The coast highway passes through verdant regions of parkland, with borassus, doum and coconut palms (borassus are the ones with a bulge in the trunk) interspersed with swampy dells, before the landscape is firmly established as rolling fields of sugar cane, culminating in Ramisi , the coast's main sugar-producing area until the closure of its factory.

 

On the shore, just before you reach Ramisi, is the tiny and very old settlement of SHIRAZI , also known as Kifunzi (which means "little Funzi"). Any of the tracks through the sugar fields on the left of the road will take you to the hamlet - a scattering of houses in the jungle and a small harbour among mangroves. The people of Shirazi call themselves Wa-shirazi and are the descendants of a once-important group of the Swahili-speaking people. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they ruled the coast from Tiwi to Tanga (Tanzania) from their eight settlements on the shore. Around 1620, these towns were captured by the Wa-vumba, another Swahili group. The Wa-shirazi, now scattered in pockets along the coast, speak a distinctive dialect of Swahili. Historians used to think they originally emigrated from Shiraz, in Persia, but it now seems likely that very few of them have Persian ancestry and that the name was adopted for political reasons. Shirazi/Kifunzi, which may be one of the original eight villages, is an important Wa-shirazi centre.

Shirazi, like many villages on the coast, is a backwater in every sense. The people cut a small quantity of boriti (mangrove poles) - much less than they used to; they also fish and grow some produce in their garden plots, which are continually being raided by monkeys. But the setting is memorably exotic and worth the three-kilometre walk from the main road. They don't have sodas at Shirazi, but they do have coconuts and tranquillity.

The people who run Funzi Island Fishing Club have a camp on the shore at Bodo , just to the southwest of Shirazi. Bodo is a small cargo port, where you can sometimes pick up a ride to Pemba, Tanzania, a seven-hour voyage. This is also from where Kinazini Funzi Dhow Safaris run their dhow day-trips .

There are some unspectacular ruins of walls and a disused well amid tangled foliage just a 100m or so to the south of the village. On the north side is the more interesting hulk of a Friday mosque, its mihrab still standing. Elders here describe how earlier inhabitants were routed by the Maasai and fled to the Comoros Islands. They remember when the mosque was still intact, though by the beginning of the twentieth century it had already been abandoned.