The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

Zanzibar is an island off the coast of Tanzania with beautiful white sand beaches.

The beach has nice chairs. You could borrow mats from the hotel to put on them which made them really comfy.

The white sand continued way back from the beach with lots of shady palm trees.

This is our hotel room there are four rooms in there. The top floor under the peak is our room.

Like everywhere in Africa the sun never seems to set properly, it just dissolves into the haze on the horizon, even when it is not cloudy.

These are their traditional boats.

They were used to transport spices all over the Indian ocean, but they had to follow the seasonal winds and unusual weather would leave the traders stranded.

The beach had a lot of little ghost crabs.

There were also some evil looking birds.

Possibly cannibalistic evil birds. Or maybe he just wound up with one of his own feathers in his mouth.

There were lots of pretty shells on the beach.

Which you probably shouldn’t touch.

It was a very nice break.

Our trip to Zanzibar would not have been complete without a spice plantation tour. To start off this is cinnamon. Based on how it dried, probably cassia cinnamon like we get at home.

It smells very sweet and smells really good.

They only take off a bit and it regrows just fine.

This is what the tree looks like.

The next stop was for lemongrass.

That grows as a bushy grass.

From there we sampled cardamom. By smell at least the seeds are very strong.

Next was a stop at this little plant.

These are curry leaves from the previous plant.

After going above ground we had to do a little digging. This is tumeric, which is primarily used as a colouring agent in food.

There were a few fruits on the trees too. This is similar to durian, maybe bread fruit but can’t remember.

This plant is sour soup. I think it was medicinal.

This is a birds eye chili or as they call it: Pilipili ho ho.

I think these flowers are used as a cosmetic dye.

This was another medicinal plant, cannot remember what for.

Here is some really unripe starfruit. Kerri liked it because it was really sour.

You may recognize this next one. It is pineapple.

This tree is what really gave Zanzibar their spot in history. And today they are still picked by hand as most of the spices.

A short interlude to keep you in suspense.

The answer is cloves. Here are the buds ready for picking and drying.

Another giant fruit in season is Jackfruit.

Here are the cloves again after picking them off the stems.

There is the flower inside.

They grow a large amount of tea too and here are the flowers.

Here are Vanilla pods still on the tree. They are not quite ready to be picked and dried.

They grow some chocolate too but this pod was really unripe.

Here they are on the tree.