Zanzibar. Days 3 and 4

Day 3.

It rained a lot so we played several games of scrabble, thankfully I won one because when Emily repeatedly beats me at games I am an embarrassingly loathable character. I’m a terrible loser. Our play was interrupted at one point by a cockroach who made me shudder and make a funny ‘uhuhuuh’  noise as he clung to my flip flop. This was little compared to Emily’s scream a minute later when she found herself face to face with him sitting on her shoulder. I did the brave boyfriend thing and pissed myself laughing as she brushed herself down for the following half an hour.

Day 4.

Having sort of wasted a day we made sure we were up early to meet up with Captain Fruit who was taking us out on a snorkelling trip. As we walked through the shallows our captain said ‘pole pole… snake’. Pole pole means slowly slowly and snake is an English word I wasn't delighted to hear as we waded through the seaweed. I asked what he meant and I think the gist of it was that we should walk slowly like a snake and not because of a snake. Apparently Emily missed this part of the conversation and so spent the wade out to the boat petrified that the weeds were crawling with sea snakes.

The dhow boat trip was wonderful, cruising along with the sun shining followed by a swim around a coral reef is a chuffing splendid way to spend a couple of hours. We headed back for fruit with Captain Fruit then bought a shell like one we’d seen whilst snorkelling from Captain Bush Doctor (everyone in Jambiani is Captain something or other).

We wanted to make the most of our last evening on the coast so went back to what was now our favourite restaurant where we accidentally consumed a lot of cheap, tasty wine. The wine took us on to the bar of an Italian restaurant that was just closing and we kept it open, joined by a guitar player and a man with a djembe drum. Emily sang along and I was tiddly enough to think I could play the harmonica.

We had to stay in the bar longer than we were welcome because a cyclone over Madagascar had blown its back end our way. By the time we were leaving at 3am we got our first sight of the beach at high tide, or rather, there was no beach at high tide. We got a fair way back towards our villa climbing over the fences of various hotels then Emily decided she’d try to outrun a wave. She did manage to outrun the wave, getting to safe ground about a second before the wave crashed into the concrete embankment. I waited for the next gap and ran after her calling her a bloody idiot. She seemed oblivious to the danger of the situation until I turned her around to watch the next wave smash into the concrete easily powerful enough to send a human head into the wall.

Against Emily’s protests I took the decision that we would stay where we were until the tide dropped. Our location was someone’s rather beautiful house. With it still raining heavily we took shelter under their porch and set our alarm for two hours later (I know, some of you are thinking you’ve heard a story like this before*). It was uncomfortable so Emily didn’t sleep and was not impressed when we moved on and discovered that we were only 50 metres from our bed. She said ‘we could easily have made it’, I replied ‘Yes, we could and probably would have made it but we could also have drowned or had our heads split open on a rock’. I was being overly dramatic and Emily was being overly ignorant of the dangers of the sea.

For the rest of the next day I built up the size of the waves in my recounting of the night, so much so that Emily got fed up and said ‘you were probably right’ just so that I stopped going on.

*See Back to Wanaka and a bit of a naughty story. If you think I should have learnt my lesson from then you’re a wally because the lesson was: Sleep where you want humans are lovely.