Zanzibar!

In what appears to be an amazingly short length of time, I reached the one third point of my current mission and so headed off for a much needed break. Unfortunately, due to the way flights work, I elected to have only a short break, flying out on Monday and coming back on Saturday. To avoid having to make decisions I headed directly to a beach recommended by some of my colleagues and was immediately faced with a choice: Do I spend my precious four days sleeping in and lazing on the pure white beach, occasionally dipping into the emerald crystal clear water? Or do I do what I have no got round to doing yet and doing my open water dive qualification? With only four days it was tight, but the nice people at the scuba-do dive centre said it was possible, given that it was low season and things were fairly quiet. So I did it... in three intensive days, and still managed to get a much-needed lie-in on the Friday.

The waters were amazing - although we had to fit in all the exercises into the dives, there was still time to enjoy the abundant underwater life and the near-30m visibility. I can’t imagine there are many better places to learn to dive.

On Friday afternoon I headed to Stone Town - very much worth a visit... very arabic and un-african. In fact I can thoroughly recommend Zanzibar as a holiday destination. Off-season it is quiet, and I believe currently only about 650 euro return from Europe.