Zanzibar!!!!

Wow, we had such a fantastic time in Zanzibar...an island off the coast of Tanzania, often called the Spice Island. This trip was a Christmas present for the kids in lieu of a wii...in hindsight it would have been cheaper to buy them the wii, but the memories they'll have will last them a lifetime!

We flew from Lusaka to Nairobi (via Lilongwe, Malawi) on a flight that left Lusaka at midnight - and got into Zanzibar at 10am. We were tired when we arrived, but the kids did great on less than 4 hours of sleep!

We stayed at a great little place with 6 bungalows - the one below faced out to the sea, ours was two rooms away from this one.

Our first morning we went for a walk and saw lots of people walking back and forth from the shore to boats in the ocean. They would go to a boat (not sure if they were assigned to certain boats, or just picked the one that had fish), but they would load up their five gallon buckets with kapenta (small fish) that the fishermen had caught that night. The full buckets probably weighed about 30 pounds and the people were walking very quickly. We learned that they got paid 500 schillings per load, so clearly they were motivated to get in as many loads as possible. They would dump their loads in a pile on a plastic sheet and the fish would get cooked in boiling water, then laid out in the sun to dry.


Fantastic, beautiful doors are abundant in Stonetown. This particular door is an Indian made door because it has the pointy brass knobs on it which were put in to keep the elephants from breaking down the door! Of course, if you saw how narrow the streets are in Stonetown, there is no way an elephant would have enough room to charge! John liked the pointy things so much, he decided to buy one and will put it up on our door in Tacoma...to keep all those pesky stray elephants wandering down 27th St. from charging our door!

This is a pretty typical store front - lots of knick knacks and baubles!

Peter was on a mission to buy some tennis shoes so we stopped at each and every shop; but in the end, ended up with nothing. I've never seen so many shoes wrapped in plastic!

The Stonetown market sells vegetables, fish, meat and of course, spices...here's the butcher cutting some meat for a customer.

Hmmm, guess what animal this was?!

We enjoyed our time in Zanzibar with Todd, Teresa and Kent Silver. Here we are at the end of our spice tour - where we were amazed at what spices looked like in their natural state, we couldn't identify most of the spice plants other than vanilla bean!

At the end of our spice tour, we went to the ocean for a swim in this warm, beautifully green ocean.

One day we went out snorkeling...As you can see Peter is ready to jump in, but the rest of us were a bit more cautious since it was cold out and quite windy. But, we saw some amazing fish and coral (unfortunately the coral is being depleted at quite a fast rate).

Our major mode of transport was via a dala dala - a truck with two benches in the back. It was fun to ride with the locals and it only cost us 1,000 schillings (about 75 cents) to ride into town (vs 5,000 schillings for a taxi).

The Silvers left us to go on a safari in Tanzania, so we opted to head to the east coast of the island to a small village called Paje. We found white sand beaches where the sand was super fine - and the ocean was a beautiful jade green. The tide went out quite a ways, then came in right up to the bulkhead of our bungalows.

High tide. John and Peter are waiting for the tide to go out so they can do some beach combing. The shells on the beach are fantastic!


This guy had just caught these octopus and I think he sold them to the owner (a Japanese lady) of our bungalows since I noticed octopus on the menu for the two nights we were there.

Every day ladies were in the water gathering seaweed. Here, they're dragging big bags full of seaweed that they lay in the sun to dry.

It was a tough life having to recline on these chairs with this view, but we suffered through it!


There are so many other picture we took that I didn't include here...if you're feeling ambitious, you can see them here: http://picasaweb.google.com/miyonkautz/JulyZanzibar?authkey=Gv1sRgCMmv4e-WjYj5qQE#. (The first few photos are of the Silvers trip to a World Vision project where they got to see some of the work being done by our Zambian staff.)

Nairobi, Kenya

At the tail end of our trip, we went to Nairobi for three days to visit our friends the Simpsons (Sharon is a good friend of mine at World Vision US) and the Leists - who were just finishing up their one year stint with International Justice Mission.

With the Leist family

It's not often you're in a major city and see cattle crossing the road, walk through a gas station and keep walking.

We went to a giraffe farm where John wanted to see how long a giraffe's tongue really is - so he forced this guy to work for his pellet of food.
This was gross - but Peter put the pellet in his mouth and the giraffe licked it out! YUCK!

We had a fantastic time - and will always remember our time with friends and the new experiences we shared as a family!