I awoke on my (daveb’s) birthday to a nice handful of birthday cards, which I opened in bed, under the mosquito net. Thanks to everyone who sent me cards and birthday messages in e-mail and Facebook — I’ve not had a chance to personally respond to any of them yet as Internet from where I’m currently typing is both patchy and expensive; I’ll explain why in another blog entry…

Breakfast by the beach was a treat too. My dahling Squifter had sneakily had a personalised birthday cake made for me, which was presented by the beaming hotel staff just after I had thrown a couple of oddly-green eggs down my neck. Lord knows how Claire managed to arrange this in such a short amount of time, although I reckon the fact that the outer icing was actually shaving foam, had something to do with it — we had a good giggle at this. The chocolate-flavoured sponge on the inside was delicious though.

Rather than spend the day slumming around on the beach, we decided to pack-up and head for the tropical island of Zanzibar, in search of even whiter sands and bluer water (no mean feat, when you consider this current beach just south of Dar Es Salaam). We donated the rest of the cake to the hotel staff and caught taxis and a river-ferry to get to port.

Our guidebook indicated that the touts at the mainland ferry port and upon arrival in Stonetown (also called Zanzibar Town) would be most forceful. And so as we came to a rolling-stop in the taxi at the port, three touts already had forced their heads, sideways, through the half-lowered window in the cab and proceeded to hard-sell us bogus ferry tickets. So we wound the window up an inch to lock them in place and exited via the other door. (Just kidding, but I wish that I had thought of that at the time!)

From my point of view, I really didn’t find the touting all that bad. Certainly, having spent a month in Morocco has helped me understand appropriate techniques for dealing with this crowd, and you might be surprised to learn that meeting them with equal or greater force is not the most effective way to resolve/dissolve the situation. I think it’s fair to say that Claire found it a little difficult and so we crossed the road and took refuge on the shady steps of a church, where we met an apparently friendly gospel singer who wanted nothing more than polite conversation and, yes you’ve guessed it, financial sponsorship.

I left Claire on the steps and had another go at buying tickets without my backpack on my back (the previous tickets that we had bought, were for a ferry that had already gone at the time of sale!). All in all, it had taken us about five hours to travel about ten kilometres to get this far, but now we could finally board a boat. Being Africa, the first boat that we got on was declared overcrowded (it really wasn’t) and so we had to decant to another boat. After a further two hours of bobbing up and down, we arrived in Stonetown, Zanzibar and paid a small premium to acquire a taxi driver inside the ferry terminal to take us directly to our hotel, thus neatly avoiding having to deal with any touts, called ‘papasi’ here, outside the gate — if you’re already a paying fare, the papasi won’t touch you.

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