Stone Town

Stone Town is the main city of Zanzibar. After our diving experience we did a day of sightseeing in Stone Town. It’s a nice city with indian and sultan influences.

There are two concepts they still have to learn in Stone Town:
– maintenance on buildings
– cleaning of buildings

There are a lot of buildings that looked really, really nice….. 50 to 100 years ago. But now most are dirty, need paint and a good wash. And a lot of buildings are just crumbling down. Too bad.

But still, we had a nice time. In the evening you can enjoy great street food. One street is converted into a food market, where you can buy fresh food (mainly day fresh fish), which is baked directly for you. Remember to first haggle about a price… don’t wait until you get your food, you will then probably pay the cook more than he normally earns the entire day…. that’s the Mzungu (tourist) price 😉

One bad thing (as in whole Tanzania, but even more at Zanzibar) are the Papasi (Kiswahili for ticks). Papasi are all the men hanging around that want to sell you something (t-shirts, taxi rides, paintings, sun glasses, island tours, etc). Their sales strategy is coming up to you and keep talking to you either until you buy something or until it is 100% clear to them you won’t buy anything (just telling them is not enough). And because it looks like there are more Papasi then tourists, you are continuously bothered by them when walking through the city.

So if Stone Town wants to improve the ‘tourist experience’ the city should clean up and restore all buildings and get rid of all the Papasi.