Kilimanjaro and East Africa

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The next day we booked ourselves into a so-called Spice Tour through Bruce. Zanzibar is a major world producer of spices, especially cloves, and is often known as the Spice Island or Spice Islands. Bruce arranged for us to be driven about 15 minutes away to a local Spice Farm, where a burly and cheery fellow nicknamed Rambonero (lit. the black Rambo) took us around. He was amazingly knowledgeable and was fluent in English, Italian and Spanish (there's that Italian connection again).

Local Spice Farm

Spice Tour

Sampling Game

We saw many interesting plants, including ones that produce many of the well-known spices of the world, including cinnamon, lemongrass, nutmeg, vanilla, ginger, tumeric, and pepper. Along the tour, young kids working in the farm wove interesting and funny little hats, ties, bracelets and necklaces from local plants, and had us wear them.

Explaining Vanilla

Pepper on the plant

Climbing for Coconuts

courtesy CDoucet

Vanilla Bean closeup

Bruce and his flock

Andrew's palm hat

courtesy CDoucet

Shucking the coconut

Coconut ready to drink

Kids making palm kick-knacks

Video: Spice Tour

A video record of our walk with 'Rambonero' at a Zanzibar Spice Farm. (3 minutes, 55 seconds)

After the spice tour, we spent another afternoon in Stone Town, doing some souvenir shopping and generally relaxing.

Apples for sale, Stone Town

Decaying Facade

Low tide

I spent a few hours on the beach late in the day, looking for a pretty shell or two for Jennifer (Jenn loves the sea, and since she was in cold and snow Ottawa, I thought it might be nice to remind her of a nice warm tropical ocean) . Peter located a huge dead chunk of Coral reef that had washed up and packed that away as a [hefty and smelly] souvenir. The quiet tropical atmosphere of Zanzibar was represented in the quiet beach, the simple fishing boats out on the water, and the lack of any sort of crowded tourist scene (in fact I think I was the only foreigner as far as I could see). This is a place as tropical as any but not at all built-up in the standard beach-resort style.

Outrigger dugouts

Dhow under full sail

Beach and boats at lowtide

Focus On...

Zanzibar

Want to see many more pictures of the wonderful island of Zanzibar? Click Here to go to the Zanzibar "In Focus" section....

We ate dinner that evening at a delightful Italian restaurant right in downtown Stone Town. It was our last night in this little tropical world, and it was nice eat outside on the patio with the ocean just a few tens of metres away. Caroline fell violently ill, and spent a horrible night being quite nauseous and sick. We think perhaps something she ate at that restaurant may have been the cause.

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