Reading this week:

• Back to the Future: the Ultimate Visual History by Michael Klastorin with Randal Atamaniuk

A strange sensation, going back to a place. When I return to a spot I always think in physics terms. I imagine the paths I have taken in the intervening moments, winding across continents and over oceans and through grad school and marriage and career changes, and that in physics terms if I have wound up in the same spot then in net terms nothing has changed. I know a man cannot step in the same river twice, but we weren’t visiting a river, we were visiting Zanzibar.

To shift from melancholy into despair, I am now two for two having trouble getting to Zanzibar and arriving a day late. After a lovely morning hanging out in Kigoma we had arrived at the airport only to watch our departure time slip farther and farther away. The airport itself though (as discussed) is not much more than a shack with a metal detector in it does also feature a gift shop (more of a gift counter) of sorts selling jars of local honey and bags of dagaa, which is charming, along with a snack bar on the inside. But our boarding time came and went with no communication, no airplane landing on the tarmac, and conflicting information via our phones. Eventually though we did board only to sit there waiting, the flight attendant said, on “paperwork” as I slowly failed to come to terms that we would miss our connecting flight to Zanzibar. The final blow to my hopes and dreams was the announcement that instead of flying direct to Dar we would be going through Burundi which would have sounded fun except that I didn’t want to go to Burundi. So we arrived in Dar late at night, quickly gave up on the very lackadaisical (in our opinion) customer service guy on the ground, and got a taxi to the nearest hotel where we got maybe four hours of sleep.

Four hours of sleep because we were taking the first available flight the next day, which we had booked for surprisingly cheap. We had pondered taking the ferry, which I had enjoyed last time, but logistically it was easier to fly which is fairly wild. As we shuffled into the airport at five in the morning we thought maybe we could have taken a later flight, but it all worked out in the end when we arrived at our hotel still in time for the breakfast that came with the room we hadn’t gotten to use the night before.

And what a breakfast. Last time I visited Zanzibar I only wrote the one blog post about it because honestly I didn’t enjoy it all that much. It was interesting, and it was pretty, but for reasons I could never quite put my finger on it wasn’t that enjoyable. Now I think the reason was money, which we had more of this time around. That meant things like we could stay at the Emerson Spice Hotel, which was gorgeous and you got to eat a breakfast of fresh fruits and new Zanzibari pastries daily up on the rooftop overlooking the dense streets in the medina leading to the ever-beautiful Zanzibar Channel. Fortified, and with the trials of travel shedding from our shoulders, we were off to the races.

The races being the streets of Stone Town. It was a much more pleasant experience than I remember. As we poked around the shops and the Old Fort I felt less hassled. It very quickly got very hot though. Coming from the highlands of Tanzania we hadn’t expected such a significant temperature increase. Fortunately though there were places you could duck into with air conditioning, like the Freddie Mercury Museum. That was a fun visit. I hadn’t gone last time and it is very well done. It is like all namesake museums hagiography in that I question the scholarship, but it does have a whole bunch of artifacts and some very interesting stuff on Zanzibar. It is smaller than I expected and they really missed an opportunity for a gift shop but it was very fun to listen to his music and see his handwritten lyrics and find out about the history of Zoroastrianism on Zanzibar.

And um I will leave it at that for the first blog post. It was good to be in Zanzibar and it was good to be back in Zanzibar. It was fun to be in the shops and it was fun to be with the love of my life and it was fun to be in a medina again after our trip to Morocco. More adventures await.