They have great food here. We start off the morning with an early breakfast around 7:45 a.m. We have mango and papaya fruit and for those of you who have never tried them (likely most of you) they taste really good.
We do plan a beach day to catch some sun rays because we were in pants and long sleeve shirts for most of the safaris in Uganda and the Serengeti to avoid pests and nettles. Try that on the equator! Anyhow, I wouldn't bother reading a blog about beaching so I won't bore you with covering that. There was too many other ridiculous as well as interesting things to report on.
Each time we landed at an airport, our travel agency had arranged for a driver to meet us at Arrivals and take us to our accommodations. For Zanzibar it was a nice Muslim gentleman names Haji (named after the Haj....look it up Janet). He was hired to take us to our first destination, Pongwe Beach Resort. When we explained to him what we hoped to see and do while in Zanzibar, he proposed a package deal to pick us up and take us to our second destination and on the way, stop and wait for us while we did the Spice tour. For some unknown reason he also took the time to explain to us that there is a thriving drug industry in Zanzibar including the distribution of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, etc. This morning, my dear sister-in-law "Weezie" read from the book we purchased prior to our trip on Tanzania informing us that many of the tour guides in Zanzibar are heroin addicts. Oh, oh. Hakuna Matata.
On this same drive, we travelled through an area that looked like a market and Haji informed us it was called Bububu. There use to be a train on the island and this is where it was headquartered. According to Haji the region got it's name from the sound that the train made......bu....bu...bu. The hotel manager at Pongwe Beach, on the otherhand, told us Bububu is where all the bottled water is processed for the island and the area was named after the sound of bubbling water. Bu.....bu....bu. Strike 2 for Haji. Hakuna Matata.
The people themselves, have proved to be very industrious. As you might expect, there are a lot of "village industries". One of these industries is fishing with nets during low tide which we witnessed this morning. The fish they catch is called "dagaa" and they sell it in the local markets. Two individuals stretched out a fishing net in the ocean that was about 50 feet long and slowly created a corral in the water. A third individual started splashing the water to direct the fish into the corral as well as the two individuals at either end of the net. It took them about 1/2 hour but they successfully filled a bucket only about a 100 feet offshore in the shallow water.
At the same time, there was several muslim ladies in full garb in the receding tide with baskets on their head picking up "tuale" (pronounced twal-ee) which are small crabs and "mwani" which is a seaweed that they extract oil from, again, both to sell at the local markets. They don't seem to be concerned that their "saris" are getting wet and they spend the next 4 hours in the shallow waters working away until the tide starts coming back in.
During the low tide, we decide to walk towards a nearby village to explore the area. By now the ocean has receded about 1/2 mile allowing us to walk further afield. Again we observe several women collecting large quantities of seaweed and hanging it on racks to dry in the midday sun. We see literally hundreds of these bundles of seaweed on racks along the shoreline. We are told by the Pongwe hotel manager that this seaweed will be exported to Japan and used in the manufacturing of rubber.
It is really remarkable that everything seems to have a purpose especially in generating an income similar to what we experienced on mainland Africa. The people seem really content and fulfilled with what they are doing. We try to imagine if this will always be the case. Hakuna Matata.
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