Zanzibar Spices

Every moment on Zanzibar can be remarkable, but these are some of the things which made an impression: the plane flight from the mainland over the perfect turquoise waters of the Arabian Sea; the ferry ride back again (we saw a whale); being met at the door of our hotel with glasses of brilliant, zingy passion fruit juice; snorkeling over antlered coral; hand-feeding spinach to giant tortoises on Changu Island; eating fresh-caught seafood while shopping for Tingatinga paintings in an open-air market; Africa's first elevator, located in the House of Wonders; Stone Town's fusion of African, Arab, and Indian architecture; a fragrant tour of a spice plantation, where you can see nutmeg picked off the tree; and a moment of horror in the old slave pens, followed by cognitive dissonance in the gift shop upstairs.

Quick Tips:

Dress modestly (cover your shoulders and knees, at least).

Learning a little bit of Swahili will get you a lot of friendly receptions -- and it turns out, since it's a recent creole, to be a pretty easy language to get started in. Some starters: Yes = Ndiyo; No = Hapana; Please = Tafadhali; Thank you = Asante; Where is = iko wapi; I want = nataka ; I don't eat meat = sili nyama.

There is an ATM in Stone Town, at the bank just south of the Forodhani Gardens. It worked about half the time we were there.

Vegetarians should check out the Indian restaurants--some of them are pretty authentic.

Don't take pictures of people without permission! They really don't like it.

Best Way To Get Around:

Getting to Zanzibar from Dar es Salaam: a plane takes 20 minutes and costs about /person. Planes are tiny--we were in a six-seater--and can be unnerving or exhilarating depending on your attitude. First-class ferry tickets are a little cheaper (about /person); the pleasant ride takes 2 hours.

Once on the island, one of the main forms of transportation is thedaladala, a cross between a bus and a taxi. These are very cheap (used by locals). Taxis are best if you can afford them (prices vary by distance, naturally), but walking is great in Stone Town. Larger groups should have no trouble getting good rates on hired cars.

When you wake up in the Mbweni Ruins Hotel, the first thing you're aware of is the low, repeating crash of the waves, punctuated now and then by a bird call. It's a lovely sound, and you can lie listening to it for a long time. But eventually you realize that it will be even nicer to see those waves as well as hear them, so you brush aside the romantic mosquito netting around your carved Zanzibari four-poster bed and walk out to your balcony...and then down the 30 feet or so to the beach, where you can watch the water ripple gently up the combed sand. There may be a white heron in the mangroves if the tide is low, and, if you're up early, a flock of orange-headed swallows will be dipping themselves briskly into the swimming pool.

When you've looked for a while, you'll walk up the hill through the flowering shrubs to the palm-thatched restaurant for breakfast--a pristine buffet of tropical fruits, juices, and cereals, plus a full, hot breakfast. (The pancakes are thin crepes in a spice syrup, the French toast is very eggy, and the Eggs Benedict are wonderfully rich--but the real attraction is the Masala Tea, clearly made with local spices.) If you're not careful, you may linger a very long time over breakfast, watching the dhows glide by, but if you miss the shuttle into town, you can sit on the beach sipping passion fruit juice (served with safe ice!) or climbing through the ruins of an orphans' school on the grounds.

Stone Town is ten minutes away by shuttle. The hotel has five shuttles a day, and you can always get a private one for $5. There must be nice hotels in Stone Town, but if money's no object, it's hard to imagine a better place to stay on that part of the island than Mbweni.

"Mercury's?" I hear you ask. "Why is an African seafood restaurant called Mercury's?" and the answer is improbable: Because the lead singer of Queen, Freddy Mercury (original name Farouk Balsara), was born on Zanzibar into a Parsi family, and the restaurant is named after him.

This wonderful conglomeration of Eastern and Western (Farouk becomes the wonderfully familiar and commonplace "Freddy," and the last name, "Mercury," invokes the Roman god responsible for leading the souls of the dead to the underworld) sums up much of what is richest about Zanzibar: as Freddy Mercury knew, Zanzibari culture is built out of crossing borders.

...but you want to know about the restaurant. Mercury's has no affiliation with its namesake, but like him, it has a way of crossing borders. Take the building itself. Seen from the street, Mercury's looks like one of the more expensive Westernized restaurants - a dark wooden front with serious windows in it, through which you can peer in at red-and-white checked tablecloths. But once through the door, the building turns out to be only half finished: there is no rear wall, but, instead, a deck built over the beach and partially shaded by the thatched roof.

Then there's the drinks menu, which makes a valiant attempt at internationalism. The margaritas may not be duplicates of the margaritas you had in Cancún, but really, the fact that you can get a margarita on Zanzibar at all is pretty remarkable. You're better off with one of the drinks made out of local fruit juices, though--although some of the stranger local liquors might be best for novelty value.

The food is less adventurous, but that's in part because the language of seafood is international. Every carnivore in our party ordered something different. No one was distressed by what they got, but no one was particularly excited, either; the attraction of Mercury's is more in the name and the setting, rather than the actual food.

And the setting is lovely. There was a bonfire on the beach the night we were there, and beyond the fire, the boats bobbed on the harbor underneath the stars. We admired the view for hours -- in part because the service was almost supernaturally slow, but also because the stars on a clear night are spectacular.

Every night, as the sun goes down, the food stalls in the Forodhani Gardens (also known as the night market) start to fire up the grills to cook the day's catch. Tentacles of octopus, skewered pieces of swordfish and flounder, and long kebabs of whiskered shrimp sit waiting on the tables next to big piles of chips (French fries), waiting for passing customers to point at them and ask to have them grilled.

Before eating anything at the Forodhani Gardens, the first thing to do is walk the length of the food stalls and get a sense of the evening's offerings. Walk past the friendly, hollering guys running the stalls, and inspect what they've got. Are you in the mood for shrimp or calamari? Whose chips look hottest? And don't overlook, at the very end, the African pizza stall, where the proprietor will make to order little pancake-like pizzas stuffed with meat, fish, veggies, or (my favorite) banana and chocolate, crowned with an egg and fried on a giant tin drum, and then garnished with tangy tamarind sauce.

When you've made up your mind, go back to the stall that caught your fancy, and let them know what you want. They'll grill it for you and hand it to you on a paper plate. We never found any food item that cost more than a $1.50, so there's no need to skimp. Vegetarians should head straight to the pizza stand as the best bet, but piscovores are in for a real treat: everything's fresh and perfectly cooked.

You can eat sitting on the grass among the Masai selling beaded jewelry, or perched on the concrete seawall overlooking the harbor, admiring the southern stars and refusing the occasional offer of pot from local salesmen. Don't expect privacy: the gardens are a crowded scene of tourists from near and far, plus locals and mainlanders in town for the evening. But it's a friendly, good-humored crowd, and maybe you can get tips about who's got the best fresh fish.

If you're worried about such things, it's good to note that the food at the stalls is also probably some of the safest in town, as you see it cooked right in front of you.

The buffet dinner and dancing at the Old Fort is a ghastly experience. Don't do it.

The Old Fort advertises displays of African music and dancing, accompanied by a buffet dinner, for 10,000 Tsh (about $10), beginning weekend evenings at about 7pm. This sounds like a great idea. The setting has potential, since it's a wide paved area surrounded by walls, about 100 yards from the sea. There's a row of shops along one wall selling wooden carvings and Tingatinga paintings. Patrons are seated at picnic tables, and as they wait for the show to start, a waiter serves the usual array of Tanzanian beer (about $1.50 each, not included in the buffet price).

Unfortunately, the standards for the dancing and music are dreadful. Instead of the wonderful traditional hip-shaking motions of local dance, the dancers, wearing plastic "grass" skirts, just hump each other (with the exception of one man, presumably the lead dancer, who runs around humping the pillars of the porch, some nearby trees, and audience members). It was embarrassing--not because it was sexy (sexy's great), but because it was crass, dumb, and debased, aimed at the kind of tourist who can't tell grass from plastic. It would be less painful if it weren't pretending to be authentic. As a deliberate parody of colonial stereotypes of the hypersexualized African, it might even be funny. But, alas, it's meant to be taken straight.

I was there with a group of six, and everyone of whom found a different reason to suffer: a musician in the group was miserable because the music was repetitive and poorly performed, another person was most distressed by the looks of glazed boredom on the dancers' faces, and another mostly insulted at being taken for someone dumb enough to think this was real African dance.

We never got as far as eating the food, but we saw it set out, and it looked mediocre: some unidentifiable kebabs and one unsafe-looking raw salad. A greater variety of better food is available for the same price or cheaper in restaurants throughout Stone Town.

From the point of view of cuisine, culture, and health, you're much better off eating dinner in the Forodhani Gardens across the street, which is what we did after demanding our money back from the Old Fort--a completely uncharacteristic action on our part, which tells you how angry we felt to have been taken in.

The main reason to go to Changu Island (also known as Prison Island) is the system of fairly healthy coral reefs surrounding it. Coral shaped like brains, antlers, trees, or boulders grows all around the island. The dead coral is a chalky white, but live coral comes in as many colors as it does shapes: brilliant yellow, deep red-orange, rich browns, and a forest of pinks. The fish in the coral can be gorgeous: giant starfish covered with markings like copper circuits, beaked parrot fish, and shoals of tiny, shimmering, brilliant blue fish glistening like sequins in the sunlit water. (This did vary, depending on where we swam; our first stopping point by the island had spectacular coral growths but fewer fish.) The only problem we had was that the water was actually rather cold; we were forced by the temperature to get out sooner than we would have liked. (Baridi means cold.)

The trip to Changu Island is a pleasure in itself. We hired a boat to get there ( $70), and found the trip -- through the blue water and the blue sky, leaving behind the picturesque Stone Town harbor, heading towards the smaller islands -- exhilarating. The boatman, Jojo, was friendly and helpful; he spoke little English, and we spoke even less Swahili, but goodwill made communication surprisingly easy.

We went on the trip for the snorkeling, but the island is also tremendous fun to explore. When we reached it, Jojo led us off the boat, along a sandy spit of beach, and up some wooden stairs set into the hillside. The stairs passed the beginnings of a small luxury hotel which is being built on the island. (Apparently all the construction workers come from the mainland, where people are willing to be hired for lower wages.) When the hotel is complete, it will have a wonderful setting; here's hoping it doesn't take so many guests that the island's sense of privacy isn't spoiled.

Past the construction site comes the island's other attraction: a colony of giant tortoises. For about $0.50, we bought big plates of spinach, which we fed to the tortoises; huge creatures with sharp beaks, which happily chomped up the spinach from our hands. Some of the tortoises let us touch them; their necks are dusty/dry to the touch, very muscular under a thin layer of papery skin. Jojo showed us a tiny cement tank containing some three-month-old baby tortoises, about the size of small turtles, and a larger tank containing some adolescent tortoises which had reached a foot in length; apparently the young tortoises are kept in these enclosures to keep them safe from rats.

After we were done feeding tortoises and snorkeling, we walked on the beach for a while, chasing near-invisible crabs at the waterline and watching a distant gray heron. Behind us, two boatloads of girls in Muslim garb arrived and began playing on the shore, wading into the water and collecting shells. We left happy.

Zanzibar is the world's main supplier of cloves, a little nail-shaped spice that gets embedded into hams, or stuck into oranges to be hung on Christmas trees. Cloves are grown for export on Zanzibar, but the spice plantations also grow a vast selection of other spices -- cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, cardamom, vanilla, turmeric, and chilies, among others -- for local use, and as a tourist attraction.

Tours of the spice plantations can be arranged almost on every street corner in Stone Town. We booked ours through our hotel (Mbweni Ruins -- see my review) with the agency run by the charming Mohammed Ali the Second. The daytrip for six cost about $10/person. The price included hiring a van, a driver, and Mohammed himself as the main guide; we also ended up hiring a local guide named Juma on the spice plantation (another $10 total).

The tour was a gentle walk through farmed fields and light forest. As we went, we stopped every 10 or 15 yards to examine a new tree or shrub. In each case, Juma would take out a pocket knife and cut a piece of whatever the plant produced: bark from the cinnamon tree, seed pods from clove trees, fresh oranges, etc. At the beginning of the tour we were given cones made out of banana leaves, into which we dropped the fresh spices; the aroma that accumulated as we walked along smelled like something between a candy store and a Victorian fantasy of Christmas -- deliciously sweet, rich, and complex. We kept the banana cones and their contents for as long as we stayed in Zanzibar, and at the end, they still smelled splendid.

The walk through the plantation was pleasant in itself, with its rustling woods, sunny fields of taro plants, and occasional glimpses of birds and butterflies, but the spice tour was also remarkably informative. I'm fond of both cooking and gardening, so I'd known that vanilla comes from the pod of an orchid and that cinnamon sticks are actually rolls of bark, but I hadn't known that nutmeg is actually the central nut of a larger, inedible fruit, nor that fresh mace -- which is a thin, hard membrane around the nutmeg -- was a brilliant hot pink.

We had two official guides, but we were also attended by a flock of little boys who climbed orange trees to cut down oranges (the best I’ve ever eaten) and cut pineapple leaves and palm fronds to make us little souvenirs (banana-leaf jewelry for the women; palm hats and neckties for the men -- very funny-looking when we were all dressed up in a row). One older boy of about 15 climbed up a 100-foot coconut palm to cut us down ripe coconuts; he sang on his way up in a strong, clear voice, and then shimmied back down the tree to cut the coconuts open for us.

I would have expected it to be awkward to be attended by so many people, but it was actually very pleasant. The guides were very well-informed, and Juma in particular, as part of the farming community, was able to give us a real sense of what life on the spice plantation was like. The children were very friendly and eager to practice their English (which some of them spoke embarrassingly well); they were also quite ready to laugh nicely at my bad Swahili. The banana-leaf hats were silly and touristy, but the overall feeling was of having really met some interesting people.

The tour had no moments of shock, nothing spectacular, but it was very pleasant indeed, and something impossible to duplicate elsewhere - and it's the only tour I've ever taken on which I was pleased to end in a shop: a palm-thatched stall selling little packets of fresh local spices. I bought $40 worth of spices -- a huge volume which would have cost at least twice that at home -- to take home as presents for all the cooks in my family (and of course for myself).