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.