The challenge of importing a vehicle into this tiny semi- autonomous nation precludes it from the obvious list of African motorcycle destinations. However, we still felt a need to be there. It’s Zanzibar after all! While few of us can point it out on the map, we’ve all heard of it. Just the way the name rolls off your tongue is enough to conjure an alluring tropical fantasy, scented with cloves and steeped in exotic old world culture.

In our own fashion we muscled our way through the city of Dar es Salam, found secure parking near the harbor, packed our riding kit and jumped a ferry out to the Zanzibar. The plan was to rent a bike in Zanzibar on arrival and zip around among spice plantations and pristine palmed lined beaches. The weather figures otherwise.

Go ahead, google Zanzibar and check out the pictures! How about those incredible beaches! We didn’t see any of those. A grey veil of monsoonal rain covered the island, churned up the waters and drenched the palm lined beaches. We nixed the bike rental, booked into the Princess Salme Hotel and resigned ourselves to a leisurely exploration of the most interesting metropolis in Africa, Stone Town.

Aside from its dark history as one of the largest slave markets in the world, Zanzibar was also the starting point for European expeditions attempting to unravel the secrets of the Nile. Along these winding alleyways and open markets, some of the most hardcore explorers of all time, such as Burton, Speke, Stanley and Livingston, outfitted their expeditions, gathered information and signed on team members that were unlikely to ever return alive. Their stories of triumph, tragedy, adventure and extreme courage are a testament to the power of the human spirit. I’d like to think that if school kids read this stuff, they’d find “Grand theft Auto” a complete bore in comparison.

The Nile, it’s history, geography and people are what brings us to dedicate our trip to Eastern Africa. However, armed with doxy and the fuel injected motor, Katelyn and I are anticipating an easier go, then say Stanley’s expedition with his 85% mortality rate crossing the continent.

Despite childhood aspirations, we are not African explorers, but in the spirit of their endeavors, we are exploring off the grid and contributing fresh tracks to the map wherever we can.

Seeking to outfit for the road ahead, we wandered markets, alleys and clove scented shops. We stocked up on locally grown dates. A bag of these would provide instant energy on the road ahead and keep for weeks. Per our Modus Operandi, we celebrated street food Saturday with octopus curry matched with flat bread.

In Zanzibar, we witnessed an impressive mix of culture. A woman in a full burka may walk down the street and pass another gal in a mini skirt. The minerates sing out the evening prayer next to the bell tower of a Christian church. There seems to be an enormous tolerance for contrasting customs. Folks were just doing their own thing in their own way.

In the late 1400s, the Portuguese arrived in Zanzibar to find a well-established Arab and Swahili trading settlement controlled by an Omani Sultan. With cannons blazing the Portuguese moved in, but within thirty years their colony was wiped out by the Sultanate’s warriors. Over the following centuries, European entities asserted various degrees of control over the archipelago, but the Sultans maintained direct rule over the islands, it’s people and it’s lucrative markets. By the mid 19th century, the Arab slave trade was in full swing and devastating Eastern Africa and beyond. Arab and African slavers marauded with enormous expeditions, sometimes reaching as far the Congo. The Swahili-Arab Tipu Tip, the most notorious of them all, ventured far into the interior, buying Ivory and slaves from indigenous chiefs. The slaves carried the ivory to the coast and those that survived the journey were sold in the Zanzibar slave market. The ivory fed the western demand for such oddities as billiard balls (no joke) and the slaves were sold to local plantations or shipped to the Arab peninsula and beyond. In it’s heyday, as many as 50,000 human beings were auctioned off in the Zanzibar slave market. Around the turn of the century, the depopulation of both people and elephants combined with Great Britain’s war on slavery would ultimately end the slave trade of Eastern Africa.