Day 5: Tanzania

Out the door early this morning with our rented car and driver to the spice farms. Zanzibar as you know is called Spice Island, although these days the only spice they really have the corner market on is cloves. A young man greeted us at the farm and walked with us and our tour guide, Mohammed. We went from tree to tree with the men breaking up leaves for us to see if we could detect the spice fragrance. Was it cloves, coffee, vanilla, turmeric, cardamom, nutmeg, pepper or cinnamon? We tried all the fruits my own father used to grow in Miami and a few more. Jack Fruit, mango, custard apples (cherimoya), grapefruit, mandarin oranges, papaya, bananas, passion fruit. They made us necklaces, bracelets and hats from leaves and flowers and we spent hours enjoying the visit and the people that worked there and then filled our bags with spices and coffee to bring home.

After the spice farms we went to see the Colobus monkeys at the Jozani Forest, the only place in the world that has them. We were walking through the forest and they were running and jumping above our heads, very fun and very cute. This was followed by a few hours at a beautiful beach resort. We had to drive down a dirt road with so many potholes I thought the axle on the van would break, but suddenly the gates opened up to an 18-room hotel. We had lunch at a table on the beach, collected seashells unlike those we find at home and slept in hammocks and then found ourselves back at the hotel, which quickly lost electricity again, the daily event on Zanzibar.