Prison Island!

Sorry for the extremely late update! Very much like the slow-poke giants that I'm going to talk abt in this post :)

So this is the morning part of Su's birthday (21st Sept). After a hearty birthday breakfast, we all set out to the docks in search of a boat to bring us to Prison Island. Rebec has informed us beforehand that from her expreience, we MUST bargain for a good price - which basically is 30,000 Tsh and we should not accept anything more than that.

Being Singaporeans, we of course excelled in that aspect. As we approached the beach, we soon were hounded by kids with various offers to take us to the island. But they were not the boatmen themselves but sort of customer-wranglers for the boatmen. We suspect they get a cut from the boatmen.

We randomly picked a kid who looked honest enough and he promptly ran off and found us 2 (or was it 3?) boatmen. We bargained amongst the 2/3 and went with the one that agreed on our price of 30,000 Tsh. He just agreed on that price for a return trip to Prison Island, with no other clause attached. (this little detail is important to a later part of the story)

We set off happily to the island halfway through the journey on the sea, the boatman asked how long we were planning to stay at the island. We said around 2hrs.

When we reached the island, it was truely a beautiful and quaint little island. In bid to celebrate Su's birthday and treat her like a queen, Qh and Rebec created a "sedan" to carry her off the boat – which Su’s wisely rejected. It really didn’t look very safe!

And of course, Prison Island became Su-Anne’s Island for the day!

Prison Island is a bit of a misnomer because it was never used to imprison people! It was used for a little while as a quarantine station but now, it is a popular tourist attraction, as well as home to some giant....TORTOISES!

That was where were headed off to first... the GIANT TORTOISE sanctuary! To quote Yan when she saw our photo, “Wah!!! Huge assss!” See it for yourself!

They are really huge and they are really hungry for food. The small ones in the cage will clumber over the others just to get to the food.

And they move really, really, slowly........ W and I spent a good 10min waiting for one huge one to TURN AROUND – like 90degrees...not even a 180degrees turn!

But we really did enjoy being around the giants and spent a good 45min or so at the sanctuary. Thereafter, we went to explore an old building which had many interesting backdrops that we took loads and loads of posy and weird-posy photos! We even made a little video there... i’ll put it up as soon as i edit it (ok which may not be so soon).

Posy photos...

Weird-posy photos...

We were running a little late as we headed back to the beach to look for our boatman. More picture-taking ensued at the beach – how can we resist?! Just take a look at the incredible blue sea and sky and the white sandy beach!!!!!

Even more blue...

All photo-taking ceased however, when our boatman told us that he’ll be charging us with extra 10,000Tsh for being late. Checking our watches, we were just around 20min late!

Much unhappiness ensued over this increase in price because
a) When he agreed on the price, he did not say that we must be done in 2 hours
b) Even if we were to pay for the extra time spent on the island, it will not be as much as 10,000 Tsh

I think we created quite a bit of a scene on the beach – well, not that there were that many people watching, just a couple of tourists and their boatman – and argued with the boatman for a good 10-15min. He ultimately brought down his price to 5,000 Tsh increment and as we were getting tired of arguing, we went with that.

Last look at the beautiful Prison Island...

It was a dampener to an otherwise very good start to the day. Even on the way back, the boatman “jokingly” told us that he’ll drop us off at another place on the main island and we’ll have to take a dala dala back to Stonetown. It was only after we All threw him DAGGER STARES that he said that he was joking.

The mood on the way back to the main island was rather sombre and the boatman prob got a little scared because Rebec said very seriously she was going to tell all the tourists not to take his boat. He hastily retracted his request for the increment just before we got on shore on the main island.

Well, so i guess all ended pretty ok... and we had a nice big nasi bryani meal after!

Exploring the Beach outside Rebec's house!

Since Su and W's post both mentioned how I insisted on getting everyone out trooping to the beach to look for STAR FISH! Here's the post on sea side exploration just outside Rebec's house.

This was one of my favourite moments in the trip! How cool is it to have a beach full of cool corals, sand crabs, sea urchins, sea cucumbers and STARFISH just outside your house!!
Ok.. So here goes.

23rd September
During breakfast at around 9.50 am, Rebec commented that it was low tide and asked if I'd like to go out and explore. I jumped at the chance. If we missed the low tide, we'd have to wait 12 hours later and wouldn't be able to see anything at night. QH, TY and I put on the booties and went out.
I was eager to go as far out to the sea as possible before the tide went up started moving ahead of TY and QH. When I looked back, the 2 were deeply engrossed in poking something among the sand and were not moving at all. They looked like two little children!

(Clockwise from top left: QH,TY poking around in the sand; Worm shit; black sea urchin, red sea urchin; some flower coral?; sandcrab)

I amused myself, taking some pictures of the crabs, sea urchins, sea weed etc, but my camera battery died on me! And it wasn't fun along with no camera, so I decided to join the two adventurers. However, we did not find any starfish and the tide was coming in. We did not want to get stuck on an island off shore, so we quickly returned to the house! We HAD to go out again!

25th September

This was the last day of our Tanzania adventures and I felt like there was still something we had to do! We had to find a starfish! Even though we slept at 4 am the night before, I set the alarm for 8.30 am and forced myself out of the bed. The plan was to prepare everything, so that Mama Rebec would let me out of the house to explore the seashore before we had to leave for the airport at 10.45 am! However, due to my dismay, the low tide of 25th was much later at 11.15 am and I was afraid that we wouldn't be able to explore! I sat patiently at the breakfast table and checked the tide at short intervals.

Slowly, others started waking up and having their breakfast and somehow everyone was interested in visiting the seaside one last time and Rebec had Nick join us. "He's very good at finding starfishes", R said, before Nick and I stepped out of the house before the others. So I was very hopeful of finding a starfish! When Nick said that he may or may not find a starfish, I misheard it as "Is that a Starfish?" and I was like "Where???"

The summary is that the short 30 minutes outside on the beach was very eventful, because Nick found us a superb STARFISH which was big, fancy, colourful and PERFECTO!

Yey! Thank you R for sending your trusty husband out to find the Starfish! Sigh! I think we gave R a certain amount of stress with our demands throughout the trip. "We have to see a LION!" " I want to see a STARFISH!" "I have never been in a Cloud!" Check Check Check!!!

(Clockwise from top left: STARFISH from the back; small starfish; STARFISH from the front; 6 of us as seashore explorers; Nick, the STARFISH discoverer, Thank you!; 6 of us posing with STARFISH and sea cucumber)

Snorkeling at Mnemba atoll

20th September 2010
We woke up bright and early for breakfast which consisted of a huge platter of fruits, fresh orange juice, coffee, omelettes and yummy toast.

We had booked a snorkeling trip with a dive centre (OneOcean) and were snorkeling around Mnemba Atoll, which is a popular snorkeling and diving site near Matemwe beach, where we were staying.

It was a very bumpy and stuffy 15 minutes bus ride, before we arrived at the site to board the mother boat (Caroline). Here is the one and only picture we took during the snorkeling trip! (SAD!!!), because we did not want to get the cameras wet and promptly kept them in the dry box once on board the boat.

Please bear with the rest of this PHOTO-Less post!

Su packed her equipment on to the boat, but decided not to snorkel in the end because she wasn't feeling well. We had a mini lesson on marine life where the guide showed us pictures and hand signs to signal different types of fish, before we left Caroline and the rest of the divers for smaller boat to begin our snorkeling expedition.

Less than 3 minutes into the smaller boat - when we were barely ready, the skipper and guide started signalling to us that there were dolphins in the water and for us to quickly get into the water to swim with them. We saw dophins swimming at the surface of the water and jumping. Most of us were still unprepared and started to hastily put on our snorkelling masks and get into the water. I think most of us plopped into the water instead of sliding in which I later read somewhere that it can scare away the dolphins.

In the waters, I saw about 6 dolphins swimming under me. However, they were a couple of metres below me and weren't really swimming WITH me. The dolphins swim much faster and we lost them after a while, so we had to get back into the boat once or twice to catch up with them. W, is the best swimmer of us and she managed to swim behind some dolphins swimming on the surface. How cool is that... Kiwi didn't need to chase after them, one dolphin came swimming in her direction on its own. I was quickly tired from chasing dolphins due to the less than calm waters.


Here I'm posting a photo of dolphins WHICH WE DID NOT TAKE. This photo was taken from http://africafreak.com/zanzibar-swimming-with-dolphins-at-kizimkazi. I just felt that there was too much dolphin text, with no dophin photo.

The previous day, we agreed to not take a dolphin-tour trip, because we decided that it was pretty pointless and contrived to take a boat simply to search for dolphins. But then! The dolphins appeared anyway during our snorkeling trip, so it was a bonus.

After the whole dolphin excitement, we proceeded to the snorkeling sites. The water was much calmer and we proceeded to swim around leisurely, looking around for coral reef fishes. We saw numerous different fish in all sorts of colours. We tried to identify a couple and the guide pointed out the more significant ones like trumpet fish, eel, clown fish, bat fish. It's fun just admiring the fish even if we don't know what type they are. We followed up with some simple lunch on board Caroline, before continuing our snorkeling at another site. Again, here.. I think we should have invested in some water proof camera of sorts cos I have no photos to post!!! Oh well! The next snorkeling trip!

At the end of the snorkeling, I'm not sure about the rest, but I was very relieved to be breathing through my NOSE again and feeling like I had enough oxygen in each breath.

After Snorkeling, we returned to Sunshine Hotel where spent the last 3 hours, lounging by the pool, swimming and having our second lunch!

Here is my attempt to be a dangerous predator spying on my prey, W, as she relaxed by the pool. Luckily, W had the camera, or I may have ambused. These captions on the photos are not by my choice!
We then headed away from the beach, towards Stone town. Stonetown, Part 2 of our Zanzibar trip can be found in another posting by Su!
During the hour long journey, Mama Rebec taught me an important survival skill - How to tie a headscarf or shall i say headmask?! Useful for blocking out the wind, sand and sun.

(Btw, in case you think Rebec learnt this in her travels of Africa.. um, no. she learnt this from Top Gear, the tv show.-WL)

...

teary liling at doha airport after seeing photo rebec posted. her specs was all fogged up.

(wah, background guy with muscular back)

anyway, so happy i had this fantastic adventure. i want more!

dardar

After all the exciting events, it was back to dar, where the end of our holiday looms (once again, sian sana!!). first chinese meal in dar, cantonese food to celebrate mid-autumn fest, which was amazingly good. then back home to eat mooncake, light lanterns and admire moon (and watch american top model). thanks to liling's mother, we had paper lanterns to play with! and together with rebec's colourful lamp, we sillily walk around the living room with the lanterns. nick also awe us with his lantern-twirlling skills, which didnt catch fire (damn).

next morning, intertidal discovery walk outside rebec and nick's house. loads of crabs and crabshit (which after research, turned out to be worm shit (http://chekjawa.nus.edu.sg/ria/text/376.htm), corals, some clam-like thing which ty thought was a shell, but somehow it can move, fishes, and bombs (urchins). but no starfish! thankfully, liling's eagerness to find starfish led us to go out again the next morning (25th sep) during low tide, minutes before we were going to leave. and nick found us an impressive red big starfish!

(waiting for pictures!)

the rest of the time was spent nuahing, uploading and looking at photos, reading and talking bout relationships, baking brownies (yum yum), eating nonstop, shopping, bumpy rides for shortcuts and to avoid jams and it all ended with a fulfilling bbq dinner with rebec and nick's friends - lisa, jim and gabriel, where we talked about most enjoyable trip moments, effective punishment/torture methods and some interesting habits.

(while rebec was busy looking for stuff on her shopping list, inspired by wanlin's photos, we went in search for our true colours)

yum yum!

(i am still suffering the heaty aftereffects....)

hot!

(fyi: nick had ear plugs round his neck in case we were too noisy; oil has higher specific heat capacity than water; gizzard is poultry stomach; crabs must be cooked alive and whole; never drink the red soup)

(clockwise: rebec with lisa and gabriel, nick demonstrating what his crazy teacher used to do, wanlin and liling playing with food tsk tsk, su and me!, su's effort to make sure we are the only ones eating, and we have a lot to eat! bulgogi and kimchi made my lisa, carrots and cucumber chopped by su, mushrooms chopped and marinated by ty, meat bbqed by nick and jim, eggplant veg and pasta cooked by rebec, wahhhhh)

Stone Town - Heart of Zanzibar

(From here on out, the entries may not be in chronological order since they are written by all of us at a similar time.. so dates represent when they occurred!)

20 September 2010

With much inertia, we finally let ourselves be brought away from the north east coast of Zanzibar. On the evening of 20 September 2010, we reached Stone Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The town is a labyrinth of alleyways and buildings with Arab, Persian, Indian, European and African influences.

We stayed at Kisiwa House, built in 1840 by a rich Omani merchant. The manager informed that much of the furniture in the house belonged to the original occupants and almost 170 years old.

That night, Rebec brought us to the Forodhani Gardens night market where we stuffed ourselves with kebabs and the yummiest Zanzibar pizzas. (Clockwise, starting from left: chef making our zanzibar pizza; chefs reloading the chips platter from a bucket; chef from whom we bought our sticks of kebabs, slathering on some ketchup on chips for another customer)

We also found sugarcane juice!!

(sugar cane man hard at work)

The call to prayer filled the air at about 5am the next morning and woke me up for my birthday!! :)

First meal was fruit platter with fruit juice. NICE.
(for those who don't get the irony of this, please read initial post introducing key members of the group)



I will leave TY to fill in the details on our morning expedition to Prison Island.

On our exploration of Stone Town, we were greeted by "Karibu" (Swahili for "Welcome"), "Japanese?", "Korean?", "China?" EVERY STEP of the way (no exaggeration here) and "Hakuna Matata" every time we had to turn down an offer to purchase some goods.


Here are some pics from the spice market. Clockwise from Top Left: W looking shocked (at the price??); Haggling; Haggling somemore; And Finally, everyone pleased with the completion of the purchase :)


(ok, this is me and a cat in one of the alleyways, photo collage courtesy of W and R)

That night, we went back to "da-bao" the kebabs and pizzas from the night market to enjoy it in the comforts of Kisiwa House. The girls told me that was my birthday dinner, with a pizza as my birthday cake, and that we would just go for drinks after the shower. How could I believe that the bunch of them would be satisfied with that little food!! After shower, i stepped out of our room and heard Rebec shouting to TY and me to go upstairs. I went up and was surprised with a huge chocolate cake (er, which we finished that same night anyway) and other very yummy dishes, namely, Piri Piri grilled chicken, Black Pepper Beef Fillet, Changu with Coconut Marinade and Crab Ravioli (list of food courtesy of Rebec's wonderful memory!) .

After a toast of Amarula (an African cram liqeur) and Adam's Ale for some, we retired ack to my and TY's room and found that they were very aptly screening The White Masai on one of the Channels!


(Clockwise from Top Left: Us back in my and TY's room enjoying the pizzas - see the thing in the aluminium foil? We had 4 - 2 Chicken 2 Vegetarian. Think the kebabs were gone by the time we stepped into the room; Me eating my birthday-pizza-cake; A Toast!; Us with the real cake :)

ASANTE SANA FOR THE LOVELY BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION :D

(From the perspective of the "girls" aka those who were prepping the celebration, Clockwise from top left:
Dinner for 6 on the rooftop balcony; Qihui waiting in the wings to surprise Su with the cake and candles; Close up of Qihui waiting in the wings.. TY quick bring Su! The candles are melting down...; Rebec and Li to act as decoys as well as alert Qihui and I that Su is coming up, but they multitask too! Rebec and Li are ordering dinner while acting as decoys; Things are good!; The Cake)

Hello beach and tropical warmth! Our first day at Zanzibar

19.09.2010

After a sad farewell parting from Willie and Chuck, we drowsily headed to the airport at 6am in the morning to fly to Zanzibar.

As the computers at the Kilimanjaro airport were "down", we were issued with hand-written boarding passes. (on our return from Zanzibar to Dar, while waiting to be issued with our boarding passes, we all concluded that it was way faster hand-writing them!)

We were also unable to check in for both legs of our flight (Arusha - Dar; Dar - Zanzibar) so when we reached Dar, we had to wait for our luggage and exit the airport and enter again to check in for our Dar-Zanzibar leg of the flight! We had half an hour before the flight to Zanzibar took off! So Su and I went out first with everyone's passports to check in for the next flight, while the rest waited for the bags. We were concerned that the rest would be stopped at security because they didn't have their passports with them, but unknown to us, a "secret agent" had been sent to escort them via a "secret passageway" from the arrivals to the departures area (probably something like 10m apart). When they rejoined us they were very pleased with the "special treatment". Then we boarded for our 10-min flight. Yup, 10 minutes. From the time we took off to the time we landed in Zanzibar. Hooray!

The Zanzibar airport was really rustic. We loved the baggage collection area!

We were greeted by our driver and headed on to Matemwe beach. It started raining when we arrived at the airport, and I was getting increasingly concerned that I might be some kind of jinx! (It had rained so heavily the last time I was at Zanzibar and we were stuck indoors for a whole day...) But the rest just left it to fate and everyone promptly went to sleep in the minivan again.

But when we reached Matemwe, how happy and delighted we were to find bright sunshine and a beautiful spanking new hotel right on the beach! Below are specimens of what we each did upon entering our respective rooms.

W and TY

Li and R

QH and SuN

On finding out that we could not book any activities for the day because we had arrived too late (11.30am), and that we had NO CHOICE BUT TO NUAH around the resort for the rest of the day, we resigned to our fate and quickly engaged ourselves with other activities, such as:

-- Lounging

-- Eating

-- Playing

And photo-taking!

We were all so pleased to be back in the sunshine and tropical warmth. The girls told me that they thought Tanzania is a hot place but the first week had been just cold, cold, cold! Li Ling especially was happy to finally be able to wear all her beach/summer clothes! (From then on, it was a fashion parade for Li Ling who strutted and donned a different set of sunny beach attire everyday)

Karibu Zanzibar!

And then we had a lovely dinner, and thus ended our lovely day at Sunshine Matemwe. We leave you with more pictures of our lovely Sunshine Hotel!

Back to Arusha!

Back in Arusha, we went on a tour of the rose farm-- Kiliflora, the largest rose farm in Tanzania! woohoo!
The flowers were beautiful

And thanks to Jerry, who was so kind and patient and spent >2 hours bringing us around the farm and giving thorough and detailed explanations to our very numerous questions!! and we realized what a tricky business growing and supplying roses is.. we are filled with admiration!

Below is Li Ling, getting to the bottom of her questions..