I wanted some relaxed beach time so I headed North from Stone-Town which is the "old city" of Zanzibar, and spent several days at the far Northern end of the island at a settlement called Nungwi... Its a pretty well developed beach resort area but its mostly pretty small scale developments so it retains a certain level of charm. And though the local businesses would be sure to disagree, the fact that it was low season and the fewest tourists they had seen in years (for some reason everybody taking summer holidays in the Northern hemisphere seems to have decided to go to Brasil for the world cup instead of Zanzibar :)! ) and I really liked the very quiet feel of the place.
And while I was lazing around the place between getting sun-burned on the beach and doing some scuba dives, I pointed the camera at the local fishing boats...
They are all Dhow rigged which is quite an elegant set up. The boats themselves seemed to come in two main varieties: The Dhow which is a plank on frame boat of fairly normal design (curved huls rather than flat-bottomed), and the out-rigger canoe. But both types of boats come in a wide range of sizes... The single hulled dhows can be single man sized or big enough to carry probably 50 people or so, and the outriggers can again be single man or larger with crews of four men. The dhows are generally used for both cargo carrying and net fishing while the outriggers are used for net and line fishing.
The out-riggers are in fact an elaborately carved and "augmented" dugout canoe with the main hull being a single log that has had the sides extended upwards with a couple of planks... They are very elegantly foiled and of very simple and effective design
I took lots of pictures...
