South Luangwa Game Park

South Luangwa really is an out-of-this-world kind of place. As everyone hung around waiting for dinner last night a wild elephant wandered by swinging his tail and going about his business, completely oblivious to the crowd of us staring at him the whole way along. At around midnight I woke up in my tent to sound of a wild hippo munching on some grass nearby. I sat up with my nose pressed against the mesh window of the tent and watched the hippo as he slowly walked closer. Soon a few other hippos joined him, one of which walked directly in front of the tent door only a few feet from where I was sitting. After a few more hours of sleep I woke to the sound another giant hippo chomping, snorting, and grunting. I stared at him as he grazed directly outside the window. Elbie the tour guide fixed breakfast just after sunrise, then shouted at us when it was time to put everything away. “Hey guys, the monkeys is awake!!!”

The weather was perfect for an early morning safari. Robbie, our Zambian driver for the day, took myself and eight others for a four hour game drive along the wide, brown, Luangwa River. Besides several exotic birds, we also spotted herds of golden baboons, several giraffes, lazy hippos cooling themselves in the water, a few cape buffalo, some warthogs, and plenty of impala.One of the great things about South Luangwa is that it feels like it really is in the middle of nowhere. South Luangwa isn't nearly as crowded as the Serengeti. The narrow, bumpy dirt roads are just wide enough to accomodate a safari vehicle, but not so wide that the place feels civilized. The scenery is very different too. Whenever I've thought of Africa in the past I always have envisioned the tall yellow grasses and scraggly green acacia trees that are so common in the Serengeti, but South Luangwa isn't the Serengeti. Some parts of the park were filled with leafy green vegetation and could almost be described as lush. Also, the Luangwa River supports an entire eco-system that isn't found quite the same way in Tanzania. The fact that the river is home to hundreds of hippos that feed on the grassy banks during the night time is also great for anyone lucky enough to be camping nearby.More wild elephants kept us company during lunch today. A couple of large males and one younger, smaller elephant wandered through the trees at the campsite, yanking at the branches and shoving trunkfuls of leaves into their mouths.Halfway through another four hour safari this afternoon we stopped on the bank of the Luangwa river and had a few refreshments as the sun set behind black sillouettes of the African bush. Hippos honked and splashed behind me as I sipped an ice-cold orange Fanta and enjoyed the view with a few others. The final two hours of the safari tonight were a “Night Drive”. Robbie rallied the Land Cruiser over the dusty South Luangwa terrain as his Zambian assistant flashed a spotlight on the ground and in the trees looking for animals. For most of the night we saw nothing but herds of impalas and hippos who had climbed out of the river to graze, but on our way back to Flatdogs we hit the jackpot. A pride of eight lions made a great sighting to finish to the day. For several minutes we watched lion cubs play and tumble over each other as a few lionesses and one very lazy male lion laid around beside them. A few of the lions snuck up on a herd of impala that was gathered nearby, then quickly closed in and darted after them. Unfortunately we didn't see a kill, but as the lions wandered off afterwards Robbie drove after them. We followed the pride until coming to the dirt road back to Flatdogs, then watched them slowly walk off into the darkness.

Flatdogs

Visiting the Serengeti two weeks ago was an amazing experience for me and it more than lived up to my expectiations for spotting wild game in Africa. Since leaving the Serengeti I've heard from several people that the South Luangwa Park in Zambia is even more impressive. The itinerary of the Gap tour includes a safari in South Luangwa, so I was very excited today to drive to the park, set up camp, and prepare for a full day game drive tomorrow.

In the past I've heard of campsites in Africa where the wild animals live nearby and often wander right through the camp. I didn't know where any of those camps were or if they really existed at all until our truck pulled into “Flatdogs” this afternoon.

After several hours of enduring dirt roads with lumps in them the size of ski moguls, the truck passed by a few elephants and a giraffe only a few hundred feet away. Everyone jumped out of their seats to get a good look but Henk, our driver, kept on rumbling right past them. Our tour guide spoke up and said that we had just arrived at Flatdogs and that elephant and giraffe sightings are very common here. When the truck stopped we got out to set up our tents as a small herd of elephants grazed in the brush only twenty or thrity feet away from us. One of the elephants wandered closer towards us into the camp and everyone backed off very slowly, careful not to offend the giant wild creature. Later on, as we ate lunch, wild baboons created a ruckus behind us and chased each other off into the trees.Flatdogs sits on the South bank of the Luangwa River, which runs through the center of the park and is filled with wild hippos and crocodiles. After lunch I wandered down to the bank of the river with a few other people from the tour group. An African man paddled a canoe in the distance and fat hippos made occasional splashes in the water and laid low to cool themselves. One hippo let out a sudden honk and the river quickly erupted with the sounds of many other hippos honking and splashing.Tomorrow's full-day safari includes a couple of game drives interspersed by guided walks through the brush. At night I'll ride through the reserve in a jeep equiped with infrared lights to spot nocturnal animals. There are a few things that I'd really like to experience before I leave Africa. Of the famous “Big Five”, I've already seen rhinos, elephants, buffalo, and lions, but I still haven't spotted any leopards. That would be a nice thing to see. I'd also like to see a cheetah or a lion make a kill, and if it's not too much to ask, I want to ride in safari vehicle while it gets chased by an angry elephant. I don't know how much of that is reasonable to expect, but either way, I'm sure the safari will be worthwhile tomorrow. I'll cross my fingers and hope for a very belligerant elephant.

Lilongwe

This morning we had another incredible sunrise. I headed out to the beach after packing up my stuff and spent fifteen or twenty minutes enjoying the view and snapping a few pictures. Something about the arrangement of the light and the clouds here creates the most amazing scenery. Every once in a while I'll see a sunrise or a sunset back home like the ones in Africa, but never two in a row that are as impressive as the ones during the last couple of days. I wonder if it has something to do with the climate or the atmosphere here. Or maybe I've just been getting really lucky.

Today was another long one on the road. We left Kande Beach just after 7:00 and headed towards Lilongwe, Malawi's largest city, on our way to the Zambian border. In Lilongwe we stopped near a couple of strip malls and two small grocery stores so everyone could stock up on whatever they might need for the last week of the tour. The intersection we were at looked like a run-down version of something you might see in the middle of West Valley, but when I asked our tour guide about it she said it was the center of the city. It's almost hard to imagine that such a place is the largest commercial center of an entire country, but then again, Malawi is the poorest country in Africa. All I can say is that the center of Lilongwe is a far cry from Wall Street, Times Square, or even West Valley.

After many hours on very bumpy African roads, we finally arrived at the Zambian border. Depending on the nationality of a visitor to Zambia, a visa might cost $45, $55, or it might even be free. Since I happen to be from the United States I got the American discount - my visa cost $135. I looked that up online months ago and I knew it was coming, so it really wasn't a big deal, but it's still a little frustrating.

We finally arrived at camp after dark and had a quick dinner before calling it a night. Burning a whole day on the road is a little draining, but I did get to see a whole lot of African landscape. I guess there are a lot of different ways to experience Africa. After three weeks of driving through Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia, I think I'll feel like I've had a very legitimate overland trip here.

Kande Village

One of my favorite ways to get to know the local culture while I'm traveling is to visit a small village and see how things are done away from all the tourist sights. That can be a little tricky while on a three-week long guided tour, but fortunately there have been a few opportunities to see that.

This morning I walked with the other people on the Gap tour to Kande Village, nearby our campground. It's interesting to see how things are done so differently in every country in Africa even though the countries really aren't that far apart. In the United States communication and transportation are so efficient that regional cultures seem to spread quickly and get diffused into each other. I think that's less common in Africa. Big cities are more or less the same everywhere, but as far as villages go, what I saw in Ethiopia was very different from what I saw in Tanzania, and what I saw in Tanzania was different than what I saw today in Malawi.A local man from Kande Village led us past small houses made of orange clay bricks and into the center of the village. To begin our tour he showed us some cassava drying in the sun. Cassava is a vegetable that is grown in huge quantities by villagers in Malawi and it makes up a large part of their diet. The stuff is gleaming white and looks like giant pieces of shredded coconut. Hopefully it doesn't taste as bad as it smells. When we approached a large canvas covered with drying cassava the stench was so overpowering that one lady commented that one of the local kids must have messed his pants. At first I wanted to try some but after smelling the stuff I couldn't quite bring myself to do it. Maybe it's an acquired taste.The local men in Kande Village have given themselves nicknames that they use in place of their given African names. Our local tour guide introduced himself as “Banjo”, his self-proclaimed twin brother was named “Mel Gibson”, and one of the others who bragged about his incredible talent for wooing women called himself “Mr. Smooth”. Banjo led the entire group into his small home as part of the tour. Of course the house was nothing like those found in developed countries, but it actually was a lot nicer than I thought it would be. The exterior walls were made of clay bricks, the house sat on a concrete foundation, and there were even a few old chairs and a wooden table inside. If not for the roof made of thatched palm leaves the thing could almost pass as a legitimate building.The tour concluded with visits to a local school and a small clinic. The school was in a tiny brick building not much bigger than Banjo's house, and for each teacher there were over one hundred students. I spent a few minutes visiting with some kids from one of the classes and looking over some exams that were laying on a desk. I was surprised how advanced a lot of the questions were. The particular tests I was looking at were math tests and the problems were every bit as difficult as tests I'd expect to see in elementary schools in the United States. Unfortunately I also noticed that most of the scores were below 25% - not too great for a multiple choice test with four possible answers for each question.

After a short visit to the clinic where about fifty pregnant women were waiting to be tested for AIDS we all decided that it was time to head back to camp. The village was very interesting, but it was also a very overwhelming experience. Each of us had been assigned a personal tour guide that walked with us the entire time and tried to make conversation. Giving each tourist a guide was a nice gesture by the village, but the guides were constantly making sales pitches for cheap handmade souveniers, short fishing trips, or anything else that they could conceiveably offer. Also, hoards of young kids followed the group and even though they were very cute and very nice, they also demanded a lot of attention. The combination of the sales pitches and the crowds of kids was pretty draining for everyone even though we hadn't yet finished the tour.

Visiting places so affected by poverty always leaves me with mixed feelings. It's interesting for me to see places like Kande Village for myself, but it also leaves me frustrated that there is very little anyone can do to really solve the problems there. Many of the kids wrote their addresses on scraps of paper and gave them to tourists so they could send them money or school supplies, but it's debatable whether sending the things would really help. I'm of the opinion that donating to a reputable charity is much more effective in the long run than trying to contribute to a single individual or small group of people.

Later today I went on another dive with “Aqua Nuts”. The dive master today took me to an old rusty safari vehicle that was sunk by the dive company and is lying fifty feet down on the floor of the lake. We also saw a few crabs and, of course, hundreds of colorful African ciclids.

Lake Malawi

The sunrise at Chitimba beach this morning was incredible. I woke up at around 6:00 and laid in my sleeping bag for a few minutes until I noticed the colors of the sky outside the tent window. I couldn't see the horizon because some palm trees were in the way, but even high above the trees I could see bright red and orange rays reflecting off the clouds. I grabbed my camera and hurried out to the coast and it easily was one of the most amazing sunrises I've ever seen. I've heard great things about African sunrises and sunsets and until today I hadn't seen one that really lived up to that reputation. Hopefully I'll see a few more before leaving Africa two weeks from now, but even if that's the only really good one I'm pretty satisfied.After a couple of hours of driving this morning we stopped at a clothing market in a town called Mzuzu. The market was filled mostly with tiny kiosks selling shoes, underwear, and men's dress clothing, but also had a few selling cheap electronics or fried potatoes. The market really amounted to a giant outdoor thrift shop. Some of the stores were selling cheap new items, but most of what was there looked like it had been used before; probably in more developed nations. I saw a lot of well-worn backpacks and shoes with Korean writing on them and a lot of items that looked like they could have come from the US or from Europe. I've heard before that a lot of donations to thrift shops end up being sent to developing countries, but it was still surprising to wander around the market and realize that this is where it all ends up. I saw one really random thing at the clothing market today - a Malawian man wearing a beat-up black fleece with text that read “Salt Lake 2002” and the accompanying olympic logo.

About an hour after leaving Mzuzu we made a quick stop at a rubber tree plantation. Hundreds of rows of tall brown rubber trees covered the landscape and scrapes along the trunks of the trees showed where sap had been drained to make rubber. I took a short walk into the plantation with a few other people from the truck and watched as an African kid made a cut into the trunk of one of the trees and stuck a small implement into the end of the cut to drain the sap into a bowl. While visiting the plantation I couldn't help but wonder how Malawi could possibly dig itself out of the economic pit that it's in right now. The country is the poorest in Africa and has very little means of supporting itself partly because it has sold the rights to most of it's natural resources to foreign investors to pay off old debts. Enterprises like the rubber plantation may be all that the country has left to support itself. There are so many people unemployed in Malawi yet so much work that needs to be done to improve the country's infrastructure and standard of living. It seems that the real missing link is the lack of money to bring in raw materials and other necessary supplies.

Back when I was 12 or 13 one of my favorite hobbies was setting up aquariums in my room and filling them with colorful, exotic freshwater fish. The fish occasionally got neglected and the aquariums smelled, but I loved them anyway and was determined to keep them until a few years later when I realized my bedroom was much better off without them. I learned from Dan Kimball that the most colorful and most ferocious freshwater fish, which we both had, were called African ciclids and came from someplace in Africa that neither of us knew much about at the time. A couple of years back when I learned that the fish come from Lake Malawi, I dreamed of diving in the lake someday and seeing the fish in the wild for myself. Today I had the chance to do that.

This afternoon we pulled up to our campsite at Kande Beach on Lake Malawi and I headed straight to the nearby dive shop, Aqua Nuts Divers, to arrange a couple of dives. Thirty-five bucks was all it took to rent all the necessary equipment and head out to a dive site at a small island in the lake with a South African dive master named Johann. Johann and I suited up and descended about fifty feet into the cool green water below the island. Ciclids are everywhere in Lake Malawi. Within minutes I saw hundreds of the fish, most of which were much bigger and more colorful than ciclids I've seen in any home aquarium. It was interesting for me to see the fish behave much the same way as the ones that I used to have in my own room. In any given area at the bottom of the lake there was usually one dominant male that was very territorial and chased away any other fish invading his space. The floor of the lake was covered with several sandy craters that the fish had built for breeding purposes. For nearly an hour I swam along the giant rocks lining the lakebed and passed by hundreds of brightly colored ciclids. Diving in Lake Malawi today almost made me want to set up a few aquariums all over again.

Chitimba Beach

I pulled myself out of my sleeping bag at 4:00 this morning, had a quick breakfast and packed up my tent, then piled into the truck with the 21 others on the Gap tour and headed for Malawi. I've heard a lot of great things about Malawi over the last few years and I've really looked forward to coming here. While getting my scuba diving certification in Koh Tao, Thailand in 2006 I talked to a Belgian kid who had been traveling for seven years, over a year of which was spent in Malawi. I listened in awe as he told me about living for several months in a guesthouse which the owners had left for him to manage while vacationing in Europe. The guesthouse was at the top of a cliff and he'd spend hours watching large birds circle overhead and wild animals wander hundreds of feet below. Malawi seemed like such an obscure, out-of-the-way place to me back then. I never imagined that within two years I'd visit the country myself.

Our South African tour guide, Elbie, told us that Malawi is the poorest country in Africa but also has the happiest, most laid-back people in Africa. So far that has turned out to be a pretty accurate description. The truck pulled into Chitimba Campground on the shore of Lake Malawi at 1:00 this afternoon and after having lunch and taking a quick nap I spent a few hours wandering nearby the place.

Malawi is dominated by Lake Malawi, a large, long body of water which runs the length of the country and occupies 20% of it's area. The culture and economy of Malawi are both closely tied to the lake and many people subsist entirely off of fishing from it. I walked from the campground out to the shore of the lake and followed the shoreline South a few hundred yards until I passed by a local man fishing, a lady doing her laundry in the lake, and a handful of kids playing nearby. It's always interesting for me to get away from the crowds as much as I can and see the local culture for what it really is. Wandering a short ways from a campground isn't much, but I'm sure that many of the people in Malawi live the same way as the few locals that I saw today. Hopefully I'll get a better feel for that during the few days that I'll be in the country.After coming back from the coast I wandered down the dirt road leading away from the campground. I passed by a few huts made of straw and adobe, several very small plots of farmland, and a whole lot of local kids. Before coming to Africa I always envisioned the stereotypical African landscape of long yellow grasses blowing in the wind and scraggly brown acacia trees. I think that kind of scenery is found mainly in Tanzania. While walking down the dirt road today I looked into the distance and saw lots of brush and a few tall rocky plateaus. That image of Malawi probably is exactly the one my Belgian friend was trying to describe to me in 2006.

Baobab Trees

I think I spoke too soon about saving a whole lot of hassle by booking the Gap tour rather than traveling solo through East Africa. Today we woke up at 4:30, had a quick breakfast, packed up our tents and our luggage, and drove until we got to the next campground tonight at 7:00. In retrospect it might have been nicer just to have booked a bunch of flights to link together all the places I wanted to visit, but I guess it does no good to look back at things that way. The advantages of the Gap tour are that I can just sit back and relax and enjoy the ride - I don't have to be stressed all the time about catching the next flight or avoiding scams and shady cab drivers.

Traveling overland through Africa does come with a few benefits. Tanzania is famous for it's spectacular, distinctly African scenery, and driving the width of the country twice over has given me plenty of opportunities to see it. After an early morning nap on the bus that was only possible because I was so exhausted from waking up so early, we passed through Mikumi Game Reserve in Southern Tanzania. Mikumi is nothing like the Serengeti, but it still is impressive by most measures. During the half-hour that it took to drive through we spotted several giraffes, elephants, zebras, and impala. Except for the impala all of the animals we saw were quite a way from the road, but it still was fun to stare into the distance and see exotic wild game wandering around on both sides of us. I think that the Serengeti has desensitized me a little to seeing animals like that so easily. Only ten days ago animal sightings like the ones I had in Mikumi today would be the most incredible ones I've had in my life, but the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater were so mind blowing that today's experience barely seems legitimate. I think I'd have to see a pride of lions wander across my front lawn in Salt Lake to beat what I saw in the Serengeti.

Later this afternoon we passed through a valley filled with large, scraggly baobab trees. The most cliche, but probably most accurate way of describing a baobab tree is that it looks like someone pulled a giant tree out of the ground and shoved it back in upside down with the roots sticking straight up into the air. Many of the baobab trees I saw were so thick that it would take ten or fifteen people with their arms streched out to completely circle the trunk.About an hour after the sky went dark tonight we finally pulled into the Kisolanza Farmhouse Campground just West of Iringa, Tanzania. I was ready to put down a quick meal and call it a night, but it turned out that we had a nice sit-down dinner waiting for us in the campground's rustic dining room. Soft bread rolls with garlic butter were followed by spicy homemade tomato soup, rice with beef curry, and steamed vegetables. The lavish meal tonight was a nice consolation after the bumpy fourteen hour truck ride.

Makadi Beach

Today was another really mellow one. I took the ferry from Stone Town back to Dar Es Salaam then spent the rest of the day hanging around a small beach resort and campground that we're staying at called Makadi. After setting up my tent I crashed onto a couch in a nearby thatched-roof hut and fell asleep for a couple of hours. Even after spending so much time relaxing during the last few days I still feel so drained. I don't mind it because it's awesome just to be here in Africa and to be having amazing experiences every day, but it also will be nice to get back home in a few weeks so I can catch up on all the sleep I've lost, shower regularly, change into some decent clothes, and just get back to normal that way.

Traveling on an organized tour for the last little while has helped me realize the advantages and disadvantages of the way I usually travel when I'm doing it all myself. Usually I'll pick a country or a region I want to visit, I'll research the place and figure out the specific things I want to see and do while I'm there, then I'll string all that stuff together and plan out all the logistics so I can fit everything into the time that I have. More often than not I end up buying a handful of point-to-point flights to save time and move around quickly. I guess the Gap tour is doing things roughly the same way that I would, except there's not quite as much planned for each day and instead of flying everywhere we're going overland in the truck.

Originally I booked the Gap tour because I wasn't sure how safe it would be to travel alone in Africa and I wanted to do it with a group at least for my first time here. In retrospect I think I could have done it alone and been perfectly safe, I just would have had to have been a little more careful than I usually am. Next time I visit Africa I probably will do it independantly and I'll do it the way I usually do trips; by flying point-to-point and packing plenty of wild experiences into every single day. With that said though, I still think the Gap tour was a good choice for this particular trip. I probably saved a few thousand dollars and a whole lot of hassle by booking the Gap tour rather than doing it all solo.

House of Wonders

Usually when I travel I do everything independently and I'm always on the run, always trying to pack a few more things into each day. The Gap tour has been a good opportunity for me to relax and pace myself, although that does mean that I haven't seen quite as much as I would have if I had done it myself.

This morning was a very mellow day on the Gap tour. I woke up at the Amman Hotel on the North end of Zanzibar, ate breakfast, then was as lazy as possible until about 12:00. I spent a lot of the time hanging around on the perfect white sand beach and talking to a few other people from the tour group. At noon all 22 of us piled into a bus with a local driver and Elbie, our South African guide, and headed back to Stone Town.

Like I said, today was very mellow. There was nothing planned for Stone Town and I really just wanted to have a good meal then take the rest of the day to relax. I did visit a museum called the “House of Wonders” though, which essentially documents the history of Zanzibar and is housed in a nineteenth century palace that was once the largest building on the island. I really wasn't in a museum mood today, but I was glad to be able to do something with my day besides just sitting around and there were a few interesting exhibits in there. My favorite part of the museum was a picture illustrating the trade routes between East Africa, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia. A caption next to the drawing mentioned that the trade routes facilitated the spread of different cultures between the four regions.

For some reason the map along with that comment really got me thinking about the different cultures I've seen while traveling and how those cultures relate to each other. After visiting East Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East (if my two days in Dubai counts), the diffusion of cultures is very noticeable. Buddhism originated from Hinduism which, of course, originated in India. Buddhism is the common link between all of Southeast Asia, the Himalayan cultures found in Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet, and parts of Indian culture. Islam is the common link between East Africa, the Middle East, and Western India. And if food counts for anything, chapatti and curry is everywhere in India, or you can find it in Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal, Dubai, or down the street in Stone Town, Zanzibar.

Before this trip I had no idea how much there is in common between Southeast Asia and India, between East Africa, the Middle East, and India, and even between Southeast Asia and East Africa. The common denominator in every case is definitely India. India is the big daddy in this part of the world. The cultures and religious traditions that originated or were perpetuated in India spread everywhere and dominate much of Asia and Africa. For some reason that single picture with the comment pulled it all together for me and opened my eyes to all those connections. If there is one underlying theme that unifies my entire trip it would be, ironically enough, the influence of Indian culture in Asia and Africa. The fact that I happened to choose all the right places to visit that demonstrate that so effectively was very unintentional and very fortunate.

Later tonight I went back to Rumaliza with Lori and had another Beef Mutabbaq. The food there is great, but I really went for one of the drinks. Last time I had a fruit smoothie with passion fruit and cinnamon. This time I got the “Blueberry Delight”, which was a mix of pineapple and orange juice, a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and big chunks of blueberries and mango. Tomorrow it will be back to camping and eating on a tight budget like only Gap tours can do, so it felt nice today to put a few good meals and a smoothie in my belly.

Shayne's Reef

Every place I've been diving so far has had a few types of underwater wildlife that are very common for that area, as well as several other types that can be found all over the world. In Thailand I saw plenty of large trigger fish and small, silvery barracudas. In Belize last February there were lots of eagle rays and sea turtles, and on the Pacific side of Costa Rica there were hundreds of puffer fish, a few octopuses, and even a large white-tipped shark. I was excited today to see what sights are typical while diving in Zanzibar.

This morning at “Sensation Divers” dive shop I met the local African dive-master who I would be diving with today and got fitted for my mask, fins, weight belt, and BCD. As I was checking out the equipment a couple of Sensation Divers employees loaded extra tanks of oxygen into a rickety wooden cart that was hauled by an ox to the boat that took us out to the ocean. Many of the boats in Zanzibar are archaic looking wooden contraptions called “dhows”. For my first dive of the day I rode in a dhow to a dive site called “Shayne's Reef” with three other divers, the dive master, and a couple of African boatmen.Zanzibar's colorful coral reefs are packed with large scorpion fish and starfish. I've seen starfish plenty of times before while diving, but the species in Zanzibar is very different than what I'm used to. The starfish I saw today were smooth bright blue or bright green creatures with several arrangements of black spikes sticking up on their bodies. The starfish are appropriately named “Crown of Thorns Starfish”. I saw a few different varieties of scorpion fish as well. Besides the typical orange and white striped scorpion fish I also saw some that were colored so much like sand that they were nearly indistinguishable from the ocean floor, “Weedy Scorpion Fish” that were blended in with patches of seaweed, and a large “Bearded Scorpion Fish” that laid on a rock and stared at us as we drifted by. At Shayne's Reef I also spotted a green moray eel, a few blue-spotted sting rays, several banner fish, and two small parrot fish.

A forty-five minute ride on the dhow took us to the next dive site, “Hunga 1”. The weather today was unfortunately very rainy and cold. That makes very little difference underwater, but I spent a lot of time wet and shivering on the dhow. I didn't see a whole lot at Hunga that wasn't also at Shayne's Reef, but I did take some time to get a better look at the exotic pink and blue coral. I don't remember exactly what I've seen on other dives as far as coral goes, but I don't think it's anything like what I saw off the coast of Zanzibar today. Along with the strange coral there was plenty of anenome that drifted back and forth with the current like a flimsy tree in breezy weather.

Spice Plantation

During the 19th century Zanzibar was the central hub for the East African slave trade. Arabs who had settled the island imported slaves from modern-day Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and sixty thousand slaves per year were sold in the slave market in Stone Town before being shipped off to Oman, India, or Persia.

This morning I left the “Hotel Kapondo” with the Gap tour group and stopped at the old slave market on our way to one of Zanzibar's many spice plantations. There isn't a whole lot left of the former market, but it still has the same eerie feel of a former Nazi concentration camp. Our local tour guide started by leading the 22 of us into a small, dank, concrete room in the basement of one of the buildings in the site. The room was about ten feet square, but except for a narrow walkway through the center of it the ceilings were about three feet high. While passing through the walkway I still had to duck my head. Standing straight up anywhere in the room would be impossible for anyone taller than 5'4”.Once we all had crammed into the tiny enclosure and sat down to listen, the guide told us that the room was used to contain 75 women and children. Two narrow slits in one of the exterior walls let slivers of sunlight in, but many of the captives suffocated to death because the tiny windows didn't let enough oxygen in to support all the people inside. A similar, but slightly smaller room in the basement was used to contain fifty men to be sold as slaves.The tour concluded with an explanation of the different memorials on the site and a short visit inside a small cathederal. Brightly colored stained glass windows and intricate mosaics decorated the interior. In the center of the cathederal just below the altar was a small marker and memorial designating where the “whipping tree” had been. Before the slave trade in Zanzibar was abolished in 1873, slaves were brought to the tree and whipped. Those who didn't flinch or cry during the beating were considered to be stronger and commanded higher prices on the market.The visit to the spice plantation was a welcome contrast to the slave market. Another local guide, who prefered to be called “Ali T”, walked us through lush green pathways and introduced us to a few of the different plants. I was reminded of my visit to the Caribbean island of Grenada with my parents and brother in 1998. While there I visited a similar plantation and learned that Grenada produces the majority of the world's nutmeg. Zanzibar doesn't claim to have a corner on the market on any particular plant or spice, but it does have quite a bit of a lot of different kinds of spices. During the tour I saw henna plants, black pepper, ginger, cloves, cinammon trees, vanilla beans, nutmeg, lemon grass, almond trees, and jackfruit.Afterwards Ali T brought out several different kinds of fruits and invited everyone to try them. The pineapple and oranges he gave us were perfectly fresh and tasted great, but I was more interested in tasting jackfruit, which I had never tried before today.
Zanzibar's picture-perfect beaches occupy two days of the itinerary on the Gap tour and I'm sure those two days are meant to be a relaxing break before finishing off with a bumpy road trip through Malawi and Zambia. I enjoy relaxing while I'm traveling, but I can only really handle an hour or two of it at a time. I always need to be moving and always need to be having new experiences or else I'll get bored and frustrated very quickly. I spent about an hour at the beach this afternoon. I swam a few hundred feet out into the calm, crystal blue ocean, then headed back to the powdery white sand beach. Later tonight I met with a British man named Pete who runs a local scuba diving company and arranged a couple of dives for tomorrow.

The “Fat Fish Restaurant” on the coast was a perfect place for dinner tonight. I sat at a table on an outdoor deck stretching into the ocean and chatted for a while with a younger couple from our tour group named Claire and Josh, Lori, and our guide and driver, Elbie and Henk. Claire and Josh told us about visits to Central and South America during the seven month round-the-world trip that they're currently on and Henk described some of his experiences while driving large diesel trucks for competetive bicycle races from Cairo to Cape Town. I decided I had to have at least one seafood dinner while on Zanzibar and orderd the cous-cous and calimari. For dessert I ate half of a banana fritter. I listened to Henk go on and on about his wild African driving experiences and sat and enjoyed the calm, breezy nighttime weather.