A t times however, the plodding bureaucracy of Tanzanias' current revolutionary government makes for rapid hair loss. As a journalist, I've been issued with an official introduction from the desk of the Ministry of Tourism. I cannot make head or tail of the Swahili paragraph this tissue of a page bears in blue typewriter ink, but it never fails to elicit a glazed chorus of sighs from the museum staff. Generally, I wait 15 minutes to save 15 cents. A s a bonus to local efficency, the computers are clunky Soviet dinosaurs.
Power is rationed and the phones sulk at whim.
Yet somehow, this tedium has proved Zanzibar's blessing. T he owners, Len and Katarina Horlin are a hands-on pair of Swedish sisters who fell under Zanzibar's spell while travelling the world. Having grown up on the remote Swedish island of Gotska Sandor, the Horlins were to get their hands dirty. T hough they'd responded to a call for foreign investment, initially, the local Tourism Ministry was a little peturbed to learn that the industrious sisters had simply pitched their tents under the cocunut palms and were enlisting the locals to copy their own huts as chalets. Five years on, the rooms still have no electricity.