Stonetown
After a short night of sleep we had a hakuna matata breakfast. Hakuna matata is a very common word we hear here a lot of times, it means no hurry. You hear it all day. During breakfast also the rest of the team arrived, they had a different flight, a direct flight but a night flight.
After breakfast we decided to go for a city walk, but first we had to go to the ATM. You get a lot of money here, 10.000 Tanzanian Shilling is about 3 Euro. You loose the connection to the value with this kind of amounts, feels like monopoly money.
Around the corner from our hotel was the house were Freddy Mercury lived. It was a small but nice and detailed museum. On pictures of young age it was easy to recognize Freddy Mercury, or Farrokh as he was named back then. On the street we were followed by locals that wanted to give us a tour, for money of course.
After the museum we continued to the old fort, an historic building. It was built by Omani Arabs around the 1700’s from material of a Portuguese chapel. It was used as a garrison and prison in the 19th century, and as a terminal of the Zanzibar railways 1905-28. Now it is a tourist place where tourists can buy all kind of hakuna matata gifts.
The rest of the day was quite relaxing, spending some time at the Cape Town Fish Market drinking Kilimanjaro lager and some swimming and relaxing at the hotel pool.
For the evening we had booked a see side restaurant to enjoy the sunset. Before we went through the small streets of Stonetown with many gift shops. Everybody saying Jambo (hello), very friendly people.
Stonetown is very small so we arrived quickly at the restaurant. The sunset is here quite early, already at 6:30. But with a delicious meal and good African rose we could enjoy the sunset.
When we arrived back at the hotel there was a small band playing music, so before going to bed we enjoyed a mocktail with so local music. It was a wonderful day in Zanzibar and a great experience with the local culture.
