Zanzibar - The Spice Island

Tue, March 9, 2010

So far, Zanzibar Island has been great. We have three nights and 2 ½ days here. Our first night (last night) was in Stone Town, which seems to be classic old-style Zanzibar. The doors here are fabulous – ornately carved and many with metal pointy spikes arrayed on them, apparently to keep elephants from pushing up against the doors. Don’t know that elephants have ever been much of a problem here on the island, but it seems to be an architectural style that found its way here from elsewhere.

Yesterday afternoon we had an option to tour the fort and “the house of wonders” (first house in Zanzibar to have electricity). I was exhausted and way too hot to be out tromping through town, so I took a nap in our room with a ceiling fan (bliss) while Jeff went out poking around. Last evening’s dinner was at the night market, which is a relatively small section of the waterfront where vendors set up stalls selling grilled seafood kabobs and Zanzibar pizzas, which are somewhat similar to the rotees we had in Chiang Mai. They take a small piece of eggy dough and stretch it out thinly on an oiled pan, then spoon in either ground beef for the savory ones or fruit (bananas or mango) and nutella for the dessert ones, then fold the excess dough over the top, forming a kind of squarish omelety type thing . I found them a bit on the greasy side, but then again, everything we’ve eaten in Africa has been greasy. Jeff had a beef one and I had a mango and nutella one. A person really needs a bit of vanilla ice cream to cut through the sweetness on that mango pizza.

Today was spent engaged in a tour of a spice farm. Our guide, Daniel, was terrific, and at the farm there were several young men who went with us collecting samples of the various spices as Daniel explained them to us and giving us each a bit of our own to smell and taste. Turmeric, for example, is a root crop that looks quite similar when harvested to ginger, except when peeled it’s a deep, bright orange. The foliage looks a bit like very young banana trees. What we know as cinnamon is the bark of the tree, harvested in strips, placed in water to soak a few days and then dried in the sun (that’s what makes it curl up). The bark is taken from one side of the tree only, so as not to kill the tree, and in about 7 months, the tree has regenerated enough bark that it can be harvested again. I assume they alternate which side of the tree they peel. The leaves of the cinnamon tree have an almost nutmeg smell to them, the branches smell just like Red Hots, and the roots smell like mentholatum. They actually use them in much the same way as we use Vicks – they grind the root and mix it with something (fat, maybe?) to create a poultice to be applied to the body when suffering from a cold. We saw peppercorns growing on trees, and coffee beans still in their little red seed pods. A cocoa pod was cut open so we could see the cocoa beans nestled inside, not quite ripe yet.

Lunch was at a home near the spice farm and featured a variety of delicious local dishes, all seasoned beautifully with the very freshest of spices. Rice cooked with cinnamon and ginger, chicken cooked in a marsala sauce, potatoes cooked up with fresh turmeric and onions, all eaten family style, sitting on mats scattered around the room. Dessert was fresh fruit – bananas, pineapple, passionfruit and watermelon. Mmmm.

After lunch we went back to the spice farm and sampled more fruit, including star fruit, which is also called 5-fruit because the flavors within a single fruit can taste like as many as five different fruits. We also had Leitchi, pomelo (a sort of giant grapefruit), fresh coconut and jackfruit (a weird looking fruit that kind of resembles a huge hand grenade and has a flavor like banana cream pudding). After stuffing ourselves on fruit, one of the young men demonstrated how to climb a coconut tree. I’ve seen trees climbed using a technique similar to pole climbing at home, but the Zanzibar way of climbing is not like that. A piece of sisal (plant fiber that is used to make rope) is twisted into a figure eight, through which the feet are half placed, so that each foot is standing on a piece of rope and the balance of the length is stretched between the feet, creating enough tension and grip to keep one’s feet from slipping. The tree trunk is grasped with the hands and then the climber simply shinnies up the tree, alternately tossing his arms upward and hopping higher with the feet until he is at the top. Our demonstrator made it look easy, but as is usually the case, when a few of our group tried it, they found it extremely difficult. Going up was easier than going down, and the first one who tried it lost a fair bit of skin off the insides of his forearms. Ouch.

As we stood watching the coconut climbing, several young boys were at work weaving palm leaves into hats and ties for the men, and frog necklaces and purses for the women. They also wove rings and bracelets and had a lot of fun presenting them to us. The guys looked especially smart in their hats and ties… like jungle businessmen.

We finished up our tour by mid-afternoon, then drove to a beach resort on the north end of the island. It’s really lovely here looking out on the Indian Ocean. Near shore, where the bottom is sandy, the color is a bright turquoise. Deeper out it turns a shade of deep navy blue. Seeing the wooden dhows and small sailing boats on the water seems almost unreal, as if I’ve stepped into a painting.

One small challenge about the place is the fact that electricity is extremely sporadic on Zanzibar Island. As a matter of fact, the island has been without electricity since December and only just regained it this afternoon. Most places are set up with generators to power only the most necessary of things. When we’re running off the grid, we have a ceiling fan and running water, but when we switch to generator, we’re left to swelter. At least we have the ocean to jump in and a bar with coolish beer. A place that has been without electricity for 4 months is woefully short on ice, so no ice in the sodas. It’s amazing how much a person can miss something as simple as ice with their coke.