September 19 - Day Of Leisure and Flight to Zanzibar

Mary spent most of the day in the room working on pictures while Paul spent all morning trying to deal with paperwork required to get into Zanzibar.  The website would take the information we entered, but then display back the previous Tanzania information and QR code.  After a call to a support number, it turns out there is a separate website for Zanzibar.  That website was down and he couldn’t get the forms filled out so after a number of calls ending with the Zanzibar airport official, he was sent a copy of the form.  Hopefully a manual copy would do.  We only left the room for visits to the hotel restaurant for meals and to the front desk to pick up printed documents. 

We were picked up about 4:00am (very early) because we still weren’t sure if we had all the paperwork required to get into Zanzibar.  As it turned out, they didn’t want paper copies, it had to be online.  The agent gave us the website to use - it was the Tanzania website.  Fortunately, this time after we entered the info it showed us the new info and new QR code.  But it still was a headache to stand there and try to fill out the forms real time. 

Eventually everything got worked out and we made it through security.  Once at the gate we had to wait a few hours before boarding time.  But we ultimately made it to Zanzibar.

We were picked up by our transfer driver and made it to the hotel fairly late.  Shades of Morocco…Zanzibar feels very like Morocco and our hotel (Serena) looks very much like the riads we stayed at in Morocco.  From the sounds of it we are right on the water.  Morning will tell.