A contrast photo. Crystal blue waters. A snorkeling paradise. Two knackered fisherman who probably can’t swim and definitely couldn’t give a toss whether the waters were crystal blue or green with spots. Theirs is a hard, hard life. They often go fishing at night with lanterns. You can see their canoes and dhows dotting the horizon like long chains of fairy lights. The lanterns confuse the fish into thinking it’s a full moon. And full moon for a fish around here means get your flipper over time. Their favourite place for fish nooky is near the surface so they’ll naturally start swimming towards the light. You know what’s coming. Love is cruel. As soon as they reach the surface, lips puckered, the fisherman wacks them over the head with the lantern and scoops them into the boat. He scoops them out with nets actually but you get the picture.

Like I say a hard life but at least a life where you can earn a living, at least for now. Apparently the scourge of African local fishing is getting hungrier and destroying more and more of the local fishing habits. The scourge? European trawlers. To be more precise European appetite for fish which is then supplied by European hi-tech long range trawlers. Completely illegal. The trawlers skulk down from the North Sea and Med fleets and fish at night, turning off their lights to avoid detection which also leads to fatal collisions with local fishing boats. Apparently the whole Somali pirate business was caused by European trawlers wiping out the local fisheries off the North Eastern coast of Somalia and well beyond. The local Somali fisherman faced either starvation or doing something else. Nicking stuff back from the people that nicked stuff from them seems fairly reasonable in that light.

Same size buses as hours but if you look carefully you’ll notice 5 seats to a row not 4. There’s actually a 6^th and 7^th row of seats outside the bus, one row on each side sort of like stabilizer wings. A bit drafty sitting in them and overtaking can be a bit hairy but at half the price, very popular.

The woman standing in the aisle, all 5 inches of it, was a sort of a bus Avon lady. She got on at one the of stations and proceeded to pull ointments, lacquers and assorted unguents from her bag. Each one preceded by an elaborate speech (didn’t understand a word of it but it sounded impressive. Clearly she had in her possession the sort of lacquer and ointment that could change a person’s life). Not one of us purchased a thing from her. Poor woman trudged off, head hung low at the next station probably thinking ‘Why do I always pull the bloody whitey bus?’

And sometimes on a bright sunny day you turn a corner and kapow! A town cloth market.

Good shot eh? I think so. It’s one of the 18^th century buildings belonging to a small cluster that were set up by missionaries to house freed slaves. Just around the corner from us. Zanzibar was the largest slave trading post in East Africa. At its height around 50,000 slaves were passing through Zanzibar every year. Estimates only cover human beings that survived the journey by the way. Arab traders brought huge human trains in from the African interior. As well as places like above there’s also a linguistic ghost image from those times. The language of counting, sorting and moving slaves back then was all done in Arabic, the language of the traders. And numbering, directions and time in Swahili to this day is still in Arabic, or heavily influenced by Arabic. There you go. You learn something new every day.