On the morning of our Zanzibar excursion, we found ourselves in luxury at Maureen's place, a random expat who took us in for the night. We met another expat, Sarah, for coffee and she properly organised us to get across to the island. We got onto our speed machine ferry, the Ms Sephide Express, and were assured to be on Zanzibar in an hour, but to true african form, we rolled into the harbour only on one engine an amazing 8 hours later!
We were met at the harbour by our local connection, Selle, with four 250cc motorbikes. There were some initial nervous moments, and a couple of hospital scares, but we managed to survive two days without killing ourselves on the island! The bikes were great tho. Our first night we spent at Luis' place (Darren's girlfriend's sister's friend from London from Zanzibar who she met once in a bar in a far far away land somewhere), needless to say it was random. We biked up the following morning and headed to the northern most tip of the island, Nungwi, and bargained and wheeled our way into a shifty local place. New years now loomed, and it was an extremely strange one at that, involving fire jumping through tyres, local shabeens, chips mayen, and bewilded foreign mazungus. New years was announced by a confused local..."in 55...1,2,3,4,5,6 happy new years!!!!"
New Year's day we biked our way back to Stonetown, stopping at a couple of great beaches along the way. We hopped onto our ferry, which now had two engines running, and made our way back to Dar. A fantastic New Years, Kenya to come still!
