A spice tour is probably the best way of seeing the countryside outside Stone Town and meeting the members of rural communities. Guides will take you on a walking tour of the spice farms at Kizimbani or Kindichi, picking bunches of leaves, fruit and twigs from bushes and inviting you to smell or taste them to guess what they are. Pretty much all the ingredients of the average kitchen spice rack are represented – cinnamon, turmeric, ginger, garlic, chillies, black pepper, nutmeg and vanilla – the list goes on and on. Local children follow you all the way round, making baskets of palm leaves and filling them with flowers to give to you. At lunchtime, you’ll stop in a local house for a meal of spiced pilau rice and curry, followed by sweet Arabic coffee and lemongrass cake. Many spice tours include a visit to the Persian baths built by Sultan Said for his harem, and stop at Fuji beach just outside Stone Town for a swim on the way back.

Jozani Forest, about 20 minutes drive outside Stone Town on the main road towards the east coast, is a conservation project aimed at preserving some of the last indigenous forest on the island. The forest is home to a unique species of monkey, Kirk’s Red Colobus, as well as the rare forest antelope, Ader’s Duiker and many species of birds. A guided walk through the mangrove trees that form part of the forest takes about an hour.

Zanzibar has many offshore islands, which provide a stunning location for a day trip or a longer stay. Boats to any of the islands off Zanzibar or Pemba can be hired easily from local fishermen. In Stone Town, ask at the ‘big tree’ opposite Mercury’s restaurant on the seafront, or arrange a day trip with one of the tour companies listed in this guide.

Prison Island is one of the nearest islands to Stone Town - just 15 minutes or so by boat. It is also known as Changuu, and its original use was as a prison for renegade slaves punished by their master, an Arab landowner. Later it was taken over as a quarantine station by the British army, and another prison was built but never used. The large house on the island was built by British general Lloyd Mathews, commander of the army of Sultan Bargash. Today people visit Prison Island to see the giant, gentle land tortoises, some of which are reputedly over a hundred years old. The island has some excellent coral formations just offshore, providing a good opportunity for snorkelling. At the time of writing (2006) work is nearing completion on a new resort development on the island.

A slightly more upmarket choice than Prison Island, Chapwani, or Grave island, is the site of a luxury hotel, but day visitors who come to eat and drink in the bar and restaurant are permitted. Chapwani is the site of a British naval cemetery, the final resting place of sailors who perished while serving in Zanzibar. The victims of the World War One attack on the HMS Pegasus by the German warship Konigsberg are also buried here. It’s interesting to wander around the graveyard and decipher the ages and causes of death of the servicemen – many died from tropical disease, or were killed in skirmishes with local slavers.

Chapwani also has a beautiful white sandy beach and a small population of duikers (a type of miniature antelope), as well as some interesting birdlife.

Bawe Island is further away from Stone Town than Changuu or Chapwani, a good 45 minutes by motorboat, and consequently less visited. It has no facilities of any kind so bring enough food and water with you for the whole day. The beach is excellent at low tide, with unusual stone formations, and there is some good snorkelling to be had on the island’s reef.

Six kilometres south of Stone Town, surrounded by pristine coral reef, Chumbe Island Coral Park is one of the world’s newest and most successful eco-tourism projects. In 1994 the reef surrounding Chumbe Island was named Tanzania’s first Marine National Park. The island itself, covered with lush mangrove forest, is a designated forest reserve. Chumbe Island Coral Park won the British Airways Tourism for Tomorrow Award in 1999, in recognition of seven years’ conservation work carried out in cooperation with local fishermen, now retrained as marine wardens. Chumbe Island contains a lighthouse, built by the British in 1904 and still operational, a ruined mosque and the lighthouse keeper’s house, now converted into a spectacularly-built education centre and restaurant.


Visitors can come for the day to snorkel over the incredible coral reef, which contains over 90% of all coral species ever recorded in East Africa. The reef, declared the ‘world’s best shallow water coral reef’ by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, is home to over 370 species of fish, turtles and dolphins. Guided walks are also available through the island’s coral rag forest, interspersed with intertidal pools and huge baobab trees, which supports a unique flora and wildlife population including the rare – and enormous – coconut crab.

But to experience Chumbe Island properly, stay the night in one of the seven ‘eco-bandas’ that nestle in the forest. Each is a two-storey, private cottage constructed out of local materials and decorated with shells, driftwood and colourful local fabrics. Water and energy on Chumbe are self-sustaining and provided by nature - the roofs of the bandas and the education centre have been designed to catch and filter rainwater, which is then heated by solar power.

Zanzibar, and especially Stone Town, is a shopper’s paradise. The narrow winding streets are lined with stores selling local crafts, antiques, jewellery, clothes and spices. The Zanzibar Gallery, on Kenyatta Road, Shangani, sells a huge range of printed fabrics and clothes plus silver jewellery and locally made massage oils and perfumes, as well as a range of handmade bubble baths in glass bottles. The Gallery Bookshop, along Gizenga Street, stocks a range of books including local history, plus coffee table and photographic books, guidebooks, novels, address books, calendars and postcards featuring photographs by the shop’s owner, well-known photographer Javed Jafferji. The Zanzibar Gallery also sells batiks, paintings and antiques from all over Africa alongside printed t-shirts and other clothes.

• Kangas and Kikois – the brightly patterned fabrics worn by local women and men respectively are used by locals as a matching skirt and head covering, or in the case of men as a casual alternative to trousers. For tourists, they make an excellent souvenir and can be used as a bath towel, beach wrap or sarong.

• Bao games – Bao is played on street corners and in village squares across the whole of East Africa, with regional variations. It consists of a carved wooden board, with rows of largish holes, into which seeds are dropped, functioning as both counters and dice. It’s surprisingly easy to pick up and very addictive. Bao boards come in all shapes and sizes, from small folding ones ideal for rucksacks, to huge, ornate antique boards which double as tables. Be sure to buy some spare seeds at the same time as they have a habit of getting lost.

• Zanzibar Chests – Arab-style wooden chests inlaid with brightly polished brass are hand-carved in many workshops in Zanzibar and come in all sizes, from tiny jewellery boxes to enormous trunks.

Beware of buying large polished shells, lumps of coral or tortoiseshell products in Stone Town or on the beach. Their collection and sale is illegal, and many of the species they derive from are already endangered.

An afternoon strolling through the narrow streets and winding alleys of historic Stone Town, the capital of Zanzibar, is not to be missed. You’ll get lost – everybody does – but don’t worry, you’ll emerge from the cool, shady lanes into the blinding sunlight of the seafront eventually.

Until then, you’ll find something of interest around every corner – an Arab archway leading into a white-walled square, with the sound of prayer coming from behind the walls of a mosque. Or perhaps you’ll stumble upon the Darajani market, with symmetrical piles of oranges, baskets of spices and enormous chunks of fresh fish arranged under palm-thatch shelters. Ladies will glide past, shrouded in black Islamic headdresses. Old, long-bearded men in white skull caps will look up from their games of Bao or dominoes to greet you gravely as you pass, and small children will take your hand and invite you to join their games in the overgrown remains of Indian townhouses. Remember to keep looking up, below a blue strip of sky, ornate shutters are thrown open and neighbours lean across the narrow gap between their homes to swap gossip and jokes, hang out washing, or just watch the world go by three stories below.

Look out for Arabic coffee sellers, strolling along the streets with their charcoal braziers and bronze pots hanging from a yoke across their shoulders. Or porters manoeuvring wheelbarrows almost as wide as the alleyways they’re passing through, shouting ‘hodi, hodi’ (let me pass). As evening falls, the seafront comes alive with stalls selling fried seafood and chicken on skewers, hurricane lamps illuminating piles of squid and octopus and mounds of chips. Sugar cane is pressed through an antique mangle and funnelled into glasses - cool, sweet and instantly refreshing. Small boys strip naked and leap off the sea wall into the oily sea, turning pink as the last rays of the sun fade and the muezzin begins his wailing call to evening prayer.

As well as the magic of the streets, Stone Town has a number of historical buildings that are worth a look. The Palace Museum and the Old Fort on the seafront both house collections of furniture and clothing from the days of the sultans, and the Palace Museum has a room dedicated to Princess Salme, daughter of Sultan Said, who eloped with a German businessman in the 19th century. The Anglican cathedral, built on the site of the old slave market, has a crucifix made from the tree under which the explorer David Livingstone’s heart was buried. Nearby are the underground chambers in which slaves were kept, forced to crouch on stone shelves less than two feet high.