Wandergliding: Stone Town, Zanzibar

January 9^th, 2024

I decided to hire Ziggy to take me from Kilifi to the Mombasa airport to catch my flight to Zanzibar Island. I didn’t want to risk the uncertainty of taking a matatu as you never know how long the journey will take, plus I did want to get all sweaty and uncomfortable in a packed van. We took a road that circumvented the city to reach the airport which is on the north side of Mombasa. It was a nice ride with some good scenery here and there.

Nice baobab tree, with more in the background:

The Mombasa International Airport:

The flight to Zanzibar was only 45 minutes, which was a much quicker way to get there than had I gone by bus to Dar Es Salaam and taken a ferry, which would be a minimum of a day and a half journey. As usual, when arriving in a new country, the first orders of business are to get some local currency and a sim card. After achieving both in the small terminal, I was escorted to a parking lot to get a taxi. A German man about my age and his younger Kenyan girlfriend asked if they could share a taxi with me. Frank and Tifffany hadn’t booked a room yet, so they didn’t mind getting dropped off at my hostel.

Mombasa from the air:

My first view of the north end of Zanzibar Island:

Stone Town in the distance, where I will be spending the night:

Zanzibar City looks pretty densely populated:

Zanzibar airport:

Traffic was pretty bad along the 7 kilometres to get to the old part of Zanzibar City known as Stone Town, this was not helped by construction on the road. I immediately noticed that there were a lot more cars than motorcycles in Zanzibar compared to where I had just come from in Kenya. The taxi driver dropped us off and wanted more money than was agreed to at the airport. He wanted $15 for me and $15 for the couple, instead of just $15 that was mentioned when we got in the cab. It made not sense…why would we have bothered sharing the taxi then?!? We gave him 40,000 shillings which was about $20 and left it at that.

We walked about 50 meters down a narrow alleyway, which are ubiquitous in Stone Town. I was staying at Shoki Shoki Hostel but it turns out we were at Shoki Shoki House, a slightly fancier place with the same owner as the hostel. I asked the woman behind the desk if this happened often…and it does. Luckily the other place was only a 4-minute walk away through the labyrinth of the pedestrian streets. There were no private rooms available for Frank and Tiffany at the hostel, so I bid them adieu and got settled in to my dorm room.

An actual street in Stone Town, most aren't this wide.

Most of them look like this:

It was late in the afternoon, but I noticed on Google Maps that the Freddie Mercury Museum was quite close by, so I decided to go and visit it. Born as Farrokh Bulsara, the lead singer of Queen spent the first part of his live in Stone Town. In my previous research of Stone Town, I had read some reviews that the museum was quite small, and hardly worth the $8 USD admission fee. Unfortunately, that proved to be correct. The museum was about the size of a one-bedroom apartment and mostly comprised of pictures, text and some handwritten sheets of lyrics. The only actual items were a couple of leather jackets and a piano. I think I was out the exit in about 10 minutes, even though I do like Queen!

There was a line up of people off to the right waiting to get their photo taken like this woman here...I decided not to wait.

Freddie's story:

One of two of the exhibits:

And the other one...

This was what most of the museum looked like:

I went for a bit of a wander around Stone Town, walking along the waterfront. There’s definitely a fair amount of commercialization with lots of stores and street vendors trying to hawk their goods to any white skinned tourist they could find.

Nice tunnel through a building:

A park near the waterfront:

The Zanzibar causeway and port:

This was in the Old Fort, which was free to enter. It had numerous shops with their touristy trinkets.

An amphitheater in the fort:

It was hot and approaching dinnertime, so I found a nice restaurant on the beach called Livingstones. Some unexpected entertainment showed up around a half an hour later. A group of local guys started doing tumbling runs down the sand towards the ocean. Most of them looked to be in their twenties but there was one kid who might have been 11 or 12 years old…good on him. They were impressive with a few of them pulling double forward flips!

My first Tanzanian beer. You can choose between Kilimanjaro, Serengeti or Safari.