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A warm winter day at Breezes Beach Club. Photo: Susan WyndhamSusan Wyndham explores Zanzibar's heady mix of history and culture.
Invisible behind loudspeakers in their minarets, the muezzins start their call to prayer at 6.20 on a Friday night. The fugue of male voices bounces off Stone Town's rusting roofs. A canvas-sailed dhow passes in front of the red sun as it melts into the Indian Ocean. Zanzibar is at its most Arab and ancient.
On the second-highest rooftop, 20 Europeans and two Australians sit on silk floor cushions and cling to their gin cocktails like 21st-century refugees blown in on the relentless southerly wind. As tourists we will barely begin to peel back Zanzibar's layers of history and intrigue. But at least we can leave our shoes at the door and enjoy the food (seafood, spices, coconut) and dancing (frenzied buttocks at eye level) in the Tower Top restaurant at Emerson & Green, an American-owned hotel in a historic, steep-staired palace.
The restaurant provides a guide to walk us back to our hotel through Stone Town's maze of streets, most too narrow for cars. During the day we had happily got lost among the crumbling limestone buildings with their fine balconies and elaborately carved and brass-studded doors. But at night I worry we might never find our way out.
The young man in white tunic and embroidered cap leads us on a winding route. He speaks enough English to exchange names and ask how many babies I have; our Swahili stops at 'Jambo' (hello) and 'Asante sana' (thank you very much). The town is livelier than I'd expected. Men sit in doorways listening to tinny radio music; shop signs throw a weak light onto potholed cobblestones.
At the door of our opulent waterfront hotel we offer the guide a $US1 ($1.40) tip. He withdraws his hand, looks offended and says, 'It is $US2.' Having handed over hundreds of dollar bills in tips on our travels through Tanzania, we have run out. So he scores a