Fat Bottomed Girls

Yes, yes, yes, laugh it up, I know it's my anthem. I am using that subject because this internet cafe is across the road from the birthplace of one Freddie Mercury. I am in Stonetown. Guess what? It's ROASTING BLOODY HOT again. Being covered up lost it's appeal before we even arrived here, and right now I'm just over it. Totally over it. Today, I am sporting a mid-calf length skirt - ie: the most unflattering length possible - a vest-top and a kikoi that seems to trap the heat like an oven. Hooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot. Hot.

Woke up early - getting into the swing of this early-morning malarky - for the worlds mingingest breakfast. I am acclimatising to stale bread and mucous-coated egg, and milk with a nice layer of oil on top. You'd imagine me to be losing weight, but the cheese croissant and Snickers chaser put paid to that idea. Headed off on the Spice Tour with some others from Exodull too, and it was really, really interesting. We half-walked, half-taxi-d our way around Stone Town/local area. The tour guide was Ali. Ali T (the T being for tour-guide, which is lucky he chose his career accurately, he would have been an oddly-named dentist) and he had plainly been watching far, far too much Ali G. He peppered his sentences with "innit"s, along with a not-too-frugal dropping of t's. Ci-*-y. As in "Stonetown is a ci-y of 200000 people, innit, booyakasha". Ok - so he didn't quite add the booyakasha, I am embellishing. I videod a minute of him on the Ixus, because he was amusing to start with. Then he just became beyond annoying. Anyhoo - went to Freddies house, church built on old slave market (very sad), old amphitheatre market thing (Kat bought a beautiful painting of Masais), and meandered to the actual spice plantations, where we saw the plants growing, and got to taste and sniff everything: cardamom (if that's how you spell it), clove, ginger, vanilla, annatoo, ylang ylang, lemongrass, then the more mundane things like paw-paw, avo, pineapple, coconuts, bananas... then it tipped with rain and we sat under an awning and sampled some local brews, the nicest of which was lemongrass tea. Really, really, really good. And apparently it has relaxing properties, so I bought 2 bags of the stuff to keep me sane at work (hopefully PP isn't reading this - I miss his nonsense on occasion). After that, we saw a demo of a bloody odd feral boy climbing right to the top of an incredibly tall palm tree. We had a fruit lunch, loads of banana, pineapple, passionfruit (under-ripe and super-bitter), mango, and oranges. Needless to say that has evoked much clenching on the trip this afternoon. I noted a comment complaining about lack of sh*t-burning detail? Well. The truck had little shovels on the inside of the door, with a nice little hand written sign saying "poo", which you could avail yourself of for trips into the bush. Only a couple of people got desperate enough, otherwise there were periodic long-drops - and do to intense dryness there was no encouragement to start bush-fires, so no burning happened. OK? OK. Annnyway - then came back from Spice Tour, said farewall to Ali T (thank goodness), and ate aforementioned croissant/snickers/diet pepsi. Then went meandering about the market. I made an astute financial investment in a beautiful watercolour of a traditional wooden zanzibarian (?) door - and also flexed my totally useless bargaining skills, and got the artist himself in, and talked him down from $90 to $65. The shop owner would have been much harder to haggle with, and he looked most perturbed at the artist as he crumbled under the extreme weight of my eyelash-batting and general man-scaring tactics that I use as my trademark bargaining technique. Suckers. I still think I was a little fleeced, but I really, really love the painting, so I'm happy.

Right. I am now going upstairs to have a stab at making my sweaty semi-burka-d self purdy for dinner. It's our final night together as most of the group leave tomorrow morning. We're going to a traditional restaurant - I'm one of the few not to be food-poisoned thus far, and am touching wood right now. It's a sit-on-floor, eat-with-hands affair, I'm excited. TB will be up to get taxi to airport with the others at 5am. I am flying back on Monday morning with Lorna, as the flight tomorrow was full. One more day in Stonetown tomorrow.

I wrote some notes in the little Moleskine book that Tessa bought me for this trip, but forgot to bring it to the computer tonight (Blackberry still has no GPRS data signal), so I'll do an update if I come here tomorrow, or when I have a stop-over in Nairobi. There were tales from our 2nd night in Nungwi and a few observations that I cannot recall right now.

Off to pay for internet, and become 2000 shillings lighter. The bonus about Tanzanian money is that everything sounds SO expensive I have been rather cautious this holiday, as my maths is still diabolical.

Going to be so sad to say goodbye to the group, plus Julius and Leo tonight. Must seek comfort in the arms of Tusker.

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