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We didn't have a lot of time, but we decided to try to get some beach magic by going directly up to Nungwe on the northern tip of the island directly from the airport when we flew in from Arusha. Then we would return to Stone Town for a couple of nights before flying back to South Africa to meet up with Kaye's sister for our trip to Kruger. Why Nungwe? We enjoy snorkelling and hoped to find somewhere to swim off the beach.
It didn't work out quite as we hoped - Nungwe is a bit more of a party town and isn't really suited for that sort of activity - we might have done better on one of the small islands, but we really didn't have time to organise anything. In the event we stayed at Pole Pole House, a little bit out of the tourist part of Nungwe, closer to one of the west coast beaches, but still within easy walking distance of Nungwe Beach. Pole pole means "take it easy" (literally "slowly, slowly") in Swahili, so that is what we did.
We had a couple of enjoyable days there, a sort of winding down from the more intense safari in the previous week - no pre-dawn waking up required.
We then went back to Stone Town and spent most of our time walking the streets and little alleys. We were staying in a B&B that was just outside the old fort - indeed, we generally went through the fort to get to it. It was in one of the alleyways - an old building with lots of character and friendly people. Stone Town is a great place to wander around - lots of interesting architecture, a large market, a nigfht food market along the waterfront and lots of cats.
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| Colonial buildings in Stone Town |
Tanzania had a little surprise for us as we left. We were booked from Zanzibar to Johannesburg transiting through Dar es Salaam. The Zanzibar to Dar bit was a 30-minute domestic flight, then we had a three-and-a-half hour flight to Jo'burg, with a bit over two hours in Dar - lots of time for the connection. When we checked in in Zanzibar it all looked fine - we were handed back out passports with boarding passes tucked into them and we went off to departures. We didn't check the boarding passes which turned out to be a big mistake! Air Tanzania had bumped us off our flight and on to one that left two hours later, and hadn't told us - not a murmer. The woman processing our booking knew we had a connecting flight - they were both Air Tanzania, and we had told her about it. By the time we worked out what had happened it was too late. We turned up in Dar to find that our flight to Jo'burg had closed and we couldn't get onto it. We were so angry with the airline - they had knowingly caused this and hadn't told us what they had done. We took it up with the staff of Air Tanzania in Dar, and insisted that they find us an alternative flight that would get us to Jo'burg before 8am the next day, when we were due to meet Kaye's sister.
Long story short - they did give us a flight, but it was on Ethiopian Airlines and went via Addis Ababa, and was overnight. So instead of a three-and-half-hour flight to Jo'burg arriving around noon we had a two-and-half-hour flight north to Addis Ababa, a long transit wait, then a five-and-a-half-hour flight south to Jo'burg, arriving at 4am. Carmel was due to arrive from Perth at 5am, so we just waited in the luggage-collection area and met up with her there.
Nungwe |
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