Travelling Hopefully - Getting Lost in Stone Town

Zanzibar City is the largest city on the island but I spent all of my time in one small part of it.  Specifically I stayed in Stone Town which is the city's requisite "old town".  Every city several centuries old has one of these and its difficult to tell whether it was a farsighted eye for the future tourist dollar or a simple lack of civic planning which permitted so many of them to survive.  Stone Town is roughly triangular in shape, bordered on two sides by sea and on the third by Creek Road beyond which is the rest of the city.

Anyone who is familiar with Indiana Jones movies or the sort of sword and sorcery Conan ripoffs will immediately recognise Stone Town.  If, like me, you spent a certain amount of your formative years playing Dungeons and Dragons then Stone Town will likewise be familiar.  It is a maze of narrow alleys, and multistory buildings all jumbled together in a confusing mass.  Small, dark rooms open directly onto the streets which are rarely more than three feet wide.  It is also probably the coolest part of the island as the sun can't really penetrate the buildings very much and the underlying humidity won't make itself felt unless you exert yourself by doing something strenuous like walking or breathing.

Naturally most of the little shops (and they were little, even the biggest) cater to tourists but there are also photocopying places, local markets, cyber cafes, mosques and schools plus one or two places selling whitegoods despite the fact that you couldn't fit more than two or three items into each shop.  People lived in the street, a fact that you noticed more at night when you would expect at least the children to be inside.

I fell mildly in love with Stone Town.  I loved the maze of narrow crooked streets and the jumble of buildings all on top of each other.  The people seemed friendly, or at least alive enough to the importance of tourism to appear friendly but what really got me was the cats.  There are a lot of cats in Stone Town.  All of them are thin but none seem to be starving and none gave any indication of ill treatment or neglect.  I passed by a mosque during evening prayers and there were a dozen cats lolling about outside in calm expectation.  It was obvious that once the Word of God was attended to the more important Feeding of Cats would take place.

Getting lost in Stone Town is childishly easy.  Over the course of three days or so I got lost so many times an argument could be made for saying I never knew where I was.  However if you have a map with the major landmarks it is impossible to stay lost for very long as Stone Town is so small that walking a couple of hundred metres in any direction will bring you to one of these landmarks and let you reorient yourself, briefly.  Then you can take a step forward and be lost again.

I stayed in a house in Stone Town which it took me fifteen minutes to find despite the fact that I was never more than a hundred metres from it.  A cool airy room on the second floor with views overlooking, well, overlooking the windows of the house across the street which you could almost reach out and touch.  It was an ideal location from which to journey out across the town.

Down by the sea are some more substantial buildings including the fancy hotels, the House of Wonders and the Old Arab Fort.  The Old Arab Fort is an old Arab fort, hence the name.  The House of Wonders is the former palace of the Sultans of Zanzibar, the title comes from the fact that when it was built it was the first house on the island to have running water, electricity and a lift.  It is now a museum or rather it was a museum until a bit of it collapsed a few years ago.  Funds were allocated for its repair but according to my guide the money has mysteriously vanished.  For Queen fans you can also see the house where Freddie Mercury spent not very much of his life.