Wow, Zanzibar is beautiful!! My last message was in Stone Town. We spent the day here, exploring and went to the night market for dinner. There's basically loads of stalls, all selling different foods. There were so many sea food stalls. All the fish is already cooked, you choose what you want to eat, then they take it and reheat it. Hmmmm, now thinking about it, it doesn't sound like a good idea... and it wasn't. Loads of us had dodgy stomachs the next day! :-) I ate Prawns on skewers and a vegetable samosa. Oh yeah, whilst we were sitting there, we had some dodgy locals chatting to us and not leaving us alone.
Anyway, the next day we started off with a spice tour. We went to Butterfly spice farm. Now I was amazed to see some of the spices mum uses in the cooking just growing on trees. We tried the cardamom pods, cloves, black pepper and loads of other stuff. We saw tumeric and ginger growing, pineapples, avocados, jackfruit, and a whole load more! It was great. Also vanilla pods and cinnamon sticks (which are basically the bark off of the trees!). They then took us to a little shack where we could try loads of different fruits. The Jackfruit had a hard cheesy rubber texture, but tasted really nice. We also tried custard-apple, ginger tea, masala tea and lemon tea ( i think). It was all so nice!!
After getting a meal cooked for us by a local family, we headed to the beautiful northern beaches of Nungwi, Zanzibar. We stayed at the Amaan Bungalows, and Rona, Iris and I were fortunate enough to get a triple room which had a sea view. It was lovely, so nice to get a nice room at the end of the trip. The beds were almost a double each! My thing about wet floors came into play here, as we had no shower curtain, so i had to go to reception to ask for one, this was going to be the first of many trips our room made to reception, I think they were so glad when we left!
The beach was just down the path then some steps. It was gorgeous. The bar at the bottom became our local as we spent nearly the whole day of every day sunbathing near the entrance of the bar.
Rona, Sam and I went snorkelling at the Mnemba Atol. It wasn't as good as I thought it was going to be, probably cos we did the cheaper local tour. It was good fun though. I'm not sure if I said earlier, but rumour had it that there were sea horses to be seen whilst diving. Now, these are 1 creature I really wanted to see, so after the not so great snorkelling, I had to do the diving. So glad I did, we had a fab time. Iris and I were buddies on our own private dive to Hunga reef and Shane's reef just off Zanzibar island. We saw a turtle, crocodile fish, a humongous octopus, blue spotted rays, lion fish, scorpion fish, coral shonefish, and best of all, a dark blue sea horse!! It was brilliant... although I was a bit sick after getting back.
We spent the next day just sunbathing on the beach. I'm so burnt!!
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