Yesterday tear gas filled Stone Town as mostly young radicals protested the indictment of a popular extremist sheik who was then held without bail.

The unrest in Zanzibar began last week. There was also significant violence in mainland Tanzania’s largest city, Dar-es-Salaam. Many media reports claimed this was Zanzibar’s “Arab Spring.”

It’s not. Unlike in northern Africa these demonstrations will not succeed in toppling the Tanzanian government. Also unlike in northern Africa, the vast majority of Tanzanians are critical of the Islamic violence.

Mainland Tanzania has shackled Zanzibar ever since the federation in 1964 and most Tanzanians look down on Zanzibaris. This has not been a helpful attitude, in the past and especially now as unrest grows on the island. Be that as it may, the significant point is that mainland Tanzanians are in the vast majority.

But there could be a period now measured in months of unrest not significant enough to stop tourists coming to see lions but enough to seriously effect the beach business. This is because the trouble that’s brewing is on the coast.

And that’s because the coast is where East Africa’s Muslim population is, and much of it has been highly radicalized over just the last few years.

Americans who think of East Africa as big game country don’t understand that more than half of the tourists to East Africa never see an animal larger than a monkey. The extraordinarily beautiful coral coast which extends virtually all the way south of Somalia through Mozambique is East Africa’s real tourist treasure, not wild animals.

Europeans especially use East Africa the same way Americans use the Caribbean, for sun ‘n sand vacations, usually of a week long, and usually transported by charter aircraft that practically land next to your beach view hotel room. There you stay, vegging out on margaritas and reggae bands.

Trouble on the coast is not new. In November, 2002, the Israeli Paradise Beach Hotel was mostly destroyed by a terrorist bomb and a ground-to-air missile narrowly missed an El Al jumbo jet taking off from Mombasa, Kenya.

There has been nothing as dramatic until this year. There had been numerous incidents of small grenade bombs in local bars and several incidents of tourist harassment in the last decade. But none of these critically dissuaded tourists from flooding to Kenya’s beaches almost exclusively from Europe.

But all that changed with the successful Kenyan invasion of Somali just to the north of Kenya. As Kenyan soldiers routed Somali terrorists, the coast began to heat up in much more generic ways that has seriously effected tourism. Tourists were kidnaped and publicly ransomed by terrorists, and virtually all the main beach hotels began to institute extremely strict security procedures.

Then last month, just as the Kenyan forces were about to oust al-Shabaab (al-Qaeda in Somali) from its last great stronghold of Kismayo, all sorts of political turbulence erupted in both Mombasa in Kenya and Zanzibar in Tanzania.

It struck me as an obvious consequence of the successful military action in Somalia. Rebels were running for cover, and the East Africa coast with its radical Muslims provides that, and what assets and hardware they could run with began funneling through East Africa.

Kenya is in the thralls of the last legislation implementing its new constitution before March elections. Suddenly there was a newly reborn political movement in Mombasa that called itself the Mombasa Republican Congress. Its agenda was nothing less than independence from Kenya.

The independent movement in Zanzibar which has been a perennial cause every since federation with the mainland in 1964, suddenly blossomed with new and fancy leaflets, new cars for its leaders and new megaphones for its Friday prayers.

While ostensibly completely separate political movements, the timing of both the emergence of the MRC and the makeover of the Zanzibar autonomy movement struck me as anything but coincidental. Money, methods and Islamic madness was coming from the north.

And then the tinderbox exploded in both Kenya and Zanzibar. Last month the principal radical cleric was killed in a car drive-by gangster-like shooting. And last week, Tanzanian police started rounding up radical clerics. Each incident, though separated by nearly a month, resulted in violent protests.

As I write this blog today Mombasa is calm following the Kenyan government’s very tough actions which involved dozens of arrests and the closing of theoretically unregistered Muslim organizations. The Kenyan President charged Mombasa radicals to “surrender or face arrest.”

But Zanzibar is not calm, today, and depending very much upon what the Tanzanian government now does with its radical Muslims, it may not be calm for a long while. And now what happens in one place is likely to effect the other.

As far as I can see, which is all along the exquisitely beautiful coral coast from Somali to the Mozambique border, this outstanding Indian Ocean venue won’t be a place to vegge out for some time.

When and will all of this calm down?

It depends upon how quickly the Somali mop-up occurs, how peacefully and completely the March Kenyan elections go, and how placated Zanzibari successionists will feel as Tanzania flirts with the idea of a new constitution.

March is the key date. After the March 4 Kenyan elections we’ll have a much clearer picture on which to predict what the coast will look like over the next year.

Until then. Leave your flippers at home. Concentrate on the binocs.

This is going to sound like the most self-serving blog ever, but I find little solace reporting about the 73 people killed last week when – once again – the ferry between Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar capsized.

The ferry is featured in Lonely Planet, in dozens of plan-yourself travel forums, and even in WikiTravel.

It’s pointless to write about the ferry, today, because I would simply be repeating what I wrote about a year ago when the same thing happened.

Do-it-yourself, plan-it-yourself travel to Africa has not quite developed to a safe enough point yet in most of East Africa, and the ferry is the best example. Forums like Lonely Planet are getting better to be sure, but they are also among those that sail right past the news of the day.

On July 8 jpinab entered the Thorn Tree Forum of Lonely Planet and asked for advice about traveling from Zanzibar to Arusha.

After several replies and backpostings, including two which I suspect were actually small local tour company stealthers from Dar, jpinab fortunately decided not to take the Zanzibar ferry.

But was there any discussion about how dangerous they are? About how unreliable they are? How of five ferries scheduled daily rarely 3 actually operate?

No, the discussion was governed by cost. And that’s the same that happens time and again if you move through these travel forums. The preponderance of activity is how to get a good price, and the presumption is that everything is possible at a good price.

That’s crazy. It’s also deadly.

South Africa and Europe are superb places to explore on your own, with forums of helpful individuals that I’ve only rarely found to be completely wrong.

If you’re savvy about forums, if you realize that most of the information from travelers who have been only once or twice to a destination is very limited and usually not true in any general way, then you’ll be careful enough to survey large numbers of remarks panning through a variety of seasons and types of people.

If you take the time to do all that, then I wager you have a pretty good chance of determining something good and safe by yourself.

But not yet in East Africa and the ferry is a good example.

The information I see from independent travelers in East Africa on these forums is saturated with inaccuracies. The most inaccurate of all is the discussion of the “great migration.” It amazes me how travelers who visit a place once in their lives suddenly are experts.

But the inaccuracies about the Zanzibar ferry defy my patience and understanding. I hope the four foreigners killed on the Zanzibar ferry last week didn’t use a travel forum to get there.

Traveling to the Mara in January to see the “migration” is a mistake that you’ll be able well to live with. That’s the point: Live.

It rather breaks my heart to substitute anything for Kenya, which as a society is so incredibly hopeful and promising. But the tourist incidents recently in the north, the kidnaping of NGOs near the Somali border, and the bombs in Nairobi city — however ineptly undertaken – all prove that the Kenyan invasion last October of Somalia has spawned revenge attacks that in my opinion make a safari in Kenya ill-advised.

And Zanzibar is one of the most fascinating places in Africa, for it was here that literally “it all began” in East Africa. Colonized in the early 16th century by Portugal, then conquered by the Omani Arabs almost two hundred years later, East Africa’s culture, language and much of its difficult politics was fashioned here in the ‘Spice Island.’

Our first excursion was to see a spice plantation cooperative outside Stone Town. Every spice imaginable is grown here, and it was so remarkable to learn how mace is harvested from the outside of nutmeg, how chilies grow wild, and how almost interminable stripping of the cinnamon tree for its bark does nothing more than promote more bark to grow and more cinnamon to be harvested!

The crown crop is cloves. First planted by the early Omani sultans who realized a business game changer if spices could be harvested less than half the distance from Europe to Indonesia, cloves production continues to be among Zanzibar’s chief sources of foreign reserves.

Rich Knapp photographing red colobus.

The monkey is the last large wild mammal on the island, and its protection is secured principally by the revenue earned by tourists like us coming to see them. And over the years they’ve become remarkably habituated. Multiple times they ran around our feet, swung by our faces, and sat for long minutes giving poses for perfect pictures!

Jozani is also where visitors can learn how important the mangrove forests are to protecting the island. They create a natural barrier to rising tides, tsunamis and typhoons. We were fortunate to go at low tide, when many crabs and fishes could be seen as well, and my compliments to the Zanzibari authorities who constructed the walkway out into the sea through the forest.

Phil & Pam Lopes in mangroves.

And we ended with a cruise in a dhow at sunset! The “live music” aboard wasn’t exactly Zanzibari or African (Beatles is particularly popular, here), but other than that the opportunity to experience traveling as the early explorers and traders did was a real treat!

On to the great northern circuit! Stay tuned!