Winter Holiday Part Two: Stone Town, Zanzibar

The hotel we were staying at offered guides tours of Stone Town – where the ferry dropped us off and where we were staying for the next two nights – with free transport if taken on the departure, so we decided to give it a shot. After breakfast we packed into the car and were off.

I’m generally wary of guided tours. If it’s somewhere like a nature reserve than I’m fine with them, I’m no naturalist. If it’s a city tour, however, I figure I’m capable enough of walking around myself and eventually stumbling upon something of historical significance. That, and tourists are easily identified when being slowly guided through a city, and as scientific proof has it, white tourists in developing countries are generally the worst people on the planet. For the sake of my roommates, who are unpretentious and genuinely friendly, I kept my mouth shut.

The tour was fine enough, with visits to an old Arab fort, the site of a slave auction, a quick lunch, and Freddy Mercury’s (disputed) place of birth, which proudly announced that Freddy and his music would live forever (false and true, respectively). The only cringe-worthy moment came at the beginning of the tour, when the guide took us through an open air market and encouraged us to buy anything we wanted. He would step in and help out if we were getting a raw deal, thank god, which just meant he would encourage us to buy only slightly marked up goods from his friends’ stalls.

I wanted to tell him my daily commute from work in Kampala took me by Owino, which is 100 times bigger, more crowded and corrupt, and at any given time, more likely to violently catch on fire. However, I doubt anybody informed him that a presumptuous 24-year-old asshole would be on his schedule that day, so I simply smiled when he informed us we were in the meat and fish section of the market.

Keeping my head down and staying quiet on the tour

Apparently this explanation is necessary for some people, despite the smell resembling the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, the thousands of flies, and meat and fish carcasses strewn about. In particular, the “some people” was a group of four or five middle-aged folks who took pictures of every stall like they were proof of Africa’s stereotypical image of primitiveness and brutality, instead of just a banal facet of everyday life. I swear to god one of them said, “Honey, I don’t believe it, come take a picture…this meat isn’t refrigerated…just astounding.” At least that’s what I assume the direct translation was, they were all speaking German.

Over the next two days I saw three tourists wearing shirts that simply read “Mzungu”. Despite personally never being heckled once in the country, the only thing whiter than actually being white and taking a week vacation to Zanzibar just to go back home and regale your co-workers with your adventures on the dark continent (nobody would wear such an embarrassing shirt if that wasn’t a perfect description of their life), is buying a shirt to advertise your own whiteness. That said, I know a few Ugandans who own the same shirt and wear it for shits and giggles, which I think is comedic gold.

While I may talk trash on white tourists, 5 PM tea time provided me the opportunity to go bottoms up, pinky out, or BUPO. We all have our moments. 

For all of my sarcasm, the tour was rather enjoyable. Eighty percent of Zanzibar’s economy comes from tourism (after the three hours of walking around Stone Town with a guide I’m virtually an expert), so at the very least I’m glad we could contribute to the local economy. Stone Town itself is gorgeous, with the African, Indian, and Muslim worlds combining everywhere from the food to the architecture. The people are genuinely friendly and happy to help, and outside friends and family, and the Acholi in northern Uganda, to generalize, some of the kindest I’ve ever encountered.

I can’t stress enough that in six months of living in East Africa, the worst things I’ve seen have generally involved Westerners, and the violent continent so often portrayed in the media is sensationalist nonsense. That said, the walk to dinner on our first night in Stone Town offered one of the more visually arresting moments of my life.

As were walked perpendicular to the harbor, we got within 100 yards of a large, loud crowd. When this happens in Nsambya, the village where I live in Uganda, it means somebody has just been circumcised and everyone is drunk and celebrating. In Zanzibar, in this instance, the crowd was surrounding a man with his hands tied together and they were beating the actual fuck out of him with everything from their fists to empty jerry cans. To make the scene more surreal, one of the attackers was holding a chain leash looped around the neck of the monkey. The monkey was rather calm, given that at any given moment a stray foot could have crushed its entire skeletal system.

The man, I’m assuming, got caught stealing and was being led to a police station by 40 friendly men who happened to distrust Zanzibar’s formal justice system and decided to take the law into their own hands for a bit. There is something utterly terrifying about a crowd whipped up into a violent frenzy, and the three of us ducked into an alley until the mob passed. From there we made it to dinner without incident, and aside from the terrific food and drinks, I ended the night with a double shot of Jack Daniels. I smiled at the thought that, 8,000 miles away, my parents would end their night the same way.

Deep in contemplation, or there's a chance Katy just asked us to pose like this.

Three more friends from Kampala – Allison, David and Neha – joined us at the hotel on our second night in Stone Town. The six of us went to an open air eatery next to the harbor, with dozens of stalls selling everything from fresh seafood to chips and pizza. I ventured off with Neha, a fellow vegetarian, and we decided to try Zanzibar pizza, which is comparable to a large Hot Pocket, cooked from scratch in front of you and sold for $2. The vegetable and cheese was superb, but the real treat was the banana, mango, nutella and honey pizza drizzled with chocolate on top.

The food in Zanzibar is absurdly good, better than most food in Uganda, and America for that matter. The kicker is that Zanzibar is a relatively remote island and everything aside from what is locally grown or caught must be imported from the mainland. In comparison, Uganda, with its bragging rights of the Pearl of Africa and much-too-large expatriate community, has Western food that wouldn’t be deemed fit for a Russian gulag. That it’s a landlocked country with ample supermarkets and easy access to goods makes the situation that much more frustrating.

More posing in Stone Town

The best meal I had in Stone Town was at lunch the second day – A chickpea burger with the fixings and guacamole, in between a bun that must have been baked by the Virgin Mary – it was culinary wizardry in its purest form. Despite its food, Stone Town essentially shuts down at 10:30 PM, and our search for a bar after dinner was more futile than attempting to cartwheel across the Sahara.