Zanzibar diaries
Paje and Stone Town
Hello. This is a very long post (11,500 words, maybe my longest Substack post?) which began as a daily diary about Zanzibar but went off on tangents about dream interpretation, addiction, madness, suicide, visions, demons and other such things.
As a travelogue, it records a week in Paje, swimming in the Indian Ocean, monkeys in mahogany forests, three days in Stone Town and my arrival yesterday in Nungwi. I might write a second diary about Nungwi. After this week, I’ll get the ferry to Dar es Salaam and fly to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, where I’m going, against some very strong advice, into the Tigray region and then to the Danakil Depression, the hottest place on earth with molten lava lakes and boiling acid pools and toxic gas vents and the ever-present smell of sulphur—essentially hell; also possibly the birthplace of humankind. Then I’ll fly to Lalibela in Amhara, where medieval churches were carved downwards out of the rock, for the Feast of the Assumption, and then I’ll go back to Addis and take a train to Harar to Rimbaud’s house and hopefully to see spotted hyenas fed raw meat over the city walls at night.
If you’d like to read about these things, consider becoming a paid subscriber so that I can keep going to ridiculous places with absolutely no oversight, media training or accreditation. You will not find travel writing like this in Condé Nast. At £5 a month, you can fund ten bus journeys on a Zanzibari dala dala, at least four packs of cigarettes and maybe five if I haggle well, or one good meal such as an octopus curry to sustain me. It’s cheaper if you subscribe via browser vs the app, btw.