Made out of people

Zanzibar

"Relax, this is Zanzibar."

These were the first slow words from Ali, our laid-back tour guide for the Zanzibar part of my trip. Ali is not in a hurry, for anyone or anything, and he sits comfortably at the front of the shuttle. Everything is in control.

We'd just landed in an antique plane on the Zanzibar airstrip. It seemed to be an old American plane that had probably been through a couple of owners and a lot of coats of paint, but it puttered away across Tanzanian desert and scrublands before landing on this old island.

Zanzibar is a relaxed place. In the 19th century, it was discovered by the rest of the world as a spice port (for Europeans) and a slave port (for Middle-Easterners) and as a vacation spot (for the Sutan of Oman). It had been generally known for a few centuries before, and had always been a stop on trade routes -- but in the 19th ecntury, it was part of the center of the world. The shortest war on record (in a matter of hours, Britain won after one brief bombardment that damaged one building) in 1898 brought it into the European colonial collections.

In the 1940s, it was still shipping around mangrove wood and cloves in the hulls of slow wooden dhows across the Arabian ocean. Meanwhile, steel shipping had taken over the rest of the world, and Zanzibar was left behind. The beautiful Arabian buildings with their marvelous flat roofs and limestone walls melted in the daily rains. And the country found itself marginalized next to the huge tropical fruit and spice plantations that were built up in Asia, India, and South America.

Today, Zanzibar is a startlingly poor town, with stunning stretches of beach. Tourists bring in most of the dollars, enjoying the view and the sun and the scuba diving. The old Stone Town is filled with hawkers selling paintings of Masai warriors and lions, and offering snorkel trips and spice tours and wanting to tell you where Freddie Mercury was born.

But it's a great walk, and the beach truly is marvelous. After a week with mind and body squinched up to survive Kilimanjaro, this is a relaxing change.

The city is in Ramadan, so restaurants are somewhat half-hearted during the day. At night, though, after the sunset and the first evening prayers, the city fills up. Men and women chat on the staircases and the front steps of their houses; the food vendors at the gardens start cooking for both tourists and locals, and the street corners fill with games of chess, dominos, and some rather odd board game that looks to be a cross between parcheesi and billiards.