I went for a brief walk last night and the touts were on me like mold on cheese. Going out alone at night will not be something I do until I have done more daytime exploring.
So at 8:00 I headed out to see (miracle of miracles) the park a minute's walk from the hotel, and there I was asked a question by a young man studying his geography. I showed him my photos of Vancouver—I have summer and winter ones—and he had never seen snow.
Daniel is fifteen and wants to be a lawyer. His English is very good and he is out f school because his family does not have enough money for this term, but he intends to go back and his family wants that too. So I hired him to show me the sites for the morning ($30) and made his day. He says he will use the money to celebrate Christmas with his mother (his father is away working in a mine).
Seeing the former slave market was truly awful. It upset Daniel and I both. It is one thing to know about the slave trade; it is another thing to see the cells and chains. Worse, is having been here and fallen completely for the Tanzanian people. How man could make a commodity of these extraordinary people is beyond comprehension.
Happily, I got accustomed to the heat. When I got back to the hotel, my shirt and pants were wet with sweat, but my early afternoon was spent swimming in the delicious pool and then lunching in the shade of the trees—right on the beach in a nice cooling breeze. The hotel ...
My private balcony, is through the green curtains.
Just outside my room and to the right, is this space. It is always empty and mine!
My walk with Daniel took me to Stonetown's every site except two and there are six days more to bore—I mean, go. It's 3:30 and my lips crack in the heat, so I sit under a fan in my air conditioned room with a six pack of diet coke's in my little fridge—I mean if you're going to be bored, be comfortably bored. Polysporin on my lips and Eros Ramazzotti singing to me from my iPad. And after I chill here a bit, I am going to a bookstore I see listed on the map. I am hungering for a book with pages.
When I was walking with Daniel this morning, I bought myself a huge pack of passion fruit. I love them. And the Durian here are huge and make the street stink.
I am going to use fruit as another anti-boredom strategy because this morning at breakfast, I had pineapple that, in each bite, exceeded the sweet taste of all the other pineapples I have eaten in my entire life. I had forgotten how completely I have been robbed of taste. What I am tasting here is to our organics, as organics are to Safeway.
Edwin: I think you had trouble finding Stone Town at first because old Bwana put so little into research before coming, he didn't know until he got here that Stone Town was two words and that, in fact, Stonetown is just part of Zanzibar City. It is the old town; the historical old port city that the UN has recognized because of its coral construction and (faded) colour.
I can't shake the images from the slave museum. I feel as though I have a wound on my heart; the kind that throbs whenever you stop moving to rest.
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