We arrived back in Stone Town and in the Abdalla Guest House to a familiar sight – fading light, hurricane lamps, and increasingly sweaty air as time went on. I surprised myself again by being happy to be back in Stone Town, however much I'd liked Bwejuu and its laid-back and let's-do-nothing atmosphere. We planned a big day out for tomorrow, aiming to go to the Jozani Forest Natural Reserve to try to see the Zanzibar Red Colobus Monkey, one of Africa's rarest.
Changuu Island's dock sees much traffic these days The plan was grand, and the follow-through was terrible – we got up late, went to send some emails, bought postcards, wrote them, sent them, and then looked at the time and realised that it was utterly pointless going to Jozani. It would have to wait until tomorrow. I suddenly started feeling tired and told M that I needed a nap, and she said she would go into the centre and find a cafe and go to read a book. We arranged a place to meet up again in a few hours.
During this few hours, something revolutionary happened that the awoken M witnessed and the happily snoozing me missed – the electricity came back on !! I came out of my slumber to see a radically changed Stone Town – people out on the streets at night, sitting in squares eating and socialising which they wouldn't have done in the darkness of the previous 3 months. I got to our meeting point and M told me that kids had been running around laughing and screaming in the streets as the light came out, banging plastic bottles together with joy. It seems this was a moment the entire island was waiting for. I wandered off to the meeting point in a rooftop cafe, ordered a beer, and the electricity promptly cut off, to moans and cries of despair from outside. “Tonight is only a test”, we were told. “They'll switch it on again tomorrow”. Zanzibar spent another night plunged in darkness.
Next morning brought more expectation and hope for Zanzibaris, but for us it brought day trips. We'd been to an agency to book some boat to Changuu Island (which, of course, is world famous for its population of Aldabra Tortoises) and left land around 9. Our guide rattled off a few facts about Changuu before mentioning in a rather insisting way about how he didn't get paid much and relied on tips from tourists to feed his wife and kids, and brother and sisters, hint hint wink wink, but aside from that he was a relaxed and friendly guy who took us around the tortoise sanctuary on Changuu (the only island in the world outside the Seychelles where you can see these tortoises, the second largest in the world after the Galapagos Tortoises) before sailing us off to a reef and seeing us overboard armed with flippers, masks and snorkels for a touch more of snorkelling. I'm not much of a fish expert so I can't get too overexcited about seeing this or that fish but it's always a bit of fun, and we saw a couple of purple starfish lazing around on the coral. That fun, it turned out, was the beginning of a problem. Before realising that, however, we went an hour's drive away on the dalla-dalla to Jozani Forest which, true to form, we arrived at 10 minutes before closing time. This being Africa though, we were greeted at the gate by a worker there who said that he was very sorry that we had arrived too late but that if we really wanted to go we could pay overtime wages for a guide to show us around which, having come all this way, we agreed to. Ten minutes later, we ended up with this very same guy as a guide. Africa Wins Again!
M successfully avoids snakebites
It's Africa's rarest monkey. Apparently.
We got a quick tour of the place where we saw a snake which they called a “forest cobra” due to its habit of lifting its head up high when it feels threatened (and our guide attacked it with a stick Steve-Irwin-style to illustrate his point, as you do) and saw an elephant shrew wandering throuh the trees. “Now, we can go and see the monkeys” said the guide. “But they are on the other side of the main road, so we will cross over and go to look for them”. It seemed that even he was surprised when, about 50 metres into the forest on the other side of the main road, we bumped into a huge troupe of these Zanzibar Red Colobus monkeys, swinging around the trees, eating fruits and occasionally dropping the remains on us, leading to hilarious consequences when one of them fell on M's glasses. “They are showing off for you! You are very lucky!” our man in the forest said. And so it seemed – they'd jump between the trees in front of us, follow us, hang upside from their tails and stare at us, whatever they could to impress the wazungu who had never seen such monkeys before! The forest was also home to troupes of Blue Monkeys and these two species seemed to take joy in wrestling with each other. We watched them for about half an hour before another shower of fruit fell upon us and we decided that maybe it was time to hop back to Stone Town. We stepped back onto the road, and our guide in the forest said he'd come with the dalla-dalla back to town as soon as he'd got changed. We stood around for a bit and he came back out, as we told him that dalla-dallas hadn't gone past yet. “No problem, something is coming” he said. It was a private pick-up, but he flagged it down anyway. And hence for the first time since Sudan, we hitched a lift on the back of a Hilux! The guys were taking firewood from Paje to Stone Town and happily gave a lift back but dropped us off on the outskirts of Zanzibar Town. We decided to walk the 45 minutes back into town.
The road to sunburn...By now, M's sunburn from the snorkelling adventure had intensified to a point where she wasn't too happy carrying a bag and after half an hour, when Stone Town was still not in sight, she suggested we take a dalla-dalla. “Sure”, I said, and after a minute or so one came past, touting for business. We waved it down, it screeched to a halt, and I walked off towards the door to ask the ticket guy where he was heading. At some point, however, I realised that my legs were up in the air and that I heading towards a ditch. As I landed in the ditch I turned around to realise that I'd been hit by a motorbike which had missed M by a whisker, crashed into the back of the dalla-dalla and then bounced off and hit me, leaving an irate rider, the jerrycans he was carrying scattered over the road, and me with a dead leg wandering what the hell was going on. As I clambered out I ended up in the middle of a one-sided shouting match with the motorbike rider screaming at the dalla-dalla boy, who was just trying to scoop us through the door and optimistically explaining “there's no problem, let's go”. Africa Wins Again! We got in, and got to Stone Town without any further trouble...
M meets a relative That night was supposed to see our final departure from Zanzibar but the “Spice Islands” played their final trick on us – M was feeling a bit rough after her encounter with the African midday sun, and didn't fancy taking the overnight ferry back to Dar es Salaam. “It's OK, you can take the fast boat at 9.30 tomorrow, you will be in Dar by midday!”. This was useful as we'd arranged to meet another 1% Fund project guy, Adam, in Dar early next day. We had dinner and went to find another place to crash for the night. 8.30 came, we dragged ourselves down to the port, and asked for 9.30 ferry tickets. “But there is no 9.30 ferry today... there is one at 12.45 though!”. Great. More sitting around with bags (although this did involve a great burger for me and a big salad for M so hey, who's complaining?) and we charged up to the pier for the boat which was waiting for us at 12.30. “This is not your boat. Yours is not here yet.” Africa Wins Again!
A bit over an hour later we were off, with me frantically dishing out text messages to Adam, keeping him up to date with our situation. Our minds were put at ease by the fact that our ferry had a showing of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”, but within two and a half hours we were on the road again, as Adam had told us that he was waiting for us at the main bus station about 10km out of town. We hoped to get there and hop on a bus to Handeni where the project was based. Unfortunately we landed in an enormous traffic jam caused by (as we eventually found out) a bus which had ploughed into the back of a minibus, and these 10km took us well over an hour to cover. We met Adam, realised that there were no buses to Handeni left, and tried to look for a place to stay. We apologised profusely to Adam, especially given that he'd taken time off work and left his base in Morogoro very early that morning and had been waiting for us at the bus station for about seven hours due to our repeated disasters. “Oh, it's fine, don't worry about it!” he said, without a hint of sarcasm. “I know how it goes with these connections, traffic jams, boats, buses... it's no problem at all...”. We'd have to spend the night in Dar es Salaam and take a bus up to Handeni the next morning. My mind floated off for a second as I thought about how a European would react to waiting seven hours for someone to show up. Africa Wins Again – The Flipside!
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