Like every beach town I have visited in East Africa, Zanzibar's Stone Town is full of beach boys. Here they are more properly called papasi, which is Swahili for "tick" -- an apt name, as their method is to latch and hold on to any tourist they can. The papasi are essentially touts, both of good and services. Along the main roads, you'll find innumerable young men standing around, waiting for a hapless mzungu to pass by. Then they pounce, holding out a plate bearing cashews or cds or sunglasses, or waving t-shirts or paintings like a bullfighter might wave his cape. Others will walk along with you for some time and try to fast-talk you into going on a tour with them: a city tour or spice tour or a trip to a nearby island. When you turn onto the market street where tourist wares are sold, everyone tries to entice you into their own shop, and wants to show you around town.

The papasi are generally friendly, polite and even fun to talk to, though it's not recommended to accept tours from them as some are less than savory characters. They're mostly in their twenties and thirties, but once in awhile you'll bump into one considerably older or younger. One in particular sticks out in my mind. A few of the papasi are now familiar to us, as we keep passing them on the street while walking around the neighbourhood. One of these is a young guy -- I'd say he's about fifteen or sixteen. He has a real baby face and looks like he still has a growth spurt in him, and like many of the beach boys, he's always wearing the same clothes. On the first day we were here, he discovered that I not only know the responses to the standard Swahili greetings, but also to the slang greetings. Actually, a couple of beach boys have picked up on this, now that I've walked past them a good dozen times and responded to their chorus of called greetings. But this boy in particular just gets me because he seems so genuinely delighted and amused each time he sees me. And he's so young. Looking at him, one can easily imagine the gaggle of small boys playing on the beach and in the alleyways growing up to become papasi. And while it may be a way of making money, I just think it's such a shame to spend all that energy and talent pandering to tourists for a couple of bucks a day.

Though the backbone of Zanzibar's economy is really agriculture (mostly spices and fruits) and fishing, some of the island's politicians own fancy hotels and resorts, or have deals with those who build them on government land, and so it is in their own interest to promote tourism to the island. However, as Kenya discovered this year, and regions that have experienced natural disasters, terrorism or political instability know, tourism is not the most reliable industry. It is also frequently practiced unsustainably, as tourists often use up resources which are scarce to residents (like water, for example).

Still, I can't deny that we are tourists here, though we can try to lessen the negative impact of our presence. Yesterday we did a spice tour with a local tour company which is also an NGO, supporting sustainable economic development and environmental education in Zanzibar. Actually, we came upon them accidentally, so it was quite a stroke of luck. The spice tour was really interesting -- we drove to a local plantation and sampled the different fruits grown there (which included jackfruit and custard apple in addition to the standard tropical fruits -- delicious!). Then we walked around and saw the various trees and bushes which grow spices, smelling and sometimes tasting them in their fresh, unprocessed forms along the way. There we found pepper, vanilla, cloves, cardamon, lemon grass, ginger and turmeric, among others. There was even a plant called the "lipstick plant", which bore a red, hairy sort of pod that looked like a litchi. It was split open and the seeds ground up and then unceremoniously spread over my lips, producing a bright shade of coral which looked ridiculous on me! But it was amazingly like lipstick. We also drank coconut water from young coconuts just cut from the tree. It was fantastic. Following the tour, we went to a local woman's house for a wonderful lunch of pilau, matoke (green bananas), fried fish and stewed cassava leaves.

Today is our last day in Stone Town. We've explored the maze of alleyways further, happening upon little squares where red and blue banners are hung and old men in kofia hats are sitting taking tea, many small fruit and fabric shops, and huge spiderwebs with giant, terrifying black spiders hanging in the centre. Tomorrow we leave for Metemwe, on the North coast of the island, for three days of beaches with fine white sand and transparent turquoise waters. I'm not really a beach person (too much laying around and "relaxation" makes me restless), but I think three days will be good for getting rid of whatever stress remains in my system before it's back to the real world.

Zanzibar

After the safari ended, my parents and I flew to Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania. Zanzibar was actually an independent country from Tanganyika (which the mainland used to be called) until the two states merged to become Tanzania in 1964. Zanzibar was colonized by the Portuguese, then the Omani, before becoming a British protectorate and finally gaining independence in 1963. Like the Kenyan coast, Zanzibar's culture is Swahili, a blend of African (mostly Bantu and Cushitic) and Middle Eastern cultures. Zanzibar is a very Muslim society, so even though it is terribly hot and humid, it's respectful to dress modestly, covering the shoulders and most of the leg.

Zanzibar is still so different from the rest of Tanzania that it's easy to imagine that it's still its own country. Indeed, the island is still semi-autonomous and has its own President. It's a beautiful place, filled with narrow alleyways and elaborately carved doors. I do find it to be a bit touristy in some areas, but if you venture outside the regular tourist haunts, you'll find people going about their regular business, buying and selling, praying, chatting with their neighbours, or just sitting and watching the world go by. Children play football in the alleyways as the mangy cats lounging around everywhere look on with bored eyes.

So far we've mostly been doing some shopping (I bought some gorgeous fabrics), and we also took a walking tour of the old part of the city, called Stone Town. Zanzibar was the centre of East Africa's slave trade, until the trade was abolished in the late 1800s. During the tour, we visited the site of the former slave market (where an Anglican church now stands), as well as the horrifying holding cells where slaves were kept before being shipped out. The cells comprised of two rooms, one for men and one for women, which were only about three feet tall, if that. There, slaves were kept for days without food. Many died there, pressed up against the bodies of their terrified, sweaty neighbours.

The island was also a centre of the spice trade, as the hot, humid climate was ideal for spice plantations. We will be doing a spice tour, as well as a visit to the caves where slaves were kept hidden, tomorrow. And today is my birthday! I'm not quite old, but getting there.

into the wilds of Tanzania

Our safari with Hoopoe tours was absolutely amazing. At first I thought that I would get a bit tired of visiting parks day after day; I didn't really think about how diverse Tanzania's environment really is. The safari was 12 days long, and we went along with another couple around my parents' age. She was Canadian and he was American, but they live in the States. We were very lucky because we all got along very well, and had a lot of fun together. I can imagine that if you were tuck with someone you didn't like, the trip could become unpleasant rather quickly. Our guide, Lesikar, was also fantastic. Not only was he ridiculously knowledgeable about the various areas we visited, and their animal and human inhabitants, but he was also a really sweet and funny guy.

We travelled around quite a lot during the trip, alternating between hikes and game drives. The hikes were a big part of why the trip was so fulfilling; with the amount we were being fed, it would have been terrible to be sedentary during that entire time. We began in Arusha, then stayed for a couple of days at a tented camp in West Kilimanjaro. Then it was off to Tarangire National Park, then Lake Manyara, and then the Ngorongoro Crater conservation area. Finally, we finished off in the Serengeti, that awe-inspiring, seemingly endless expanse of savanna. Though all of the places we visited were fascinating and beautiful in their own way, I think my favourite was Tarangire park. It was there that we saw the most elephants, who are so active and so much fun to watch. The park also has a high concentration of baobab trees, which I also love. They somehow manage to be gorgeous and comical and grotesque at the same time.

During the trip, we saw:
-455 elephants in one day in Tarangire
-176 baboons in one day in Lake Manyara
-43 hyenas in one day in Ngorongoro and Serengeti
-lions devouring a baby giraffe
-ostriches mating
-elephants chasing juvenile lions, after they attempted to pick some zebra off from the herd
-an adult hippo using a baby hippo as a toilet (worst parenting ever!)
-elephants drinking and splashing themselves at the water hole
-a cow in Ngorongoro which had been attacked by a lion and had a chunk torn out of its flank, being led off to slaughter
-three baboon babies playing and fighting
-a cheetah hunt and kill a Thompson's gazelle by draining the blood from its neck

... and a whole lot more. I was astounded by the sheer number of animals we saw, as well as their interactions. One day we also had elephants visiting us during our lunch in one of the parks. That was a little bit frightening, but definitely an experience that we will never forget.

Overall it was a great trip, particularly because the staff of the various camps and lodges we stayed in were really friendly and personable. Perhaps the only negative experience was during the first day of our two-day hike around the Ngorongoro crater rim. The day was warm and sunny at first, but the weather quickly went downhill and it began to rain. Not just a regular shower, mind you; this was a torrential, full-blown rainy season-style rain. And it went on, complete with occasional thunder and lightning and a little bit of hail, for about three hours. By the time we arrived at the camp, we were all soaked to the bone and definitely getting cranky. As the crater rim is quite elevated and windy, it was also very cold. There were donkeys carrying our equipment, including the tents and sleeping bags and fire starting materials, which were a couple of hours behind us, so we couldn't even set up the tents. Luckily, one of us had a lighter, so we were able to make a fire. The next three hours, we spent drying out our clothes and everything else we had been carrying that day. I didn't carry any papers with me, but others were drying out plane tickets, itineraries, passports and the like over the fire. The next day, it was happily warm and sunny again, so we had a fantastic hike through Maasai country. Mom did get sick for a couple of days, but luckily it was when we were staying at a hotel which had an in-house doctor, not at a bush camp, and she recovered well.

After our treks and travels through forests and arid regions, around salt lakes and rivers, always in amongst elephants and lions and hyenas and many cows, it's time for a change of scenery. Our next stop is the coast: Zanzibar.

I had a great week in Nairobi with mom and dad, dining out, showing them around and going on adventures. It was so nice to finally show them what I'd been telling them about for so long, and wonderful for them to have a chance to talk with Lucy again, and meet George and a couple of other friends. I think they had a good time (I hope so, anyway!). There were a couple of "Nairobi incidents", but nothing too disastrous. However, yesterday I had a hairy encounter with Kenyan bureaucracy that I won't quickly forget.

Crossing over the border into Tanzania was a nightmare for me, due to an encounter with an overzealous border guard on the Kenyan side who refused to give me the exit stamp. I won't go into the details here because of the incredible sketchiness of the entire situation, but suffice to say that the shuttle left without me, and I was stuck in Namanga, the border town on the Kenyan side, for about six hours before managing to scrape my way through. I may not be going back to Kenya for a little bit longer than expected -- my plan at the moment is to stay in Tanzania until early November and hopefully work with some of IIN's partners here or maybe do some writing for the upcoming issue of the Nomadic News magazine, and then head down to Cape Town. I found out the day before we left that some of my fundraising efforts for the women's movements conference were finally successful, so at least I'll have the chance to go to South Africa and take part in the forum before returning to Nairobi.

In any case, last night I rejoined my parents in Tanzania at last. We begin in Arusha, the town where the UN Tribunal on the Rwandan genocide is located, and where most safari companies are based. I haven't seen too much of the town yet, but so far it seems quite laid back, and very green. Lovely big plants everywhere. I've also noted the pureness of the Swahili here compared to Kenyan Swahili, which is mostly Sheng, all mixed up with English and slang words. Here it's all just Swahili. There are also an astounding amount of dogs barking and howling away during the night. Tomorrow we depart for our tour of several national parks.

At last, my vacation has truly begun. After the crazy time I had getting here, I couldn't be more thrilled.