Zanzibar – Rain and the big party - Malachy Harty.

Muslim Zanzibar is celebrating the end of Ramadan, Eid al Fitr. It’s a lot like Christmas, but the party lasts for four days. Nothing is open. We starve each rainy day and join the locals on the waterfront in the evenings for paper plates of barbecued seafood.

Yesterday, for the first time, Niamh joined in my idle threat, “I’d love to run to South Africa after Zanzibar”. We’re both weary of travel. It’s been over 6 months since we left Cork. We have very limited communication with our friends and family. It’s mostly email, unless one of us gets sick and then there are loads of phone calls for a while. We’re both looking forward to being at home.

The travel is slow and tough. We’re hoping to be able to draw an unbroken line tracing our land journeys from Cairo to Cape Town, and possibly back to Cork if we return through the Middle East. This means long, hard bus and train journeys. We recently took trains and busses from Mwanza to Moshi. The journey took four days but we could have flown in 45 minutes! We see lots and we want those adventures, but it really is tiring. Even now, we could opt for city to city busses which would whiz us down to Cape Town in a week or two. However, we would love to visit Northern Mozambique along the way, which adds weeks to the journey time. I wonder if we can make South Africa by Christmas?

Malachy

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