At 8 am, Saraphia and I were ready to be picked up and waited for our driver again. After an hour, he was still not there and I admit that I got slightly annoyed. It took us some time to make a few phone calls and to figure out who had been in charge of organising this trip for us, so we could check on what was going on. After almost another hour, Stan, my contact, showed up and explained us that the driver couldn’t make it because overnight something happened to the petrol market and suddenly, it was impossible to get gasoline for cars. The prices had sky-rocketed and his driver could not offer the transfer for the agreed price anymore. After a lot of discussion, a friend of a friend of whoever showed up and offered us a ride to Nungwi in his minibus (exceptionally, a real one). First, I was happy and grateful for his offer – but only until I heard that he wanted me to pay 30.000 Tanzanian Shilling for it (about 23 Euro), which is pretty much a fortune and I refused to pay it. Instead, he drove us to Stone Town for 3000 Shilling which was a regular taxi price for this route. By this time, I had given up on the idea to ever reach Nungwi today, so at least I wanted to spend my day with something useful in Stone Town: writing.

First, however, I tried to send a parcel to Germany because my backpack had become ridiculously heavy by now. At the same time, I had lost weight, which didn’t make us such a good match anymore and I even had trouble to get it up from the ground without halfway breaking my back. If you asked me why it had gained weight, I couldn’t even give you a reason. Maybe it was due to the souvenirs I had accumulated by now (although I was VERY restrictive with shopping), maybe it was because of the gifts the people from Mwanakwerekwe had given me for my parents. On the other hand, my backpack must have lost weight thanks to my extensive use of sunscreen, mosquito repellent, shampoo and other hygiene articles (you may think this couldn’t make much of a difference but I promise, if you carry around 30 kg, you feel every gram’s change). Then again, maybe it was the 400gr glass Nutella Renate had given me as a present when I left Plantation Lodge (although I was ensuring the diminution of its weight day by day), or maybe it was really only because I had lost weight and was much weaker than when I had left in April. Who knows, in the end it was just too heavy for me.

So I went to a post-office in Stone Town with a huge plastic bag full of stuff I didn’t need to carry around with me. Well, unfortunately, it turns out that this post-office didn’t accept parcels for abroad shipment. In fact, there was only one post-office in Zanzibar that would. Of course, this one was far out of my way and I admit that I didn’t want to spend the money for a taxi to get there. So I spent the rest of the day carrying around my regular daypack plus the plastic bag with my belongings...

At first, it wasn’t a big deal since I spent 5 ½ hours in an internet cafe, writing my diary and replying to some emails. Afterwards, I had late lunch at a place called The Coco Nut Bar and went for a last walk through the maze of Stone Town, finally visiting St. Jacob Church, the last sight on my to-do-list which I hadn’t seen yet. Unfortunately, the church was closed for public but at least I managed to find it in the labyrinth of Stone Town’s streets – after running around the visible towers for half an hour without ever getting close to the entrance!

When it got dark around 6pm, I took a taxi back to Mwanakwerekwe. This time I had to pay 6000 Shilling (after tough negotiations with the driver) because of the ongoing petrol crisis. To this day I haven’t found out what exactly happened but since everybody was talking about it, I guess SOMEthing was going on... At 7 pm I was picked up for dinner at Dr. Mhagama’s house, another one of the church elders who had invited me for dinner. I went there with Pastor Ntele and we had a very nice evening altogether. Afterwards, the only thing left for me was to pack my bags, take a shower and go to bed at 10:30 pm.

P.S.: Did I ever mention that I shared my room at the community guesthouse with a million fierce mosquitoes and – even worse – a big, strangely flat looking spider? The room was sprayed every morning and only God knows how the mosquitoes managed to populate it again until I returned in the evenings. At least, the bed had a mosquito net but because it had a few holes, I slept in my own mosquito tent PLUS the net. This did help about the mosquitoes but one night I was bitten by a spider which I found inside the big net the next morning. I must admit that I didn’t know any other solution but to kill her. This spider, however, was very small and not at all scary compared to the big flat one I found in my bathroom one day. I don’t know how she ended up there but she was far too fast to catch and/or kill her. The worst thing was that she sat on the side of the toilet and when I got closer, she disappeared in the gap between the base and the actual toilet seat. When I finally pulled myself together (and only because I HAD to use the toilet), I slowly opened the toilet cover with two fingers and peeked inside - the spider was gone. But this was even worse because it meant that she must sit somewhere under the rim where I couldn’t keep an eye on her! Since then, I used to be extremely careful in the bathroom and never sat down on the toilet again!! (Later that very same spider hung out in different corners of my room or on the ceiling and luckily remained there until I left...)