North of Stone Town Dec 16, 2010

Our guide from yesterday Mohamed brought his "brother" around with a car promptly at 9 am. However Mohamed was now not going to be our guide but Amin the driver was. Does this sound like the old bait and switch? The car was a 7 person mini van with just the 3 of us and the AC was good so we were happy. We travelled first to Myoni Palace where Princess Salem was born. Having read her book "Memoirs of an Arabian Princess" and the recently published book "The Sultan's Shadow" we were curious to see this site. The palace was built in the 1840s but destroyed by fire in 1914. Now only the main walls, roof and bathhouses remain. A lovely location! There were other remnants of palaces along the road but the only one still kept in good condition was the one in the naval area.

We drove on to the Kidichi Persian baths which were at the highest point on the islands. These baths were built in 1850 for the granddaughter of Shaherizad and see decorated the Persian style stucco depicting lotus flowers, cloves, coconut palms, peacocks and dates. The sultan brought in Persian Zoroastrians' to create the stucco as Moslem's under the Quran can not make this type of decorations. At the baths we saw the bathing area, toilets, massage room. The care taker does seem to be working hard to keep the mold off the white stucco. Following this quick tour we proceeded to an old clove farm that now has other spices as well. We have been on a spice tour in India but had never seen cloves and a few other spices as well. During the time the Omanis rulered Zanzibar the island was wealthy from the income from the clove plantations as well as the slave trade. The previous day in the market we had bought spices so today we only bought a lemon grass tea and more cloves. Now we know that everyone walking around with some green woven coconut hat has just come back from a spice farm visit!

We then drove up to the northern most tip of the island passing piles of coral stones that were being used in the construction of houses. It was this same construction that gives Stone Town its name. The reason we had come up here was to see the dhow builders. As in Qantab we watch the various boat being built and the fishing activity we wanted to compare it to Zanzibar. Here we have seen very few fiber glass boats and the fisherman use many either paddle with a dug out canoe,mtumbi, or sail with a larger boat called a ngalawa. The biggest boat here is called a jahazi. While we saw minimal actual construction as we had arrived close to 1 PM we did note the wood was being cut and shaped by hand, the use of the old square body nails.
There were many fishing nets hanging to dry and being repaired by the fisherman. We spotted the net dumping area and were delighted to see all the shells! Many cones, some mitra, tiger coweries and other members of the cowerie family. The most common in the discard piles we reviewed were spider conches. Of course we had to poke through the debris to see if their might be a Lyrialeslieboschai!

Lunch was at the sunset restaurant at Amaan Bungalows. This tip area is very much affected by the tides so not great for swimming and there is really no beach to walk on unless you walk by the local village and all the boatmen. There was one old man selling sea shells. The tiger coweries, helmet shells and spider conches were $1 and the large lambis like in Oman were $5.

We arrived back in Stone Town around 5 pm so went to check out some of the shops and sit by the beach at Livingston's Cafe which we had spotted earlier. As usual when walking around one is pestered by the local touts.  They are know as "pappasi" which mean flea can be quiet irritating and many places have "bouncers" in a uniform to make sure they don't pester tourists on their property.

Tomorrow we are going to hunt for our friend Richard Hann's various houses in Stone Town while he was growing up. He has marked them on wikimaps so we take a closer look at them again before we head off on the hunt.