Day 45: October 19. Things get a little spicy...

I got up extra early this morning to go to mass at St. Joseph's Cathedral before our spice tour. I wanted to experience local spirituality, and Hellen had been telling me that going to church here is a very different experience than it is at home, so I decided to check it out. Unfortunately, the 7 am mass was the English mass, and very very similar to home. Maybe next week we'll both make it to a Swahili mass!

I walked back to the hostel, and Karla and I had breakfast on the roof in a sudden rainstorm, which luckily cleared just as we were being picked up for our tour.

The tour itself was fantastic: it took us to 5 stops and showed us how dozens of spices are grown. We were a little skeptical at first because everything always seems so chaotic and disorganized. Once we got to the plantations things seemed to fall in place perfectly. My favorite sprice was cinnamon: the spice literally comes from the bark of the tree, and cinnamon sticks are just twigs from this tree. It's amazing that people figured this out! Karla's favorite was the jackfruit, which is this large fruit that is about as big as a watermelon, and which grows by dangling seemingly precariously from the trunk of the tree! We got to try the jackfruit later, and it tastes like a banana but more citrusy and had the consistancy of a pineapple. It's quite delicious.

We tried several other exotic fruits before lunch (one of which I had an extremely mild allergic reaction to...I'll have to be careful with fruit in the future!), all of which were interesting, to say the least. We had a lovely lunch of rice pliau with a coconut milk sauce and more of that delicious bread before heading back to Stone Town. There we had just enough time for a last spiced cuppa (tea for Karla and coffee for me) at Monsoon, before getting on our ferry back to Dar. They served every cup with a small piece of Kashata (or peanut fudge) that Karla loved. We actually went in search of it on our way to the ferry.

Let's just say the ride back wasn't exactly smooth. For some reason, we encountered very rough water, and poor Karla was violently ill for the whole 2.5 hour journey. All around us, people were sick, and everyone was offering us their personal remedy: one man offered motion sickness tablets, an Indian woman offered cloves to put on her tongue, and the porter just kept handing us plastic bags. Even I, though I have a very strong stomach -knock on wood - was feeling quite queasy by the end.

We made it back to the good ol' YMCA more or less in one piece, and Karla's sleeping it off. She was able to stomach a little rice and Coke. I think we've both gone through more Coke in the last week than either of us has consumed in the last 4 years! It's sad when you're more sure about soda than water...anyway I think Karla will be just fine in the morning! This is why I've written the last few entries (plus she's lazy haha).
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