Zanzibar, Tanzania, Part 2: Turtles and Stone Town Exploration

Is there such thing as feeding too many animals, too often?? We obviously don't think so.  Zanzibar adventures, commence.


Cliffnotes of the Day:

• Day 3 in paradise began with a leisurely breakfast overlooking the ocean - which always consists of fresh fruit here. And tea. Seriously such a dream. In the early afternoon, I'd wanted to head to this turtle sanctuary I'd heard about down the beach - so J. Rich and I took the long, gorgeous walk from our hotel (in "so hot you're almost melting" weather, on that note).

The beach walk to the turtle conservatory. I look like I'm 10.

• The turtle sanctuary is small, run by locals, but is the cutest - they exist to help with conservation efforts of turtles - which means they rescue turtles that are caught in fishermen's nets and baby turtles in poorly-place nests, etc. They eventually release them back into the wild.

Favorite part?? You get to feed the turtles handfuls of seaweed!!! 

These turtles are huge and not even close to full-grown yet!  These are green turtles - which can grow to be 5 feet long!

These turtles were very snappy about their seaweed

This is a hawksbill turtle

AND BABY TURTLES. Did you know that 90% of baby turtles don't survive to adulthood in the wild (due to predators, etc.)!?!  So this conservatory keeps them until they get bigger, and they all look like tiny unstable wind-up toys

• J. Rich and I spent the rest of the afternoon chilling in adorable beach cafes; drinking fresh juices, eating fries, and watching the ocean.

Fishermans' boats

And lying under a palm tree

And then we set up to watch the sunset because they are my fave.

Sunset on Nungwi Beach, which was INSANELY PRETTY.

More dusk. *siiigh*

• Our last day in Zanzibar, J. Rich and I switched locations from Nungwi (beach paradise) down to the main city of Zan, called Stone Town.  We started with back-to-back tours of a spice farm, and then a city walking tour. 

The spice tour was super interesting - we got to see trees that produced cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, pepper, etc. And the guide would point out each plant and then take some and let us see and smell and taste it. Some of the spices come in the MOST INTERESTING form ever. It's crazy to see it at its source, vs. in your grocery store on a spice shelf.  This is our guide with his rainbow umbrella.

Saddest part about spice tour though - torrential rains the entire time. 

Though this kind man pulled down a jackfruit and is carving it up for us!

Jackfruit! You spit out the pit, and the flesh tastes like a combo pineapple/banana flavor with the consistency of a lychee.

Wet wet wet. And you can't see, but they made us all necklaces/bracelets out of plant leaves! Cute.

• In the afternoon, we took a rain-soaked walking tour of Stone Town. Stone Town was a coastal trading city back in the day - popular for both spice and slave trading. It used to occupied by the British, then the Portuguese, then the people of Oman (Oman..ese?  Omani?).  The sultan of Oman actually moved the presidential palace to Zanzibar back in the day.  Traces of its varied history are still very visible in the city itself today. 

A pretty tree. J. Rich and I look miserable, but we were going for "American Gothic"

Panoramic view of Stone Town rooftops

An underground chamber used to hold slaves. Which were basically villagers they stole/imprisoned/coerced/attacked from the African mainland. From Zanzibar, they were sold at the slave market (but kept shackled in these tiny holding pens in the meantime) and usually shipped off to the Middle East.

A sad memorial of how slaves were sold at auction.

And here is the beach! Not as pretty as Nungwi, but will take it.

Charming little back alleys of Stone Town

I kind of loved the vibe

Meal of the Day:

We went to dinner at a restaurant called House of Spices, which was true to its name - there were tiny cabinets of spices all along the wall that helped season the food and drink. Not only did the restaurant have super interesting/tasty food, but there were also spiced teas, spiced ice cream, etc.  YOU KNOW HOW I LOVE A GOOD THEME.  And it was delicious, which doesn't hurt.

Adorable starter bread platter

Veggie curry with spiced rice

Fun Facts of the Day:

• Green turtles have soft shells so they aren't hunted for their shells as much as other turtles. But still are endangered because people eat them too!
• There are over 90 mosques in Stone Town.
• A British missionary was instrumental in helping stop the slave trade in Stone Town - it was officially abolished in 1897. 

Zanzibar, Tanzania, Part 1: We Spend Half Our Beach Vacay Feeding Animals

Safari adventure over, J. Rich and I flew from Kilimanjaro to the island of Zanzibar for a few days of sun and tropical paradise-ness.  

It is very weird to me that it is the middle of December, and I've successfully avoided winter for six full months. And by very weird, I mean freaking awesome. 

What It's All About:

Zanzibar (or "Zan," as I'm calling it for short) is an island off the eastern coast of Tanzania - just East of the Tanzanian capital of Dar Es Salaam.  It's kind of known for being a tropical wonderland paradise, due to its insanely beautiful waters.  The island itself is pretty large (about 2-3 hours drive from the Northern end to the Southern tip), and there are multiple cities you can choose to stay in.

We are in Zanzibar!

The city we stayed in was Nungwi - on the most Northern tip of the island. It's known for being absolutely insanely picturesque (and has a good nightlife/hangout scene), but I will say that it was a little harder to get to some of the sites. The main city of Zan is called Stone Town, which is also adorable and much more centrally-located.

Cliffnotes of the Day:

• Checked into our hotel, Warere Beach, which unbeknownst to me before I booked it, had just opened a week prior to our arrival.  It was located down a shady, bumpy, rock-filled dirt path - but opened up to this view:

Paradise.

Warere Beach Hotel

View from the pool

Practicing ninja moves in the pool

The tides in Zanzibar were crazy - during low tide (above), the ocean receded a TON and you could walk out forever - or walk along the beach to town.  But during high tide, the ocean rose so much that you couldn't walk through the beach in a lot of places.

We walked out super far during low tide. I found the hundreds of sea urchins everywhere incredibly cool

And when you pick them up, they actually move and wiggle their spikes

• Day 2, J. Rich had arranged for us to go out to an animal Sanctuary called Cheetah's Rock. It's run by this woman named Jenny who has a total passion for animals, and has built an incredible sanctuary for animals who have been abused, confiscated, or donated. She keeps the group sizes small, which allows a lot of interaction with her animals - and she's trained most of them to be sweet and adorable.

This is Jenny with her incredibly rare white lion, named Aslan. She raised him from a cub after getting him from a conservatory - he used to be small enough that she would let guests enter his cage, but now he's too big so only she is allowed in. 

Jenny was also an incredible self-promoter (which I'm sure is warranted, as I really liked her). "They said zebras couldn't be trained like horses because they're too wild. But I gave him positive love and reinforcement, AND I TRAINED HIM!"  This is Chaka the zebra, and he does really cute tricks.

She trained him to hand me a rose! JUST LIKE THE BACHELOR. Dream #1, fulfilled.

This is an animal called a bush baby, and it had its ass shoved into my face the entire time it was stealing my spaghetti strands

And then we went into the lemur enclosure. And a peacock photobombed my picture.

Here is me feeding a lemur. They jump from shoulder-to-shoulder constantly and use their grubby little hands to grab all food in sight. Which in this case, happened to be spaghetti and mixed fruit.

Here is J. Rich feeding a peacock

I can't get over how cute turtles are when they eat

NOM NOM NOM

This is Gizmo, the striped hyena. She is super duper rare because the hyenas in the wild are usually spotted, and was surprisingly adorbs. Even though hyenas have the strongest jaws, we got to feed Gizmo and she was super tame and cute about it all. Like a canine with large eyes. And a hunched back.

And then we went to visit Aslan!  Here is Jenny showing how giant Aslan is

Here is J. Rich feeding Aslan a giant slab of raw beef. 

And my favorite experience of all - Tyson the cheetah! He's apparently trained well-enough (putting all my faith into Jenny here) that we entered his enclosure, where there was seating set up and champagne for all of us. Seriously, we sat INSIDE the cheetah's enclosure and drank champagne while he paced around us. Jenny called him over to us with a big slab of  raw chicken

And then she let us pet him. I know how bourge-y this looks, seated on a chair, holding a glass of champagne, petting a cheetah. Which means this is obviously going to be my new Tinder profile photo.