunteer working there named Chris, whom I had meet during my training in England last January. Chris had previously spent 2 years in Tanzania with VSO, but didn't last long this time around as he had resigned from his position. A Ph.D in Marine Biology, Chris said that he had been given tasks which included picking-up garbage from the beach and checking-out snorkling equipment. He was close to arranging a new job directly with the Zanzibar government. He mentioned that quite a few of his VSO colleagues had either resigned or were discontent with their placements. Ironically, one person who was happy was the fellow working with the Tea Grower's Co-operative, a passed-on in taking my placement in Kenya. Oh well.