Friday, 27 November 2015

Day 15 - goodbye to Ethiopia; hello Zanzibar





Our last morning in Addis was an early one. The airport transfer picked us up at 6:40am, and after a short drive with little traffic we were at the airport, and going through the layers of security, immigration and customs control. We were in plenty of time for our flight apart from the last security queue at the boarding gate area. Here we were told we were too early and to come back in half an hour. We returned to the queue after 20 minutes or so, and now the queue was so much longer and slower that we were at risk of missing the flight!
We were eventually called forward into a shorter line and got through OK. The flight was great, we had around 100 people on a brand new Boeing 787 "dreamliner"..
On the ground in tropical Zanzibar, we entered a different world!
Our hotel was in a maze of twisty little passages between colonial-era grand and humble houses, hotels, mosques, and madrasas. This area in the Zanzibari capital of Stone Town is called Old Town, and to reach the hotel (or to leave for any reason) involves walking for several very confusing blocks in streets and alleys too narrow for cars. We were safely delivered to our hotel by the transfer driver as he led us through between potholes full of water, bicycles, scooters, businesses spilling their wares into the street, children in school uniforms, men and women in cultural / religious dress, and stray cats!
We got lost every time we came or went between our hotel and the rest of the town but it was fun! Tried buying a map but the streets have no names :-) .
The hotel itself was fascinating in many ways...
The name and history are interesting - Swahili House. Originally built in the 19th century as home to a wealthy Arab merchant and his family, it was later owned by an Indian businessman who started using it as a hotel. Internally renovated over recent years, it has large rooms with rickety balconies built around a central atrium; internal stairs between the very high-ceilinged floors (with every flight seemingly steeper than the last), impressive studded timber front doors, and a covered rooftop terrace with a spa pool of sorts, bar, and restaurant... Swahili is the major language of Tanzania, and more generally has been the language of coastal peoples and trade routes through eastern and central Africa for centuries. We are in the place where people actually greet you with "Jambo" and respond to a request with "Hakuna Matata"...
Our room was large in size, with a mosquito-net canopied bed with a ceiling fan inside the netted area, a large red free-form concrete bath with steps to climb to get in!
We explored the old town during the afternoon, mostly feeling quite lost until we randomly ended up at the waterfront where we enjoyed a quiet few minutes watching the sun on the water aand rhe passing parade of dhows and other boats.
A very commercial street of souvenir shops and the like runs away from the waterfront, and after browsing there we took the plunge back into the old town streets and frustrated ourselves by walking within half a block of our hotel at least twice without even seeing a glimpse of it, then finding the nearby (larger, on the map) Emerson Spice Hotel and asking for directions to our hotel which was less than 50m away!
We got there in the end and enjoyed sunset from the rooftop terrace and rhen a very satisfying Seafood platter for dinner.


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