Today we said goodbye to the Serengeti.  The Sound of Silence camp serves their meals under domes and then has the practice of counting “1-2-3-wow” in Swahili before removing all domes at a table with flourish in unison. They taught us the words on the first day and by now we are quite skilled at the practice, able to count to 5 both forwards and backwards. Waow!!

The friendly staff at our camp sang us a song of farewell as we walked to our vehicles for the trip to the airport (squeezing in a last bit of game drive along the way – including another cheetah and leopard) and once there we it was also time to say goodbye to our tremendous guides Sifuni and Isack. Our flight took us past Mt. Kilimanjaro (only the very tip of the peak was visible above the cloud deck) and across an arm of the Indian Ocean to the islands of Zanzibar.

Although Zanzibar and Tangyanika merged in 1964 to form the country of Tanzania, they feel like very different places. The culture of Zanzibar has much more Arab influence, and climate is noticeably more humid. We are staying at a hotel housed in one of the historic buildings of Stone Town, and the climb to our rooms up its steep staircases had us all dripping with sweat by the time we arrived at our rooms. But what rooms! With carved wooden screens, canopied beds, and spacious plaster tubs each one feels fit for royalty (though not necessarily this century; our room has a distinct lack of AC or fan).

By the time all the travel was done, we didn’t have much daylight left. We made the most of it by takng to the water on a dhow-style sailboat for a sunset cruise. Our captain James, though now catering to tourists, had grown up as a fisherman and told us a little about that way of life. The fishing grounds are far away from land, so the men spend the night on the ocean before returning the next morning with their catch. Apparently the hotels that cater to tourists now buy up so much of the local fish that very little remains for the locals.

After our short cruise we returned to shore and walked the streets of Stone Town for a while before retiring to our hotel.