The mighty Kilimanjaro IV rocked easily at anchor and disgorged its human cargo onto the wharf at Zanzibar which seemed less than impressed at being so honoured. Burdened by my worldly goods (or such of them as I had brought with me) I struggled up the ramp to passport control. Once my passport was stamped I went along to customs to have my bags checked and then passed on to a stern, unsmiling man who patted me down and demanded to see the stamp his colleague sitting ten metres away had put in my passport a mere five minutes ago. Which actually caused a problem as he hadn't done a very good job of it and it took the combined efforts of myself and my searcher to find it. Eventually he decided I was unlikely to be either an illegal immigrant or an international drug smuggler and reluctantly let me through.
"Wait a minute!" I hear you cry. "Customs? Passport Control? Surely Zanzibar is part of Tanzania?" Well yes it is in much the same way as Scotland is part of the same country as England. Tanzania is an archipelago off the coast of the African mainland. The mainland part of the country is called Tanganyika. Tanzania is actually an acronym which stands for TANganyika-ZANzibar Independent Association. Zanzibar is semi-autonomous. Exactly how semi depends on who you ask but they have their own president, their own flag and, most tellingly of all, their own football team. It is fair to say that the marriage between the two entities has not been without its little tensions.
Once through customs we headed to our hotel where we dropped our bags and went off to visit a spice farm, as you do. Spices are a major export for Zanzibar particularly now that their other principal export, slaves, is somewhat politically incorrect. We were driven out of Zanzibar City into the countryside which was the usual messy collection of trees, bushes and weeds scattered about the place with no particular sense of order. We stopped in the middle of this and were informed we were in a spice farm.
It didn't look like a farm to me. I have a very definite idea of what a farm looks like and it involves orderly rows of vegetables presenting themselves for inspection with some lean, elderly person commenting on how dreadful things had been lately and he didn't know how they were going to survive. I asked our guide about this but apparently Zanzibarians are currently getting pretty good prices for their product and certainly good enough to make the hapless coffee producers of the mainland grind their teeth in envy.
The farm was a profusion of trees and bushes grown apparently (but not actually) at random. Our guide wandered through them leaping onto one innocent looking plant after another and proclaiming them to be cardamon or turmeric or pepper or vanilla or now forgotten others as the case may be. On a slightly relevant sidebar, vanilla icecream on Zanzibar is absolute heaven. After the tour we were fed sames of various spiced teas, the ginger tea was surprisingly good, and were then feasted on octopus which the farm apparently doesn't grow. We were also, of course, given the opportunity to buy spices. I picked up a bunch for my Mother which I'm hoping make it through customs.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment