Jambo!

Quiz time.

Who out there knows what a cinnamon tree looks like? No? Nobody? How about nutmeg? Could you identify a nutmeg fruit on a tree? Are you even confident cinnamon and nutmeg comes from trees? No? Or no idea?

How about a different question: what about turmeric? Any idea what a turmeric plant looks like? Black pepper? Ginger? I mean I can tell you what a ginger root looks like at the grocery store, but a ginger plant from above ground? Could you pick that out? Cloves? Lemongrass? Vanilla? Vanilla is a yes, right? It's the shriveled black beans that you see in the jars at the grocery store. But...they are green on the plant. Didn't know that? Neither did I. I mean, it makes sense, but I still didn't know.

Spices were once a big deal. I mean a bigger deal than they are today on like an econonic, world domination level. Like there were wars waged over the capture and control of these food flavorings. Sounds nuts, right? But it's true. This turned out to be particularly true of nutmeg and cloves, with the Portuguese going to great lengths, including conquering whole islands in southeast Asia in the 16th century, to control the worldwide distribution of those two spices. It worked for a while with nutmeg, but cloves were too widely distributed by the time the Portuguese decided to try to take over that market, although the value of cloves continued to be high until very recently because there were so few places in the world that it could grow easily. 

Most of these spices which were historically and are today highly coveted from a culinary standpoint grow well on tropical islands located around the Indian Ocean, which coincidentally exactly describes the island of Zanzibar (I know...Zanzibar has 52 islands) where we happened to be in March of this year. While Zanzibar was not an original location of many of the spices that men and countries fought over centuries ago, there is a thriving economy based on spice production today because the farming of spices was introduced by an Omani Sultan in the nineteenth century. We figured while we were on the island, we may as well see if we can track down some locations where folks grow spices today. 

Spice farm time!

Turmeric: the plant (top) and the root (bottom) showing that familiar yellow color. And yes, it stains in root form, too.

As it turns out, visiting a spice farm in Zanzibar today is exceedingly easy. There are a TON of them. We made our way to the Jambo Spice Farm as part of a packaged day trip but I guess you could just grab a taxi (or your own rental car, I guess) and just show up on your own. They clearly from our point of view based on our visit (and the efficiency of which they paired up people arriving in multiple different cabs simultaneously) are well set up to receive a ton of visitors.

If you decide to go, plan on staying a while. We got there first thing-ish in the morning. We left about three and a half hours later. Not a typo. And it was awesome.

The term "spice farm" might be a bit of a misnomer. There are so many things growing there that are not spices. Namely fruits. Like tons and tons of fruits. And if you get on the same tour as we took, you'll be eating lunch there with the main course adequately spiced with (I assume) various crops grown on the property and you'll finish up with some dessert. Spoiler alert: it's fruit!

Spices have been around on Zanzibar for hundreds and hundreds of years. And growth and production of spices there has been around pretty much that entire length of time. They were brought there by traders from Asia, Africa and all over the Indian Ocean looking to swap their wares for gold, minerals, cloth, ivory or even slaves. Once you have the right parts of these spices in hand, it's fairly easy to grow them for your own use and to make your own money off their production if you have the right climate. And Zanzibar does. It's pretty much exactly like the place where most of these plants come from originally. 

But the large scale farming of spices as a cash crop (or crops) really didn't get going in a serious way until the Sultan of Oman, Sayyid Said bin Sultan al-Busaid, introduced organized spice farming as an industry. The trade of spices on Zanzibar is so significant to its history that even today the export of cloves and the price of that crop for export is controlled by the government. Cloves! Can you believe it? I get that it's powerful stuff but who needs cloves in their food that badly? Incredibly, cloves are the second most valuable industry in Zanzibar after tourism.

Papayas (top) and bananas (bottom). Papayas were not in season but no way I'm taking a pic of a papaya and NOT putting it on this post.

Visiting the Jambo Spice Farm is like being on some sort of walking quiz tour. What kind of tree is this? What does this leaf smell like? Identify this fruit or vine or plant. What was that heavy fruit that just fell out of a tree about a foot from you? What is this spice used for? It's non-stop but that's how they teach you about all this stuff, I guess. It worked, actually. We learned a ton. We had no idea what we didn't know about spices.

And do watch for falling fruit if you go. Especially the avocados. These are no soft, fist-sized brown avocados that you see at the grocery store, either. These things are about double that size, green and rock hard. They would hurt when dropped onto you from a plant about ten or twelve feet high. Thankfully, we didn't have to find this out.

Our guides for our test on foot around the farm were two guys named Black and Cappuccino. They are the two guys in the excellent photograph at the top of this post. Cappuccino is on the left and Black is on the right. I'm fairly confident that these are not their names given at birth but I'm not positive. We met some dudes with some unusual names like Good Luck and Monday in both Zanzibar and Uganda on this trip so it's wholly possible I'm wrong on this point. Broadly speaking, Black was the guy that told us everything about what we were seeing and smelling and tasting and avoiding from above while Cappuccino went and got us samples of whatever it was we were learning about at the time while also weaving some elaborate headdresses out of palm leaves for us to wear at the end of the tour. Cappuccino was the show; Black was the tell.

Black with a pile of coconuts (used as fertilizer) and a bough of lychees cut down by Cappuccino.

The amount of knowledge we got here was staggering. Indulge me just a little bit here.

Black pepper and vanilla? Both parasites whose vines grow up and around other plants for support.

The turmeric that we buy in the supermarket (or wherever else you buy spices) is made from the root of the plan and dried and then ground. When the leaves of the plant turn yellow, the root is ready to be harvested. Traditionally, it's been used (other than for flavoring) to help with stomach ailments, memory and skin care.

The ready when it's yellow came up again and again on this tour. We were told that as a general rule, fruits are ripe when they turn yellow or red and not while they are green. Fruits but clearly not vegetables. And I guess there are exceptions (like limes).

A banana tree takes a year to grow. To harvest the bananas, the tree is cut down because the tree is not strong enough to support the weight of a man climbing it. 

Lemon leaves smell like lemon, clove leaves smell like cloves and cinnamon bark smells like cinnamon (because the stick cinnamon is actually pieces of the bark). Cloves have been used to treat fever and diarrhea. Cinnamon is also used for healing; apparently the roots smell like Vick's, not that things that smell like Vick's are automatically good for you but I guess cinnamon root is. Or is believed to be.

Ginger is used to increase endurance. Lemongrass is used to repel mosquitos. Cardamom is used to mask the smell of alcohol and marijuana by Zanzibari teens. I question how effective this last one is. Their parents have to have used this spice for sort of stuff also, right? What do they think when their kids come home smelling like cardamom? That they have been hanging out on a spice farm? Or cooking? I don't think so.

Breadfruit is used like potatoes on Zanzibar. It's also used as a laxative. 

We did also see a durian tree, the spiky fruit (which resembled breadfruit) with a custard-like filling inside that is super smelly (some feel it smells like rotting meat). I guess it's not in season in March but we were told it's prohibited in Zanzibar to sell this fruit in town or even take it on public transportation. It smells THAT bad. One day maybe I'll find out. Never had durian.

That's quite a lot, right? There was a lot more. I kept notes while we were walking but am not putting all of those in this post.

Cinnamon (top), iodine (center) and vanilla (bottom).

But we do have to spend a little bit of time here talking about nutmeg because honestly, this plant blew me away.

So first of all, nutmeg trees are big. And they are full of fruit that looks like little round peach colored balls. I never would have imagined this, probably because to me, whole nutmeg looks like a nut. I figured they would look like walnuts on a tree. Or more accurately, I figured they would look like walnuts on a maybe four foot high tree, not something 20 feet tall or so. And yes, I realize that I'm basing my preconceived impression of what a whole nutmeg plant looks like based on knowing what a nutmeg looks like but disabusing ourselves of notions like this is part of why I travel. I know this one is really pretty small compared to some other realizations I've had while abroad but they all add up.

Cut into that nutmeg fruit and you'll find the nutmeg that I would have recognized as a whole nutmeg that I could find in a spice or grocery store. But...it's not hard, it's soft. You can cut right into it with a sharp knife, revealing something that looks like a piece of brain (or maybe a chestnut is a better point of reference here all things considered) coated with a dark brown membrane. This thing, minus the cover I guess, is the nutmeg that I'm thinking of, although the one I thought about was in its dried state.

This little ball in the center of this fruit, by the way, was the object of the Portuguese launching fleets of ships to conquer the islands where this spice grew so they could control the world market in this stuff. This little thing that we had cut open for us on our last vacation one afternoon. It's crazy to think that something like this could have started a war or at least an armed takeover of several islands in the Indian Ocean.

But nutmeg doesn't stop there. When you first cut it open before you cut the nutmeg in half, you'll find a vivid red netting looking thing (I don't know how else to describe it) surrounding the heart of the fruit. This is nutmeg's last surprise. It's mace. 

I have never used mace to flavor food with but I knew it existed. And honestly, I'd never given any thought to where mace came from, just like I'd really never given much thought to what a nutmeg tree or a cinnamon tree or a turmeric plant or anything else that is in my spice drawer really looks like in the wild. But the fact that it comes from the same plant as nutmeg just blows me away. I don't know why it does but it does for sure. I'm telling you...the stuff you learn when you get out of your own house a bit. It's mind-blowing.

Nutmeg. Nutmeg and mace. And nutmeg.

I think that's about it for spices for this post. Let's spend a little bit of time on Jambo's other bounty: fruit.

There are a ton of fruit trees at the Jambo Spice Farm and for some of these where we wanted a sample and the fruit was yellow or red, Cappuccino indulged us and climbed the tree and threw us down some fruit. I had my first star fruit ever (it's good!) and we reacquainted ourselves with some lychees that I first had from close to the tree in Costa Rica last fall (Costa Rica's were better, maybe it was the season). But there's one fruit that Cappuccino didn't go get for us: coconuts. The trees are just too tall for him to climb. I'm not knocking his ability, here. No way am I getting even two feet up a coconut tree, let alone all the way up.

That's not to say that we didn't have fresh coconuts minutes or hours removed from the palm, because we did. Just that Cappuccino wasn't going to get them for us. We needed a specialist. Enter the Banana Man, who climbs palm trees with no tools other than a length of rope that he uses to tie his feet around the tree while he shimmies up to coconut height. This is a thing to behold. Look I get that he does this every day and has honed this skill (I'm guessing) over years and years and years but it was still incredible. To watch a dude climb straight up a branchless tree trunk with zero tools other than some rope and not even rope in his hands? Astonishing!

If I had some doubt about Black and Cappuccino being their real names, by the way, there's no doubt about Banana Man. No way did his parents name him Banana Man. Probably.

Banana Man climbing a coconut palm.

There are few things more refreshing than drinking the water from a fresh coconut. I had my first one from a roadside stand in Costa Rica (complete with straw) last October. This one was just as good as soon as Banana Man had stripped it and chopped a hole suitable for making the whole thing into a giant drinking vessel. No straw this time which was totally OK. I have a thing against straws anyway.

We made full use of those coconuts. Or I guess Banana Man did it for us. We drank the water, then he carved out the meat and we had some of that. Then he found a young coconut and scooped out the young meat, which is sort of like floppy raw fish but raw fish is actually pleasing to me (at least in sushi) so maybe it's the floppy part that makes what I ate in Zanzibar texturally objectionable to me. I'm clearly not super enthusiastic about that part of the snack but I'm all in on the coconut water and the meat. We certainly didn't expect that we'd be partaking in fresh coconuts on our visit to the spice farm but fresh coconut is always welcome in my world. Just not the young coconuts necessarily.

So after walking past turmeric, papaya, avocado, banana, coconut, pineapple, vanilla, black pepper, cinnamon, star fruit, orange, lemon, durian, passion fruit, breadfruit, nutmeg, cacao, clove, ginger, coffee, aloe, lemongrass, lychee and cardamom plants, trees or vines, our time at Jambo Spice Farm was about done. All we had left was lunch. The main course was a tasty dish of rice, vegetables and chicken but not on my list of best meals ever. I appreciate the fact that pretty much everything was grown locally. 

The highlight here was dessert.

Generally, I am not much of a fruit guy. I like limes, I love pineapples and I'll eat papaya any time we are in the tropics, but I can pretty much pass on the rest. But I have to tell you, the fruit we had served to us at this spice farm was some of the best I've ever had. Plus I got to try some new stuff. It was the first time for me really eating jackfruit or passion fruit. I always appreciate the opportunity to try something new, although it in no way made up for my disappointment that papaya apparently is not in season in Africa in March. 

Those weren't the highlights.

If I have ever been served a sweeter juicier pineapple in my life, I don't know where it is. My standard go tos for breakfast when we are traveling in Africa and South or Central America are pineapple and papaya but I have never had pineapple that tasted like the stuff they handed out to us for dessert at Jambo. I know I just said this a couple of paragraphs ago but I do really love pineapple. I didn't really understand how good this fruit was before my day walking around a spice farm in Zanzibar. I don't want to say that this experience ruined pineapple for me because I've been perfectly happy (apparently) eating sub-par pineapple for 54 plus years and will continue to do so, but this stuff was the best ever.

The last piece of fruit they handed to us as the finale to our meal was a slice of mango. Now, mango I don't love. It's too peachy for me. It's not a pronounced peachiness but it's in there. And if you know me, you know I do not love stone fruit of any kind (cherries don't count as stone fruit here). I have never had a piece of mango as juicy and sweet and non-peachy as I had at the Jambo Spice Farm. Honestly, if every mango out there tasted like that one I ate on that day, I'd be eating mangos all the time. It was absolutely phenomenal. I need to possibly take another look at this fruit from now on.

First jackfruit ever for me.

This is the last post I'm writing about our Africa 2023 trip. I think it's a great way to end things. Three and a half hours learning about all sorts of spices I use every time I cook (black pepper allows me to make this statement) along with some I've never even contemplated using while discovering the best pineapple and mango I've ever put in my mouth was for sure a morning and early afternoon very well spent on our first day in Zanzibar.

When we visited Portugal about 15 months before this trip I wrote that I couldn't believe I visited a farm on vacation. The cork farm we visited in Montemor-O-Novo in the fall of 2021 wasn't the first time I'd set foot on a farm in our travels around the world. I'm pretty confident that our visit to the Jambo Spice Farm won't be the last one.

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How We Did It

We made our way to the Jambo Spice Farm as part of a larger tour called Spice Tour + Stone Town Tour + Prison Island that we found on Viator. I wrote about the second part of this particular tour (the walk through Stone Town) on my Zanzibar blog post earlier this month. 

If you take this same tour, it might help you to understand that the dude who picks you up at the hotel is a driver only. Other than saying hi and (I guess although I'm not sure I specifically remember this) asking us to follow him to his vehicle, he didn't really tell us where we were going. If it seems sort of odd for us to blindly follow a stranger and get in a car with him on our first day in place we'd never been before, maybe you are right. We asked him where we were headed first and he told us that he was taking us to a spice farm so that made us feel more confident we were with the right dude.

Also understand when you get to the spice farm itself, there are likely going to be a number of people who help you get around the farm and learn about spice production on Zanzibar that day. Roughly speaking, there is someone to walk you around the place (in our case, Black); someone to go get fruit from various trees and to make you each a crown out of palm leaves (that would be Cappuccino for us); someone to get you some coconuts (Banana Man); someone to serve you lunch; and finally someone to carve the most amazing-tasting fruit ever right in front of you. And that's not counting your driver. Bring some small bills for tips. We weren't as prepared as we could have been and had to make change at the store at the end of our time on the farm and asked Black to hand out some money to Banana Man.

This last paragraph applies if you just show up at Jambo Spice Farm on your own. Or any of the other spice farms on Zanzibar. I imagine they are all pretty much the same. There seemed to be a number of different choices right on the road we drove along. Tip your guides, folks!

Finally be prepared to spend quite a while there and learn a lot. And enjoy it.

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Women's Work

If you ever travel to the east coast of Zanzibar you might think you have gone and ended up in paradise. You might not be wrong. The Indian Ocean side of Zanzibar's main island of Unguja is a continuous soft white sand beach fronting on a gorgeously peaceful light blue and green sea that goes on forever. At least it was when we were there. I'm sure there are days and nights when the ocean is a little more fierce. But hit it at the right time and you might feel like you can stay there forever and just live on island time for the rest of your life. 

I'm not going to lie, it's very appealing. Even for a non-beach guy like me. I certainly could have stayed there a lot longer than the four nights we spent there earlier this year.

Because we didn't want to just hang out in our hotel and eat food cooked especially for us and sit on a lounge chair and sip drinks and spend whatever time we felt like each day cooling off in the hotel pool gorgeously set between majestic mature palm trees (jealous, yet?), we decided to take a trip of some type every day we were staying there to experience something about Zanzibar outside the four walls of our hotel property. The first day we took a trip to the Jozani Forest to see a ton of monkeys. The next day we got up early and went dolphin watching. For our last full day on the island we wanted to connect with the people who actually live on the island today. So, we made arrangements with a guy named Ameir to have him take us to see some of the women he grew up with in the town of Jambiani, which was just next to our hotel.

The streets of Jambiani, Zanzibar.

Believe it or not, people lived on Zanzibar before almost the whole east coast of the place was built out with resorts to serve tourists. And while it may seem to us like those people were living in a place where life is easy and always sunny (because it is for those of us who visit there today...), that's probably not true. For the men on Zanzibar, life every day involved getting up early, battling the Indian Ocean and finding enough food in a boat to feed you and your family. For the women who were left behind, well they just needed to take care of everything else. Cooking? Sure. Raising kids? Definitely. Making and/or repairing clothes? Absolutely. Minor or major house repair, including reroofing said houses? Yes, that too. Making rope for the men who were out fishing all day? Getting the picture, yet? Everything.

For some people on Zanzibar, that reality still exists today. Men still fish or work in hotels or resorts or take tourists all over the island to do whatever tourists love to do. Women still do everything else. We thought it might be both important and enjoyable to see that side of life on Zanzibar. So we left our gorgeously appointed hotel grounds where the sand is raked each morning and breakfast is ready whenever you need it to be and we spent a couple of hours with Ameir. And some of the women who have taken care of things for him in his life.

Gathering coconut shells.

Ameir picked us up from our hotel; took us to the ocean where we found two piles of rocks just submerged below the water level; grabbed a coconut shell from beneath one of those piles; and took us to meet his grandmother. If I have ever had a stranger start to a tour while I've been on vacation, I can't recall it. 

If you asked me today how people in Europe or the United States started making rope, I would not be able to tell you. I'd have to guess and I'm sure I'd be totally and completely wrong. But if you asked me how people in Zanzibar started making rope, I could tell you without a problem: they used (and still do use) coconut shells.

Ameir handed the coconut shell that he picked up from the ocean to his grandmother who then proceeded to beat the thing to a pulp with a wooden stick. Literally. When she was done, she had a mass of coconut shell length, ugly, orange fibers. Ameir referred to this as "Donald Trump's hair" and I really have no issue with that. She then proceeded to make the coconut into rope by grabbing a right-sized bunch of fibers, folding it in half, and rolling it on her leg until it bonded together into a rope. Boom! That's how rope gets made in Zanzibar. Coconut shell, water, stick, rolling on legs. Need rope for fishing or household goods? That's how it's done.

As part of our experience, we were allowed to try this technique. And by "we", I mean my wife. Rolling coconut fibers on one's leg pulls the hairs out. And, not wishing to have my legs waxed by coconut shell fibers, I watched. If you are thinking of opening some sort of business in Zanzibar to make rope out of coconuts, you'll need patience. Soak time in the ocean is 90 days. Coconuts are tough!

Making rope the old-fashioned way.

From there, we met four other women who introduced us to how women dress in Zanzibar and how baskets, clothing and roofing materials are made by the women while the men of the village were and are off fishing for food. We finished our tour on the beach again with a walk-through of the seaweed industry in Zanzibar which is cultivated for use both for food and to incorporate into wellness products like toothpaste, shampoo and medicine.

I don't know what the cost-benefit analysis of making rope from coconut shells vs. buying one made either in Zanzibar or from some other part of the world but today, ropes are woven into mats and other goods which are sold for income. This is real world stuff, both through the centuries that people have been making rope from coconuts and today by creating a source of income for people who traditionally were not part of a market driven economy.

This idea is also perhaps especially vital for women who have started their own businesses growing seaweed. While seaweed as a food source was introduced to Zanzibar by the Japanese in the late 1800s, the leveraging of this crop which is grown in parts of the ocean which can be accessed on foot (women in Zanzibar were not traditionally taught to swim) is relatively recent. Since this practice is clearly traditionally "women's work", it has allowed women to transform a traditional practice into a modern business free from the influence of men. I think that's pretty cool.

Seaweed from the Indian Ocean. It's surprisingly stiff and not salty. Yes, I ate some right from the sea.

Now, if you thought I was getting away with doing nothing hands on during this tour, you'd be wrong. Not interested in clothes making or basket weaving, but I had to try my hand at making some roofing out of palm leaves. I mean I am an architect, after all.

I watched. I learned. 

A roofing component in Zanzibar construction involves a long linear element to which are attached a series of leaves. Stack these like tiles on a sloped roof on top of a building close enough to one another and the leaves act like a continuous membrane that sheds water pretty efficiently. I can't say whether this construction is totally waterproof, mostly because I wasn't in a building roofed with these materials while it was raining. Nor can I say if there is something else like a membrane placed below a roof made of leaves. I just made a part of a single element. We didn't actually put these things in place on a home under construction or anything. 

Take the long spine that runs down the center of the palm leaf (apparently it's called an axis; I looked that up when I got home) and use it as the spine around which all the leaves are attached. Then take three palm leaves (the things that are attached to the axis of the palm on a palm tree), fold them in half and place them so that the center of the leaf is against the axis. Then take your rope (perhaps made from the Donald Trump's hair from the coconut shells), run it across the top side of the leaves, thread it under the leaves on the axis side of the leaves and pull tight. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Until you have an entire section of roofing.

Then do it again. And again. And again. This may not seem like an efficient way to make a house but when it's the only way you have of making a roof and you have a ton of palm trees all around you, it's a necessary task. Needless to say, I put about 12 leaves in place and then was ready to be done with that job. After all, I was on vacation.

We needed something the last day we spent in Zanzibar that got us out of the hotel for a couple of hours and really connected us with someone local. Spending a couple of hours with Ameir and the women he grew up with got us all that. This was totally different than anything else we did on the east coast of Zanzibar. It wasn't focused on food or wildlife or the tourist industry machine that runs the Indian Ocean side of the island. While acknowledging that we did pay for this tour and were picked up and dropped back off at our beachside hotel, this felt more real. 

And if I'm every marooned on a desert island full of palm trees and I need to make some rope and some shelter, I'm pretty much all set. As long as I can survive for 90 days for the coconuts to get soft enough to get me the raw material for the rope, that is.

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How We Did It

I feel like I'm plugging Viator a lot of these Zanzibar posts but honestly, most of the things we did on the island from our base in Jambiani was booked through that site, including our visit with Ameir for a couple of hours.

Our visit to Jambiani was the shortest and cheapest of any tour we booked while on Zanzibar. We paid an extra $20 for the ride from and to the hotel and tipped everyone we spent time with so the overall cost was a little more than the price of just the tour itself but it was worth every penny. When else are you going to be able to spend time making rope out of a coconut shell or the roof of a house out of some palm trees. 

If you want to spend some time with Ameir, the tour we booked was the Jambiani Village Women at Work and Play tour. Honestly, we saw a lot more work than play here. If you want to book this tour, just be flexible on the time. Believe it or not, the tour is tidal. The seaweed farms are accessible if the tide is in the right spot at the right time.

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Punk Monkeys

Our safari trip to Uganda was precisely what it was planned to be and exactly what it needed to be. It consisted of three daytrips focused on single species (shoebills, chimpanzees and gorillas) along with three what I'll call "traditional" safaris, half day or so excursions into a national park to see what kinds of animals we could find with no specific species focus. Two of those traditional safaris were on land and the third, which turned out to be the most memorable of three, was on a boat. We couldn't really have asked for much more from our time in Uganda. 

Well sure, we could nitpick about nature not cooperating on one of the three safaris, but what would be the point?

With our passage out of Uganda and onto the islands of Zanzibar, the safari portion of our Africa 2023 trip was largely over. But largely over is not completely over and Zanzibar had an incredible surprise for us. We may have just left one of the best primate-spotting spots on the planet in Uganda but we didn't see monkeys in mainland Africa anything like we found waiting for us in Zanzibar's Jozani Forest. Our African wildlife watching in 2023 was not over after Uganda. Not even close.

One of the first places we put on our Zanzibar list after we firmed up our plans to spend a few nights there was the Jozani Forest. Jozani is literally the only place on land where we were guaranteed quality wildlife sightings on the island. The focus here was on red colobus monkeys with a few other species as possibles, including Sykes' monkeys. No elephants, no lions, no large mammals or sizeable birds at all here. It would be mostly about the monkeys in Jozani.

I know I used the word guaranteed in the previous paragraph in regards to finding wild animals in nature. I also know I shouldn't. But I feel like this excursion was a sure thing. There's only so many places this many monkeys can hide. This was a sure thing. No foreshadowing or tricks here. No questions asked. No strings attached. A sure thing.

Why a sure thing? Well, quite simply, and I'm guessing here a bit (but not much), there's not a whole lot of forest left on Zanzibar but there are a whole lot of monkeys. To its credit, having erased most of the animals' habitat, the island has sort of banded together to preserve these monkeys (and other forest residents) as a natural resource. There is one road which passes through the forest and every time we passed through there (including at about 4:30 in the morning the day we departed), there were police forcing traffic to slow to a tortoise-like crawl to prevent any on-road casualties. As an added measure of insurance to prevent human-on-monkey crime, the government has agreed to compensate neighboring villagers for any crop damage caused by the monkeys. 

Red colobus monkey (top) and Sykes' monkey (bottom).

For its size (which is about 50 square kilometers), the Jozani Forest is quite diverse. There are at least three distinct and separate environments within the forest: an old growth forest established on top of a former coral bed; a mangrove forest; and a super large grove of fruit trees, mostly guava and almond. We spent time walking through all three and while the old growth forest and the mangroves were picturesque and very scenic, they offered little in the way of wildlife, which, you know, is kind of what we were there to see. 

Now, sure, the mangroves got us a sighting or two of the less common Sykes' monkeys and some very cool and funky red and black crabs crawling over the dense soil at the base of the forest. We also spotted a couple of Sykes' monkeys around the perimeter of the old growth forest. But the star attraction here was the red colobus monkeys, which almost without exception we found in the guava trees. And to say we found them is really an understatement. We found a ton of them. So many, in fact, that we ended up spending between the three environments, about three and a half hours total roaming around the forest. Not a typo. There was a ton to see. I told you this was a sure thing, didn't I?

And when I said that the old growth forest was on top of a former coral bed, I was serious. There were spots on our walk where we were literally walking on top of worn down coral. Not stone. Coral. If our guide, Mohammed, hadn't have pointed this out, I wouldn't have even considered that we were walking over the top of something that used to be under the Indian Ocean. Although I suppose it wasn't called the Indian Ocean at that point in time.

Old growth forest (top) and mangroves (bottom).

We had caught glimpses of red colobus monkeys in our time in Uganda the week before we arrived in Zanzibar. I mean fleeting glimpses between tree branches from far away. Nothing of any sort of quality. The Jozani Forest got us all the time we needed with these animals. Enough time to talk with both our guides, both of whom were called Mohammed, and look and watch and observe.

The red colobus is for sure a distinct looking monkey. They obviously get their red name from the rust red color on their backs but that's not where the characteristics that define this species stop. First, they have extremely long tails. We've see all sorts of monkey species all over Africa and in Central America but I don't think we've seen tails quite like the red colobus have. Maybe it's the way they sit in trees with their bodies scrunched up together and their tails dangling straight down. It's almost like the tail is about three times the length of their bodies. It's not, by the way, but sometimes it seems that long.

They also have just four fingers. This is a little unbelievable at first. I mistakenly thought that all monkeys have five fingers with opposable thumbs. They don't. Not all of them. Not the red colobus. No thumbs. None. We managed to get so close to these creatures to be able to check this out in person. That means they stayed still long enough in person right in front of us for us see for ourselves and then point it out to each other while the monkey was still right there about four feet away. 

But if there's a feature of these primates that make them irresistible, it's their haircuts. I don't mean that literally of course. There are no red colobus barbers in the Jozani forest but they all seem to have the same 'do, hair brushed straight back from their forehead and sticking straight up and out. They are for sure the punks of the animal kingdom.

We started our day in Jozani early. It's the best time to see wildlife, after all. Before the day gets too hot. We headed straight into a grove of guava trees and looked, walked and waited. In really short order, our search was rewarded. Red colobus monkeys travel in troops as large as 30 and with their protected status on the island, it's easy to grow a group to that size. Once one starts hanging around in a guava tree, it's followed by another and another and then maybe a half dozen or ten or more.

Red colobus monkeys can't process sugar so they love yellow guava, fruit that hasn't matured and developed the full sugary content of a fully ripe fruit. So find a stand of trees with unripened guava in the Jozani Forest early in the morning and you are likely guaranteed a sighting of a significant quality and length. Large troops of monkeys looking for food in the morning are active and their ages range the from the very young babies still clinging to their mothers to the eldest monkeys. Young monkeys means playing and jumping and swinging and lots of being active. And active wildlife watching is way better than animals milling around doing nothing much. 

These monkeys must see human tourists every day. That kind of audience and the fact that the locals don't chase them off based on their agreement with the Zanzibari government makes them extremely habituated to humans. We didn't see any fear or any aggression during our walk in the guava trees. I even had two monkeys at various points in the day walk within a foot of me, including one in the guava grove who pretty much pushed past me on a trail like I was just an object preventing him (assuming gender, here) from getting from point A to point B. The second occasion was a mother with baby, which was special to see. It's clear they don't care about humans if they are willing to walk right past you with an infant.

I am a firm believer in the value of actually traveling in person and just being somewhere far away from home and experiencing something you can experience nowhere else on our planet.  I am sure there are people out there who think that you can probably simulate a lot of travel experiences by strapping on a virtual reality headset and seeing what's on the screen and hearing what's coming at you through the speakers. But there's more to travel than sight and sound. If there's a recent experience that emphasized that fact to me, it was our trip to Jozani.

It's the smell.

When you are walking through those trees looking for (and finding) monkeys, the smell of guava is everywhere. It's overpowering in its sweetness. It's completely wonderful. It's a smell from that day that I will never, ever forget. It was so powerful and I am sure any smell of guava will take me back there instantly. 

Why is it so strong? Honestly, because the red colobus is a bit of a messy eater. They are prone to taking a few bites of a fruit and then just dropping it right on the ground. And when tourists like me go stomping around in their Timberlands squashing these discarded monkey half-meals it just amplifies the aroma. It's so strong that when we were traveling back to the airport from our stay on the east coast of Zanzibar and we passed through the forest, we could smell the fruit through the open car windows. I'm telling you, there's value in actually being there.

By the way...if you are walking through the forest looking for monkeys, watch out for falling guavas. There are definitely heftier fruit out there but getting clunked on the noggin is definitely a surprise. Trust me, I know from experience. It's not a papaya or a coconut or anything like that, but just watch out.

I have frequently used the word intimacy to describe our encounters with wildlife on this trip. Spending moments or longer than moments feet from a chimpanzee or a gorilla or even a colobus monkey is truly an intimate experience. The chance to get this close to a wild animal and have it be ok with you and you be totally cool just standing and watching is just amazing. I hate to be so generic in my description of this experience but honestly there's an intelligent being doing what it's doing mere feet or yards away from you and you are both just in the moment. It's something that has to be experienced. 

This day was for sure the best monkey encounter I've ever had. There were tons, they weren't concerned about our presence, they were active, they were close and they didn't attack. That last one I feel is particularly important. Every time you go out into nature to try to see something, it's a bit of a crap shoot (I'm not suggesting here realistic odds of being attacked by an animal, by the way). You never know what you are going to get. This one got us something spectacular. 

One more thing...we didn't just settle for monkeys on this trek. There were other animals to seek out in the Jozani Forest. When you first get to the park, there are a couple of giant animal spotting boards for the first time visitor to look at and assemble a wish list. Mongoose, wild pigs, duikers, civets, African wood owls, turacos and much, much more. They are all just way harder to spot than those red colobus monkeys because quite frankly there are just far fewer of them and they are not drawn to the guava trees every morning in huge groups.

We tried for a duiker or two. There's a fenced in section of the park that holds these small deer. We walked a bit of the perimeter of the fence and saw nothing. The fence is there to prevent these animals getting out onto the road and getting killed by a car. From a nature-seeking tourist perspective, the fence also prevented us from walking through that section of the park to flush one out. No big loss here. We can see deer at home.

But we did manage a look at an elephant shrew. It was fleeting, it was far away and it was gone before I could take a picture but this was a thrill just the same. When else am I realistically going to see an elephant shrew? Shrews are one of the tiniest mammals out there, they have to be fairly difficult for humans to spot and they have to be fairly tasty for other animals to eat. Now, granted, the elephant shrew is huge compared to most shrews (hence the "elephant" part of the name, which also I suppose refers to its long nose that sort of resembles a trunk) but it's still got to be pretty hard to find in the wild. I suppose the almost complete lack of predators that can find these things under a tree canopy helped a lot.

We spent most of our days in Zanzibar at our hotel on the beach fronting the Indian Ocean on the east side of the island. But we took a day trip per day each morning and every one of them was worthwhile. This one got us the most animals. Total success.

One of the two animal boards. Elephant shrew is bottom center.

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How We Did It

For our final four nights in Africa, we stayed on the east coast of Zanzibar at the Uzuri Villa, a six room hotel in Jambiani fronting right onto the Indian Ocean. We spent most of our time those last three full days at the hotel just hanging out on the hotel property which was pretty much a version of paradise. 

Each day, we took at least one quick trip out of the hotel, either arranged through the hotel or through Viator.com, which I find is a good ideas repository for things to do when we are out of town. We don't always book through Viator when we find something there but we did in this case. We picked the Jozani National Park tour through Mo Tours & Safaris. "Mo" I assume here is one of the two Mohammeds who accompanied us on our tour. We picked this tour because they were willing to pick us up from our hotel in Jambiani even though they are based out of Stone Town on the complete opposite side of the island (the island may seem small but it's at least an hour to get across it).

Honestly, both our guides were awesome. They clearly got us some great looks at all sorts of monkeys, they gave us lots of great information and when we found a small troop of red colobus along the side of the road after we'd finished our walk through the forest, they stopped and let us watch this group for 20 minutes or so. The tour time on their Viator page says three hours. We spent more than that in the Jozani Forest. Our total tour time was probably closer to 4-1/2 total. I'd highly recommend these guys. 

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Zanzibar

The first time we visited sub-Saharan Africa in 2015, we stayed for just six nights. Most people we knew told us we were crazy to go all that way for less than a week. They were probably right. We won't likely ever do that again. I think any trip to that continent where we go further than Western Africa has to be at least a two-weeker. So after eight nights in Uganda and an extra one in Rwanda, we couldn't go home just yet. We had to go somewhere else for a few nights. We picked Zanzibar.

Zanzibar for us meant two things: (1) a gorgeous white beach fronting onto the endless pale blue Indian Ocean and (2) plenty of history. We scheduled five days for all of that, four of which involved the beach and the ocean and a lot of doing not much at all. That part of the agenda would have to wait until a day after we landed on Zanzibar, though. We started our time on the west coast in a place called Stone Town.

In case the name Zanzibar doesn't mean anything to you, it is an archipelago of 52 islands in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of the African continent. It's a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania which was absorbed into that country's territory in 1964, a move so significant that it changed the name of the country from Tanganyika to Tanzania (Tanzania is a smushing together of Tanganyika and Zanzibar). We knew all that before we landed in Zanzibar because we did our homework ahead of time, but if you think I am boasting about that, read on.

Most people in Zanzibar live on one of the two largest islands, Unguja and Pemba. Most people refer to Unguja informally as Zanzibar but that's technically incorrect. We didn't know that before we set foot on Unguja. No homework done, there. The capital city of Zanzibar is Zanzibar City and its historical center is known as Stone Town. We didn't know that either before we visited; we thought the name of the city itself was Stone Town.

How great are these names, by the way? Zanzibar sounds like something out of a centuries old romantic poem and Stone Town belongs somewhere in the Game of Thrones books, I'm sure. Actually, both have nothing to do with anything like that. Zanzibar got its name from Arab and Persian explorers who named the place after what they saw when they arrived. Zanjibār in Arabic and Zang-bār in Persian means black coast. And Stone Town refers to the buildings there being constructed from...ready for this...stone.

The rooftops of Stone Town at sunset.

But before we get to Zanzibar in 2023, let's go back to that 2015 trip just for a few paragraphs.

When we landed in Africa and actually exited an airport on that trip, we found ourselves in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Not a very African sounding place, right? Nothing like Zanzibar or Unguja. That's because the town of Victoria Falls was named after the famous waterfall which was named after Queen Victoria of England who ruled Britain and the rest of the British Empire in various parts of the world from 1819 to 1901. The reason a waterfall in sub-Saharan Africa is named after a British monarch is the dude that named the Falls happened to be British. His name was David Livingstone.

Before we planned that 2015 trip that started in Zimbabwe, I didn't know a whole lot about David Livingstone. I thought he was an explorer, some dude sent along with some sort of army or at least a few troops to conquer territory in far off lands for Britain so that nation could extract valuable assets out of the land they had just taken by force. Some of that is true. He was an explorer. But he didn't go with an army of any sort. He was actually there as a missionary and what he did with the many, many years he spent in Africa in his life had nothing whatsoever to do with Britain exploiting the lands and people in present day Zimbabwe and other colonies held by his mother nation.

I'm not saying Britain didn't do that. Just that Livingstone wasn't there for that.

If you ever make it to Victoria Falls National Park, you will likely come across an oversized statue of David Livingstone. There are a series of words around the base of that statue, including "Explorer" and "Missionary". One of other words around the base of the statue is "Liberator". I am sure it is that word that would most honor Livingstone's life's work because most of his time on this planet was spent trying to end the slave trade in that part of the world. He was convinced, right or wrong, that opening Southern Africa to equitable trade would end the practice of tribal leaders selling people into slavery as a means to enrich themselves. We can debate the merits of that theory, but he tried like hell to do anything he could to stop slavery.

Since that 2015 trip to Victoria Falls, we have bumped into Livingstone in a couple of different spots. We visited his grave in Westminster Abbey in 2016 and we made a pilgrimage to his childhood home last year just outside of Glasgow, Scotland. Zanzibar would be another opportunity to check in with David Livingstone because Zanzibar was a center of international trade on the African side of the Indian Ocean. And one of its main commodities available for purchase was slaves.

Livingstone first set foot in Zanzibar in 1864, 24 years after he first set sail for Africa. When he arrived there, Zanzibar was under control of the first Sultan of Zanzibar, Sayyid Majid bin Said Al-Busaid. His father was the Sultan of Oman, who made the decision that upon his death that Omani territory be divided between two of his sons; his third son became the Sultan of Oman and his sixth, Majid, became the Sultan of Zanzibar. 

Now, lest you think Majid got the short end of this stick here, consider this: his father valued Zanzibar's location so much that he relocated the country's capital from Muscat to Stone Town. Zanzibar was that important as a port of trade between Europe; all the lands around the Indian Ocean (including Persia, the Middle East and India) and the east coast of Africa. Think about all the riches pouring through this tiny series of islands off Africa's coast. Silk. Cloth. Spices. Fruit. Ivory. Gold. Slaves. It was this sort of bonanza that led the Omanis to take it from the Portuguese in 1698.

Of course, the Portuguese knew all this too. They started looking for a means to import goods from the Silk Road and other riches from Asia when the Ottoman Empire imposed impossibly high tariffs on goods transported through their territory after they seized Constantinople in 1453. With land routes to Persia, India and beyond no longer economically feasible, the Portuguese turned to the sea and found Zanzibar to be perfect for use a base of operations from which to operate their Indian Ocean trading post.

The Portuguese took Zanzibar from its Swahili-speaking natives who had established the islands as the trading post they became by the time the Portuguese arrived in the early 1500s. Swahili speakers were the first to trade African goods for those from Asia and some of the frequent visitors from Persia, India, China and the Arabian peninsula settled and intermarried, making Zanzibar one of the first true melting pots of different peoples in the world.

Of course, those "African goods" included slaves.

If you know where to look, a walk around Stone Town will get you an insight into a lot of Zanzibar's centuries of history. If you can keep your bearings about you. If you can avoid the motorcycles and tuk-tuks and dudes pulling very large carts by hand. And if you can manage not to get lost, that is. The place is a maze of thin streets, small squares and narrow alleys defined by remarkably similar (but admittedly sometimes ornate) stone buildings with wooden trim and balconies holding hotels and museums and offices and souvenir stores and anything else that an historic economic center of an entire coast of a continent needs to operate.

And if you don't know where to look on your walk or are worried about getting lost, there are plenty of guides available to show you. Keep up and you won't get lost at all. Providing you keep up. We found a good one and we did keep up, although there were a couple of spots where we had to hustle because he had gone in front of us and disappeared around one too many corners. It happens. We found him again. Just.

Walking the streets of Stone Town, you can see the wealth accumulated by the city's residents over hundreds of years of trade in the elaborately carved doors and door frames throughout the city. You can see the mix of religions and nationalities in the 52 mosques, four Hindu temples and two Christian cathedrals. You can see memories of the now banned ivory trade that passed through Zanzibar on the walls of the Dhow Palace Hotel, itself richly adorned with fantastic wood carvings around its entryways. You can see the massive fortress erected by the Sultans of Oman to protect their hard won and extremely important treasure of a town. And I suppose if you listen, you can hear the melting pot in Swahili, English, Arabic, Persian, Hindi and Swahinglish. 

You just won't likely hear it in Portuguese. Despite holding Zanzibar for 200 or so years, all memory of those times have been blown away over the Indian Ocean. They were that hated.

And you know what? You can probably even take in all of that if you do get lost. Is there really any such thing as getting lost any more when everyone has some sort of navigation app on their phone?

The Dhow Palace Hotel, Stone Town. Full of historical photographs of the ivory trade through Zanzibar.

A remnant of Zanzibar's slave market is still around too. Most of where it used to stand was taken and used for the construction of the Anglican cathedral in town. Walk inside that house of worship and you'll see a reddish stone circle in the flooring right in front of the altar. That's the spot where the whipping post stood in the market. It's forever immortalized in the flooring of the cathedral so we don't forget. 

Outside the cathedral, there's a small Slaves Monument, statues of four chained Africans waiting to be sold at auction while being watched over by fifth statue of a slave master, a black man afforded some measure of freedom to drive and punish people who looked like him on behalf of the slaves' owners, a sort of double humiliation for the slaves and the slave master alike while sparing the people who owned these people the trouble of meting out discipline. It's completely twisted but very carefully conceived, I am sure.

We have, by the way, seen all too many of these statues of black people chained up ready for sale over the last few years of our travels. The shock never really wears off. Neither does the shame, really.

But the really disturbing place to visit in this part of town is below the cathedral, two underground rooms with little light or ventilation that were used to hold slaves prior to auction. The tiny rooms held 50 men in one room and 75 women and children in the other. These places are so tight. It must have been about as excruciatingly hot and uncomfortable and unsanitary as you could make a place. Even the geometry of the rooms was worked out to I am sure impose more pain on the occupants. There is no way for a fully grown man to stand comfortably and the room is not a single height, which meant that even if most of the people packed into these places wanted to stand, there is not enough floor space to allow them to do so. It's so sickening and creepy being in a place like that knowing somebody probably designed these places to impart a great deal of discomfort over a long period of time on whoever was confined here.  

There are varying accounts of the number of people captured and sold into slavery through Zanzibar. I've read numbers as high as 8 million people over a couple of hundred years, but that was for the entire east coast of Africa. Our guide walking us around Stone Town put the number through that place at 1.2 million. Most ended up in homes in Oman or on plantations in Brazil, Mauritius or right there in Zanzibar. Apparently, spice farming was labor intensive in the 1800s. I can't even begin to imagine the hopelessness these people felt. 

David Livingstone made several trips to Zanzibar in his lifetime. Every time he visited, he knew the East African slave trade was alive and thriving on the island. He never saw the end of it. Livingstone died in 1873 from malaria and bleeding caused by dysentery in present day Zambia. He was 60 years old. The very next year, the British government, mostly through threats of force, brokered a treaty to close the slave market in Zanzibar. I am confident in saying that all trade in slaves did not end in 1874, either in Zanzibar or over the Indian Ocean. Our guide told us there was a slave market north of Stone Town on Unguja that was still operational until 1909. But 1874 may have been the beginning of the end of open trade in slaves.

After Livingstone's death, his two companions Chuma and Susi prepared his body for transport to England. He was ultimately laid to rest in Westminster Abbey where we found his grave some seven or so years ago. During the preparation of Livingstone's body, his heart was removed from his body and buried under the tree that he died beneath.

Earlier in this post I mentioned that Zanzibar was another opportunity for us to check in with David Livingstone, but it was not just by visiting a place where he had spent time trying to end the slave trade in that part of the world. The connection to Livingstone that we sought in Stone Town was through that tree he was buried under in Zambia. Enter the Anglican cathedral and look to the left side of the altar in the crossing of the church and you'll find a simple wooden cross. That cross was made from Livingstone's death tree. This was the connection that we sought in Zanzibar. That cross.

The former location of the whipping post is marked with a stone circle in the floor (top). Livingston's cross (bottom).

We spent altogether too little time in Stone Town. Slightly less than 24 hours is not enough time by any stretch of the imagination to spend in that place. We spent our one day on an organized tour which included our walk around Stone Town but it also included about half of the time on the full day tour outside of town. We missed the Freddie Mercury Museum. We missed Prison Island. We missed the night market in Forodhani Park. We missed a lot.

What I've chosen to write down in this blog post about Stone Town is not by any means all we got out of our time there. Sometimes for us, trips connect in ways that enrich our understanding of the world, the region or even the history of humankind. Sometimes those connections are wonderful and thrilling and uplifting. The connections described in this blog post are not in that category but they are important to make nonetheless.

We had an awesome time in Stone Town. The place is magical and enchanting. Everyone we met there treated us well and enriched our stay there. We also had some of the best food of out trip and for sure stayed in the best and most comfortable hotel of our 14 nights spent in Africa. I also managed to enjoy my first ride in a tuk-tuk anywhere in the world. We've seen these vehicles in places like Kenya and Peru but I've never actually taken a ride. After a walk around Stone Town for a couple of hours in 90+ degree temperatures, a ride home at the end of the day in a tuk-tuk was extremely welcome. Sometimes it's the small things.

Tuk-tuk ride home.

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How We Did It

Our walk around Stone Town was a portion of an organized tour we found on Viator.com before we left home for our couple of weeks in Africa. The full itinerary on this tour took us to a spice farm outside of Stone Town; got us our visit to the old slave market site and about a million other things; and ended at Prison Island, where there is a colony of giant tortoises. We cut the tour short before Prison Island so we could take a taxi over to the east side of the island for our four days on the beach. There are many tours like this on Viator. We ended up on the Spice Tour + Stone Town Tour + Prison Island tour. No complaints from me on this tour. Everything went seamlessly. 

I think my one regret about our time in Stone Town was that we didn't spend enough time there. There are choices we make when we travel to spend time in many places. Ultimately we decided to prioritize as many nights in one place as possible on Zanzibar. That decision got us just a single night in Stone Town. I will say that from walking around Stone Town for a couple of hours, the place seemed manageable and walkable and comfortable. At no time did we feel unsafe or in any danger whatsoever. If you want to stay in a hotel that will pamper you without breaking the bank, check out the Spice Tree Hotel by Turaco. It's a Marriott property now but it wasn't when we visited. The breakfast spread is just incredible. 

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