Zanzibar!

I'm thinking of going to Zanzibar on holiday this year. I saw an advert for a package that includes all airfare, return transfers, meals, drinks, snacks and various activities, 6 nights at the Mapenzi Beach Club, and 1 night at the Dhow Palace Hotel in Stonetown. I did some quick searching on the net, and it looks like a really nice place. The Mapenzi Beach Club looks like a great place (I thought it might be a dinky, small East African kind of hotel, but it looks really smart - light and airy, with palm groves and white beaches and air conditioning in each room). And Stonetown looks really interesting - an old, Arabic kind of town, really historic and just plain cool.

The down side is that it's a malaria area, and apparently you shouldn't eat or drink anything that hasn't been boiled or otherwise thoroughly cooked - no salads, no unpeeled fruit, and only drink sealed bottled water (apparently some bottled water is actually just used water bottles refilled with tap water!). And they recommend that you have yellow fever and other vaccinations. so it's a bit scary from a medical point of view :-( Oh, and you need to get a visa.

But overall it does sound really cool and exotic - apparently you fly in to Tanzania, then cross to Zanzibar by boat - hydrofoil, dhow, or catamaran. So I think that on Wednesday I'll go to the travel agent and find out a bit more - the price looked pretty good, especially since meals and things are included, but things like visas and airport taxes aren't, so I'd have to find out how much they are; also, the price quoted is per person sharing, as usual, which really annoys me because it doesn't help much if you're travelling alone! I'm sure that there are a lot of single people who go on holiday by themselves; it's a bit unfair to assume that everyone is travelling with someone else! But anyway ... I'll find out some more about it, and go from there - I might as well go somewhere interesting on holiday; I may even go during my birthday in July as a present to myself :-)