This is me in the morning, trying to juggle Wanda the water bottle, my iPad, reading glasses, and my phone while taking a photo of my toes in the Indian Ocean. Another sea I’ve paddled in.

Today we were driving back to Stone Town to see a bit more of the place. The resorts are situated well away from where the people live, so it’s a 45 minute drive before we arrive. There’s plenty of time to look at all of the activity happening by the streets as everyone shops, works and socialises as we drive by.

I don’t know… I definitely don’t want to live here, or to have my suburb magically transformed to be like this, but there’s a sense of community and liveliness here that out streets in Australia can’t match.

Our first stop today was Prison Island. We had to wade out to an ancient boat, which putt-putted its way across the sea to one of the islands half an hour away.

The sea was a glorious colour, and the boat was so small that it pitched and fell with the waves, every now and then splashing us. The weather was so warm that we welcomed it.

Prison Island.

Which is a misnomer because it was never a real prison.

It was originally given to two slave traders in the early 1900s as a place to school ‘bad slaves’, but when slavery was abolished in 1907 it was earmarked to become a jail.

More work commenced on buildings, but in the end it was decided that this place would be more useful as a quarantine station. Yellow Fever, Cholera and the Bubonic Plague were problems for East Africa at the time, so an island was the perfect place to quarantine people for a couple of weeks to prevent diseases from entering Zanzibar.

We had to land on the beach and wade ashore. My linen trousers were wet up to the knee, but with the warm weather I wasn’t too worried about it. There is work afoot to build a new jetty, but apparently it’s been going on for the last two years.

Now this was a surprise. I wasn’t expecting to see giant tortoises here!
Elbow is the info sheet that details how this came about.

The numbers have grown since then.

I thought I’d have to wait until I went to the Galápagos Islands to walk among giant tortoises here, but it seems I was wrong.

They write the age of each tortoise on its shell. You can see one is 67 years old. The largest number we saw was 162.

It didn’t seem like a very exciting life for them, but on our way out, we witnessed a couple of them “telling each other bedtime stories “, as Awaysu phrased it.

As soon as the baby tortoises hatch, they’re taken away to a nursery like this, where they stay apart from the adults until they’re 15 years old. By then, they’re big enough not to be crushed underfoot.

It must’ve been hard for the bad slaves and the quarantined people to see Zanzibar so close, yet so far out of reach. There is another island nearby called “Grave Island “, where all the people who succumbed to their diseases while in quarantine were buried.

Incidentally, Covid was terrible here.

”Many, many people died,” said Awaysu. “Our leader didn’t believe in it, so he told us to go on as usual. Them people started dying. More and more. He eventually died from it, which is why Tanzania has a female prime minister. She was the vice. I kept my family at home and we all stripped our clothes if we’d been outside and we stayed away from people as much as we could. We were ok.”

Then it was back to Zanzibar, where we went to a harbour-side restaurant where I had the best calimari I’ve ever had.

Afterwards, some of us wanted to stay put and drink Irish coffees and watch the world go by, but not me. I can sit and do that at home.
So our Sisterhood Travels guide stayed behind, while 3 of us walked across the road with Awaysu to have a look at the shops inside the old fort.

Most of the stall holders here were widows, or single mothers, so we did our best to support them.

We were back in time to jump on our boat for the sunset cruise. It’s a sumptuous ride, don’t you think?

When we first set off, it was driven by an outboard motor. But once we were out in the harbour proper, the sail was unfurled, the motor was switched off and we glided along in silence.

Well, almost. We could hear the boys singing as they were jumping in the water, and we had a couple of musicians on board.

Awaysu translated what the songs were about.

”This song is about heartbreak. His girl has gone away and he’s sad.”

” This song is the opposite of. He’s in love and everything is fine!”

Sylvana, our Sisterhood Travels guide, tried her hand at the drum.

”It’s so hard!” She said. “Before you start, you think you’ve got a good sense of rhythm, but once you begin, you discover you’re hopeless!”

This is what we must have looked like to anyone else on the water.

Ideally, the sunset cruise would have started later and gone for longer, until the sky really got dark.

But the call for prayers starts at 6:30 pm, so the men had to be back on land by then.

Still it was a fun experience, and we were back in time for a lateish dinner at the resort.

Tomorrow is a free day at the resort. I’m planning a reading and writing day.


Dad Joke of the Day: