Zanzibar!

January 14, 2009

Zanzibar, Tanzania

And here I am in lovely Zanzibar! About ten members of our group decided to take the afternoon ferry from Dar es Salaam a day early to the island of Zanzibar, and in so doing, we snagged an extra day at the beach for ourselves!

We spent the first night in Stone Town, where I negotiated a single room for myself. We had dinner of Zanzibar pizzas at the Night Market and set out on an ill-conceived attempt to find a "discoteque," very silly. When we returned to our hotel at 1:00a, I remembered what someone told me about checking mattresses for bedbugs. I pulled the sheets back to find exactly what I was hoping not to find: a small, round, grayish bedbug on the mattress! At this time, there was nothing to do for it but place the sheet carefully back in place and go to sleep. Maybe this bedbug had eaten her fill on another traveler the night before because I was not bitten, thank goodness.

The next day I joined a spice tour to see cardemom, curry, pepper, coffee, nutmeg, cinnamon and all of the other spices the island is renowned for and enjoyed afterwards a spicy lunch. After the spice tour, I h0pped into a taxi to transfer to the beach with 9 other members of our breakaway group. When we arrived at the hotel, I was surprised to see that our tour leader, Allison, had booked me into a room with some dude. When is that ever okay, to put a married woman in a room with some single punk? Clearly, that was not cool. The hotel was fully booked. In the end, I booked a single in the hotel next door, which is lovely. When I confronted to tour leader about it, she said "That's backpacking" and "You have to take what's available." She was clearly annoyed by my objection. She argued that if we had stuck to the original plan, there would not have been a lack of room. To me, her response shows a lack of sensitivity and discretion. What do the rest of you think? Was her response appropriate?

I'm clearly annoyed by this, and quite frankly, I considering ditching the next week and a half of the trip through Malawi and Zambia. If I can book a flight, I'll spend another week and a half cooling my heels in Zanzibar and then fly to meet everyone in Livingstone to continue through Botswana and Namibia. I'll miss several 12 hour days of driving, cooking duty and setting up my tent in the muddy banks of Lake Malawi. What do you guys think? Is it too early to ditch the group tour?