We leave in two days for ISP! Ahh. It's so weird to think that after two months of spending all day every day with the same 14 people, we're all about to split up for a whole month. Hopefully it won't be that long, and we'll be able to get together for the end of ISP on the beach.

We've been in Stone Town for the last few days, just doing lots of school work. We celebrated Halloween, which was lots of fun. For being in Zanzibar, I think we did a pretty good job scrounging up costumes. We trick or treated around the hotel with weird Swahili candy and drinks, etc, then went to Livingstone's, a bar on the beach with a live band. After that we went to Bawani, the crazy club with bad American music and strobe lights.

Before Stone Town we were in Pemba. We flew there in two tiny planes (maybe 10 seats total), which was exciting and a great way to see the island. It was a bit scary being able to see everything the pilot was doing and seeing during the landing, but definitely worth it for the excitement. Pemba is sometimes called the "Green Island" because it's rural and undeveloped. It's a beautiful place with a more varied landscape than that of Unguja. Apparently, it's also referred to as the "Dark Island," which I now understand after spending a week there without power. The island is powered by a single giant generator, unline Unguja which is powered by a cable from Dar es Salaam. Apparently, someone "forgot" to order fuel for the generator, so there was no power! The boat operators were on strike, so there was no guarantee that the fuel would be coming over on the boat anytime soon. At the end of our stay in Chake Chake, the most happening town in Pemba, power finally came back. It wouldn't be so bad without power if it wasn't so HOT! It was unseasonably hot while we were there, causing even the locals to complain. My house also didn't have running water (although there were taps?) so I could only do bucket showers, which just don't work as well for cooling down. Either way, it was quite the experience.

During our week in Chake Chake we saw a bunch of cool stuff, like the Pemba Health Lab, where we saw their TB lab and they also showed us slides of malaria and other parasites like those that cause elephantitis. We also went to the Pemba Essential Oil Distillery and saw kilos and kilos of cloves being prepared for the distillation process. Pemba's biggest cash crop is cloves, so the whole island smells like cloves. We also went to Misali Island, where green turtles nest and there are also cool caves and coral reefs around the island. Also salt farms, a cool idea but not carried out terribly profitably in Pemba.

After homestays in Chake Chake we went to Wete, Pemba, where we visited some local farms and went to Ngezi forest. Some people in our group saw a Mozambique spitting cobra there, and also a dead bushbaby and a tree that bleeds (!). On our last day in Pemba, we visited Kidike, the site of a conservation project of Pemba Flying Foxes, a species endemic to the island. They're pretty much huge bats that roost all over the place in Kidike.

So now ISP in two days! Back to Jozani to study monkeys. Should be cool. Send me emails!