Skip to main content

Zanzibar

From Dar we caught the ferry across to Zanzibar.
Stonetown is not like any other town i'd been to in Africa. Kind of stating the obvious considering the middle eastern influences. The town wasn't built for cars but this doesn't seem to matter. Surprisingly it has the cheapest and fastest interent access i have come across yet. However the mainland sometimes plays funny buggers and shuts of the electricity for a few seconds deleting epic emails to my forever worried parents.



Even though it is the wet season the weather on the island has been rather good. It has
allowed some time to do some snorkelling and 4 of us hired a car day for 3 (only US$25 a day) days to drive around the island. Driving here is an experience not to be missed with cars driving three abreast down single lane roads with people, goats, cyclists and mopeds to deal with. I returned the car in one piece, however you feel sooner rather than later your going to come into grief. The seafood here is amazing. Last night i had a 1/2 kilo lobster, 3 prawns, a crab, a kingfish fillet, octopus, calamari, rice, salad and chips all for less than AUS$20. Not surprisingly i have had seafood four out of the four nights i have been here.









Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Zabid

There's nothing like a big travel bag to attract anyone in sight who speaks English. This guy was a teacher keen to ask me about Australia. Like most who asked he couldn't believe that Australia only had 20 million people. He bought me a juice, helped me find the taxi stand for Zabid, asked if there was anything else he could do for me and went on his way. The drive to Zabid was another of those 'anywhere to Port Augusta' drives. The hotel was pretty basic and was the first on this trip to have the cold water only shower directly above the squat toilet. Zabid is the second UNESCO world heritage site in Yemen but walking around the streets you wouldn't guess it. So this was one those occasions I was glad to have a guides approach me. Again with the 'ask you like' payment. I knew where it would end but atleast it would work in my favour. With a guide you got to see inside some of the court yards and they were truly impressive. You even got to see inside some o...

Hamburg

Its hard not to say how much I liked about Hamburg without contradicting what I said about Denmark. It had the bars and clubs, but it also had graffiti on the walls and dog shit on the street. It had a buzz to it. And strange things happened. Among other things, I was in a net cafe near my hostel when i got a tap on the shoulder. Turn around there's a bloke I had met in Jordan 4 months earlier. Creepy. Turns out he had just flown in for the weekend to meet someone he met randomly in Poland. I could have just as easily been in Bergen. Other than catching up with random friends I checked out a few of the museums and churchs around town. Highlight was probably the History of Hamburg museum which had more model cityscapes, planes, boats and trains than a boy at heart could poke a stick at. I got lost looking around a harbour that seemed bigger than the rest of the city. I also found myself in the middle of a joke when two germans, two indians and an Australian went out until dawn on t...

Aden

I caught a shared taxi to Aden without hassle though again it stopped on the outskirts of Town. For the first time in Yemen I was mobbed by taxi drivers as I got out of the car. I played quiz show host trying to ascertain who was going to be the least hassle. The winner was a fraud. The only English he knew was "I know that Hotel, only 500 rials." He was also a liar. We had to stop twice for directions and he asked me for 'only' 2000 rials when we finally got there. I stayed at the Rambow Hotel. Named after the French poet Rimbaud not the fictional Vietnam Veteran Rambo. It might have been quite grand once but now you would say it had character. It wasn't too bad but became uncomfortably hot the second night when the electricity failed to kick/be turned on. Aden was a lot less interesting than I thought it would be. Once occupied by the British I was expecting they would have made left more of a mark on then town than a store that sold Argos products (seriously) a...