street eats in Zanzibar

I love food so this post is just about food.

My general impression of street food in East Africa is that Kenya has terrible/no street food game, Uganda has delicious rolex (chapatti with egg and tomato) going for it and Zanzibar... Zanzibar knows what it's doing. Street food in Zanzibar is cheap, delicious, everywhere.

One Zanzibar classic is urojo soup, which consists of a mango and ginger broth with your choice of add-ins, like potatoes, potato/flour balls, cassava chips, and meat. Only 1000tsh ($0.65).

At night, Stone Town's Forodhani Gardens by the port becomes a giant, vibrant street food market. There are dozens of vendors, all selling one of three things: 1) Zanzibar staple Zanzibar pizza, 2) meat and seafood skewers with naan, 3) sugarcane juice. The gardens attract about a 80/20 tourist/locals mix, and the prices match that reality. With that said, everything is up for negotiation.

Zanzibar pizza stand

Zanzibar pizza is a small piece of dough is rolled out real thin, and fried with on the pan with egg and toppings of your choice, sweet or savoury. I must admit that I finished mine before examining it too hard because I was very hungry. The place was way too touristy for me and I didn't have the patience to take many pictures before leaving (though, the food was delicious).

Forodhani gardens 

Skewers of beef, chicken, tuna, lobster, rockfish, barracuda, red snapper are all available! As are naan, garlic naan, coconut bread, and samosas. Yum yum. The prices at Forodhani are about 2-3x higher than what you would pay at other stalls (during the day).

Chicken biryani, with tamarind juice. All for just 6000 ksh ($4).

One of the best meals I had, probably all summer, was this chicken biryani from a local joint called Passing Show. Zanzibar cuisine, even more so than East African cuisine more generally, has a very strong Indian influence. Chapattis, pilau, biryani, naan, and samosas are all common foods.

Zanzibar

I came back to Nairobi on Friday from a week in Zanzibar. Definitely the most expensive week of my entire four months in Africa! But it was so sunny and beautiful - I understand now why Zanzibar is the tourist hotspot it is.

Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous region of Tanzania, near Dar es Salaam. It consists of an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, with two main islands, Unguja (the main island) and Pemba. Zanzibar was a major slave trading post for the Arab slave trade, where slaves captured in Africa were held and then sold in markets, before being transferred to buyers in Arabia. Today, one of the old slave holding cells is preserved as a tourist attraction but an Anglican church was built over the site of the old slave market.

Stone Town is the largest city in Zanzibar, though I can't emphasize how small it is. You can walk from one end to the other in 15 minutes. The town as a whole is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it's easy to see why. The town, the culture, and even the food illustrate an interesting mix of Swahili, Arab, Indian and European influences. While Tanzania is mostly Christian with a large Muslim minority, Zanzibar is over 90% Muslim. I think it's actually the first predominantly Muslim place I've been to.

Having a map in Stone Town is so useless. There are no street signs anywhere, and the streets are so narrow that in any other town, they would just all be considered alleyways. Below is the street that my hotel was on, and my map actually drew it as a relatively large street. People had warned me that Zanzibar is relatively expensive for travel because it is so touristy. Despite being popular with travellers, I could not find any hostels or dorm accommodation in Stone Town... so I stayed in a single room at the cheapest place I could find. USD14 for a single room with shared bathroom (with a hot shower) and including a breakfast of coffee or tea, eggs your way, four slices of bread AND fruit? Not bad. Not bad at all.

Zanzibar seriously has such blue water. I remember going to Miami when I was younger and being so disappointed by the colour of the water because the movies all make it so bright and beautiful and in real life it's just a boring dark blue. On the other hand, When I was swimming in Zanzibar I could see the treading bodies underwater of people 5m away.

Near the port

Things drying 

One evening, I attended a rehearsal at the Culture Musical Club, one of Zanzibar's main taraab orchestras. Taraab is a popular music genre in Tanzania. The women sitting in the side of the photo aren't spectators - they sing together, and take turns singing lead.

Unfortunately, Zanzibar's really great beaches aren't in Stone Town, but elsewhere on the island. After three and a half cold months in Kenya, I was desperate for some beach and sun. I went to Kendwa, one of the North Beaches. It was about 60km north of Stone Town. Though most travellers take a taxi or a shuttle there, I decided to give the local transport a go, and save some money while at it.

Dala dalas are the main form of public transportation, shown below, the Zanzibar version of the matatu. There are benches along the sides of the vehicle for passengers to sit in, but when it gets really crowded (and it does, as the dala dala picks up more people along the way), people start sitting or crouching on the floor in the centre, and men will just hang off the back. They will also transport bags of rice/potatoes/fruit on the top. The dala dala was only 2000tsh ($1.30) compared to $40 for a taxi or $7 for a shuttle. Win! (though, I took a shuttle back)

Dala dala

The beach was so relaxing. Nice couple of days.

After returning to Stone Town from the beach, I went on a spice tour. It's one of those things tourists do. Spices are a big part of Zanzibar's economy, though less so now. Zanzibar was once the world's leading clove producer! On the spice tour, they take you to a spice plantation and show you different fruits and spices and let you taste them. I have to say, the taste of raw, fresh clove really lingers in your mouth.

Annatto

One of the boys from the spice plantation demonstrated for us the application of annatto. Its orange-red color makes it popular as natural lipstick and hair colour.

We were all given little leaf baskets to collect spices and fruits. The photo below shows only some of what we tried. In the photo you can see black pepper (green and unripened), cinnamon, lychee, starfruit, annatto... and I don't recall what the white stuff is.

On the flight back - a view of Kilimanjaro!

from the Lion King to the real thing

Last week (wow, can't believe it was only a week ago... feels like a lot more time has passed), I finally went to Hell's Gate National Park near Naivasha in Kenya's Rift Valley. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Hell's Gate is the real life inspiration for Pride Rock in the Lion King. Crew from the Lion King actually went to Hell's Gate. Let's just say the film has a lot more animals than the park... Also, funny enough, Hell's Gate doesn't have any lions. However, this also means that it's safe to walk and cycle in.

(I cycled.)

Fischer's Tower. There are better pictures of it on the Internet but quite honestly it's not that impressive of a structure in person. It's popular for rock climbing which I obviously did not partake in.

Just to the right of my head in the picture above there is a zebra. There were so many zebra in the background but honestly taking a selfie with animals in the background is SO HARD. Oh the struggles of solo travel.

Antelope

I thought Hell's Gate would be a full-day excursion (and brought a lunch of unhealthy snacks in expectation of that), but it really only takes (part of) the morning. It was about 10km biking and 2km walking one-way.

Hell's Gate features a spectacular gorge to walk through. There's a ranger station to drop off bikes at because obviously it would be terribly inconvenient to bring your bike into the gorge. Apparently Tomb Raider, that movie with Angelina Jolie, was filmed here. I haven't watched the movie though, so I can't comment.

While I biked solo to the gorge, I had a guide for the gorge portion of the park... mostly because this guy just started following me even after I told him repeatedly that I did not have enough cash for a guide (I really didn't, but here no one ever believes you when you say you don't have money). I'm pretty sure he was just some random guy because all the other guides I saw were park rangers in uniform and real shoes while this guy was wearing a t-shirt and plastic sandals. With that said, I'm glad he came along because there were a lot of steep areas in the gorge and it was nice to have an extra hand to pull me up when necessary. There are also no signs in the gorge for direction, so I would have completely missed that you were supposed to climb up with this rope.

I had lots of fun! Once I finished the gorge portion I decided to eat the chapati that I packed for lunch on a picnic bench... I had taken about two bites when a monkey came over and snatched it out of my hand. Sneaky thing. 

crossing the equator

Earlier in the summer I had met two women named Rose and Maria, two Kenyan-born white women that I had met in Kianyaga and gone to visit in their hometown of Nyeri. After leaving Kianyaga, I returned to Nyeri to stay with Maria for a few days while their daughter was on August break.

One of the most exciting things about staying with Maria was going with her to her ROSCA (merry go round) meeting. ROSCA stands for rotating savings and credit association, and are popular in developing countries as a way of saving money for investment. Groups of individuals, usually from the same community, meet regularly, and each individual contributes an equal amount of meeting at each of meeting. One individual in the group then takes the entire sum of the contributions at the meeting, to use as her or she wishes.

Maria's ROSCA consisted of 16 women. The location of the meeting rotates between each member's homes. Everyone paid 200ksh to the host to pay for dinner, in addition to the 1000ksh contribution. It so happened that this meeting was the annual election for the board positions of chairperson, vice-chairperson, secretary, and treasurer! Elections were conducted very transparently. There is no "running" for a position. Everyone gets a slip of paper and writes the name of the person they would like to hold the position, and throws the paper in a basket. The slips are then all flipped over, in front of everyone.

I've studied ROSCAs and other informal lending mechanisms at school... no one told me how much singing and dancing and eating and yelling there would be. Granted this was an election meeting, but choosing the four positions and the recipient of the money as well as collecting the money took SIX HOURS. From 11AM-5PM. Part of this was because some members arrived late so they extended lunch. There was so much food. The host, with the help of some other members, made a soup with pumpkin, black eye peas, and beef, along with chapati. 8kg flour worth of chapati. For twenty people and some babies. It was insane.

While staying with Maria, I also took her 13-year-old daughter to Nanyuki, one of Kenya's equator towns. Kenya is one of ten countries in the world in which the equator crosses.

I never would have guessed that my first time crossing the equator on foot would be in a thick wool sweater. But it was cold.

So how do you know this is actually the equator and not just some hoax sign? There are guides by the sign who demonstrate the Coriolis effect for you. I'm not going to pretend I understand the Coriolis effect. The wikipedia article on it is long and complicated. The guide merely conducts a demonstration with a funnel, a pail and a matchstick. He pours water in the funnel, with a matchstick floating. North of the equator, the matchstick spins in one direction, south of the equator, in another direction, and on the equator, it doesn't spin at all.

There really wasn't much to see and I'm impressed they've made a whole tourist attraction out of it, but I guess you take what your geography gives you.

the final stretch! + pictures of food

I realize I haven't updated anything in a while. I left Kianyaga on Friday, August 8 and haven't had good Internet access since then to upload photos... but now I do. So I'm going to post a lot of things this weekend (starting now) because I have gone to a lot of places in the last two weeks! 

First though, I want to share some pictures of what I ate very frequently in Kianyaga. People from my office would go to a nearby restaurant called "Refresher" almost everyday, and I would say I ended up eating there on average 3-4 times a week throughout the summer. Their food was so delicious.

Unfortunately, Refresher had an extremely limited menu. Everything I ordered there was some combination of (1) rice or chapati (or both, if you're really hungry), (2) beans or githeri, which is beans and maize, (3) greens and cabbage. Fortunately, I love rice and beans. It's basically my cheap college diet anyway.

Rice and beans with sukuma wiki (collard greens) and cabbage

I really liked the beans they used at Refresher. In the local language Kikuyu they're called wairimu beans. I'm not sure they have an English name.

Two chapatis 

I usually cooked rice for dinner, so I would prefer to have chapati for lunch if I was choosing between the two. Chapati is a staple food in Kenya. The dough is made from just water and flour, cooked on a thick pan (the "chapati pan") with a very, very generous coating of oil or shortening. Pretty much everyone knows how to make chapati because it's so easy, and most families have a special chapati pan. You can get chapati at any Kenyan restaurant, usually costing between 10-40 ksh (about CAD 0.12-0.50). It really doesn't look or taste that oily but seeing chapati made is a little frightening because there is so, so much oil used.

Chapati comes in various degrees of thickness and softness. I had the most amazing chapati at a side of the road stall in the Rift Valley, but Refresher chapati was almost as good. I generally love chapati, but I have had some bad chapati both in Kianyaga and in the rest of Kenya and ... bad chapati is awful.

Githeri with greens and cabbage, served with stew (soup) and chapati

While beans are definitely a staple food in Kenya, most restaurants don't serve them alone. Rather, they're cooked in a classic Kenyan dish called githeri, which is beans and maize. At home, Kenyans might add pumpkins, greens, potatoes or other vegetables, but at restaurants, it's usually served plain, cooked maybe with some tomatoes and onions (as Refresher does) or with some small pieces of meat. Restaurants will often also give you some beef-flavoured broth to add to the githeri to add flavour and moisture.

Githeri + chapati was my favourite combination of food to get for lunch. I can't even name how many times I've had it, definitely dozens. As you can see, it's a lot of food and I would be incapable of stopping myself from finishing it even if I was full! So I generally ate small breakfasts, if at all, and only went to Refresher if I was feeling really hungry. After eating at Refresher I would always feel super super full, sometimes uncomfortably so, and would sometimes end up eating no dinner or just some fruit for dinner because lunch was so filling.

I kept a fairly vegetarian diet in Kianyaga. I think I ate meat four times in Kianyaga all summer (once at a restaurant, once at a friend's house, twice at office events). The beef cooked in Kianyaga was just sooo tough, and the meat at the butcher was honestly a little mysterious looking and you don't have choice over the cut - it's just random chunks of meat, sometimes with a lot of fat. So I became a Kianyaga vegetarian. I relied on eggs, beans, and lentils for my protein. Really missed tofu.

At Refresher with Peter, who runs Refresher.

Hiking Mount Longonot

Wow. I can't believe I'm flying home to Toronto in just three weeks! This Friday the 8th will be my last day in Kianyaga. Afterwards, the plan is to do some more traveling in Kenya for about a week, and then go to Zanzibar in Tanzania.

I spent this last weekend just hanging out in Kianyaga (reading, learning how to make samosas, attempting to make 葱油饼), but the weekend before, we had a long weekend at work. Eid, which is a public holiday in Kenya, was on Tuesday and the office moved our "day off" to Monday since no one at the office is Muslim.

So obviously, I was in Nairobi for the third weekend in a row. I ate a whole pizza on Saturday night and then on Sunday, I went to climb a whole mountain! I went with Emma, who works with me. We brought way too many snacks but they were delicious so it was okay.

We went to Mount Longonot, which is an old volcano near Naivasha, a town about an hour and a half from Nairobi. It's part of the "Great Rift Valley" that runs through the length of Kenya. Nakuru is also part of this region. It's very, very different from Kianyaga - much drier, much more yellow.

Mount Longonot is a very popular day trip from Nairobi, and we assumed that it would be easy to get to by matatu. Our guidebooks told us the same. Lies. By the looks of it, NO ONE MATATUS TO MOUNT LONGONOT (and the Nairobi-ers I spoke to afterwards confirmed this). Either you are a) a tourist, in which case you go with a large, organized group and a driver who drives you there or b) a local Nairobian, in which case you drive there with your friends or family.

Emma and I took a matatu to Naivasha town from Nairobi, and once we got there, the matatu people seemed very confused about this "Mount Longonot", assuming we were going to Longonot town. We finally found a guy who knew we wanted to go to the mountain, so we hopped in his matatu, and as we pass by the mountain off in the distance, he stops the car at the side of the road. There are only a few small shops at the side of the road, this is not a town. He drops us off, points off to the distance, says "That is Mount Longonot." And drives off.

It was actually pretty hilarious. Luckily a motorbike driver was around to take us to the entrance of the park, by passing through unpaved, dry, rocky land. So much for the "clearly marked path" that the Lonely Planet book mentioned. The fact that the weather was cloudy, dark, and mysterious only made it worse.

But thankfully, we eventually arrived. Three hours after leaving Nairobi city centre. And it was so worth it! Gorgeous views. I also realized how terribly out of shape I am.

3.1 km (not 31 km), don't worry

That's meeee!

The classic, Rift Valley landscape

What a brave, lonely tree. I wonder how that happened.

I think this is another volcano?

The day started out really, really grey and foggy, as you can see in the background. My face is super red!

When you get to the top of the mountain, there's a large crater that dips down with lots of trees growing inside. Most of these pictures are from Emma's camera.

It's me again!! Going around the crater.

AND FINALLY, hours later, the weather clears up and the sun comes out.

On our way down we noticed some animal friends in the park! There are three giraffes in the photo below, but we saw a total of five. I suppose we could have walked closer to them, but we weren't sure if it was okay to veer off the path and we didn't want to anger the park rangers. 

I also want to add that I met a lot of Chinese people on the mountain. I found out they were all from one Chinese company in Nairobi that does work related to planes and engineering. They had 20 people come in four cars! The different people I spoke to had been in Nairobi for anywhere from three weeks to thirteen months and were from cities all over China, though I think their company is based in Beijing. I met them in different groups and all of them asked me how old I was. I always ask people to guess and they all guessed correctly. Good for them. (Meanwhile, one of the farmers I was interviewing guessed that I was 12, and one of the shopkeepers in town guessed that I was 25??)

All in all, great weekend.