A very early morning flight to Zanzibar in a propellor plane. On the drive to the airport I saw a woman balancing a large basket of bananas on her head and a man riding a bicycle with a precarious tower of pallets stacked on the back.
In the afternoon we went for a walk around the maze of backstreets in Stone Town. It's packed with shop upon shop seemingly selling identical tourist nick-nacks. How any of them could make any money competing for the exact same market was beyond me. There didn't seem to be many tourists around, but everyone greeted us hopefully with a smile and a cry of "Jambo!" They love early Hollyoaks over here in Tanzania and I guess to them every white person looks a bit like the actor Will Mellor. Ha ha, I am funny. In fact "Jambo" means "Hello" in Swahili. But for the first time, as tiredness is subsiding I felt like I was in Africa.
After a couple of hours of walking I suggested we get a coffee and Tony (who lives in Dar Es Salaam and has been to Stone City before) tried to find the Zanzibar Coffee House, which he'd been to just last week. But even though there were signs on seemingly every corner pointing the way we still got lost in the warren of streets and suddenly had lost all sense of direction and had no idea where we were. Tony asked a couple of locals where we had to go: neither of them seemed to know, but were still intent on helping us, telling us they knew someone who would know and going to find them. This went on for some time and finally the third or fourth person we asked, knew someone who knew where we were going and he kindly led us to our destination, chatting happily to Tony about London as we went.
It seems a very friendly place and though I am feeling embarrassed by my relative super-wealth when there is clearly a lot of poverty around (none of the locals knew where the coffee house was because I suppose they could not afford to drink there) the warmth and friendliness of the local people is genuine and endearing. Imagine someone in London offering to escort a tourist to a Starbucks some five minutes walk away.
After all this walking in the heat a coffee and a glass of water were most welcome. We sat by an open window (more like a door down to the ground) with a nice breeze coming in through the thin material acting as a curtain. Five or six local children saw us there and shouted "Jambo!" at us as we drank. "Jambo!" we replied. They laughed and beamed at us and shouted "Jambo!" again. We smiled and said "Jambo!" back. They were thoroughly amused by this game and it continued for quite some minutes. We were tiring of it while they showed no sign of no longer finding it amusing. Finally they started shouting "Jambo! Bye!" but made no motion to leave. "Jambo! Bye!" I replied, being the adult who was most keen to continue with this childish behaviour. I pulled faces at the littlest boy and he laughed and repeated "Jambo! Bye!" It seemed they were indeed going, but within about two minutes they all returned to continue this game. I wanted to show I could out-Jambo them. They had started enjoying saying "Jaaambo!" so I said "Jaaaaaaaaaaambo!" but none of them seemed keen to try and prolong the word Jambo any further, perhaps finding my behaviour a little childish. Evenso we continued this conversation using essentially one word for another few minutes before the kids decided to give it up for good now.
But it had been genuinely funny and lovely and innocent fun and a moment of human connection which we all enjoyed as much as each other. I like it here.
