I leave Uganda tomorrow, traveling through Nairobi and Doha, Qatar, and will be back in India early the next morning. Below is another saved post about our stay in Jambiani, the small beach town on Zanzibar’s quiet eastern coast. Landscape/people photos by Mattea; food ones by me.
On Jambiani’s white sand road, we sat in the shade and watched cows wrestle.
First dinner I made a green lentil dal and coconut rice and a salad of only tomato slices, very good with just lime juice and salt.
For dessert we saved some of the coconut rice — made with the flesh from tender coconuts — to mix with the honey-like sweetened condensed milk and have with pineapple. We made a pot of tea, Zanzibar-style, spiced with fresh ginger and cinnamon.
The next day before lunch I walked along the town road with its jeep and bicycle tracks, beyond the well and the primary school, the sun very hot and baking the sand, and bought more rice and vegetables to make a simple potato and carrot biryani, the easy-to-make and very good Indian rice casserole.
Biryanis are best with big pieces of cinnamon steamed in with the rice. We also made a simple cabbage and tomato salad, and in place of cold beer we sipped whisky and water. It was a very good lunch, and there was biryani leftover to have for dinner that night.
I work on the veranda of our cottage early every morning. At sunrise the tide is high and the only sounds are the water, the gulls, and the wind through the palm trees, and after a few hours the water has receded a few hundred meters and the women are out harvesting the seaweed from where the water was. Later they dry it in the sun.
Avi Kramer is a freelance writer and editor. He has lived in Chile, China
and India and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.
