The hotel we stayed at was quite nice. It was kind of funny getting there though – the car cars can barely fit through the streets! Pictures of the hotel:
The view from the rooftop:
The first day we got there, we went out to the night market on the waterfront to grab some authentic food. April is the beginning of monsoon season in Zanzibar, so some people had cautioned us about going, but it turned out not to be a problem – we only ran into a few cloudy mornings and major downpours (none of which lasted too long, and it didn’t really matter because it was so warm there). It was raining a bit at the market at first, but that didn’t faze anyone else in the least. It was a really fun atmosphere to experience. As all the boats were coming in for the end of the day as kids lined the docks running and jumping and playing in the water endlessly. The boats there are primarily rickety old wooden boats, with a lot of traditional Arab sailboats called “dhows” – definitely not any fancy motor boats to be seen. It was a beautiful place to watch the sunset after the afternoon rain subsided.
The busy shoreline as boats come in for the day
Kids lined up jumping off the docks
Then the market started to pick up as dinner time came. The market consisted of dozens of vendors set up with tables lined with fresh seafood and vegetables, and then you go point out what you want to eat and they throw it on the grill. There were also lots of people squeezing fresh sugar cane juice, but we didn’t try any. I thought we were very brave to try some shrimp, considering the setting, but we braced ourselves for food poisoning and decided it would be worth it. It was, and amazingly enough, we didn’t get sick! We also had grilled bananas, cassava, and a naan-like bread. So good!
Forodhani Gardens where the market set up
Squeezing sugar cane
So many things to try!
Later that evening, we walked down to the pier where there was a fun bar called Mercury. I bet you don’t know why it’s called Mercury…because Freddie Mercury (lead singer of Queen) grew up in Zanzibar, believe it or not! I had no idea. Nor did I know that he and I share the same birthday. Yes, plenty of opportunities to brush up on your Freddie Mercury history while in Zanzibar, as they are quite proud of him.
We spent the next day just wandering around the city. Stone Town was amazing – truly labyrinthine. I don’t have the opportunity to use that word very often, but Mikael and I quickly realized there was no other way to describe it. Many of the buildings are hundreds of years old and of course the city was not built with a grid in mind. Narrow, twisting alley ways was all there was. It was incredibly hard to navigate, especially since a lot of the streets are so narrow and curvy that you can’t see over the buildings or around the corner to look for landmarks or orient yourself towards the ocean. We had a map, but honestly that did us absolutely no good, especially because there was not a single street sign to be seen. And even if you knew on the map what path you wanted to take, the likelihood of being able to stick to it was basically non-existent just because there are so many small streets angling off of each other at every corner. Luckily, Stone Town just isn’t that big (at least the old town part) so you can wander and wander and not worry about being too far away from a landmark at some point. I loved walking through the streets, with shops lining the alley ways, bicycles and mopeds constantly ringing bells or beeping horns to let you know they were coming around the corner, people pushing carts of vegetables or other goods to take to the market, etc.
Sometimes it's a tight squeeze! This guy certainly struggled trying to get his mattresses through this street
Some buildings looked a little worse for the wear. You know it's bad when you're using ricketly wooden poles to support a cement building!
The other really cool thing to see was all of the old doors on the old buildings – elaborately carved wooden doors with Arabic and Indian design dating back hundreds of years, representing homes of rich merchants and others who used the doors as a status symbol. They were really beautiful.
Just a few examples:
And the occasional refurbished one
And it’s also really interesting to walk around Stone Town because it has such a great mix of people – Africans, Indians, and Arabs, and of course the occasional white tourist. I tried to be careful about being respectful of the Muslim culture and wearing skirts or long pants and shoulder-covering shirts, but it was SO HOT! We saw plenty of women dressed in the full burqas and I honestly don’t know how they do it. I guess you must adapt.
The first thing we did was wander in the direction of the market. It took us a while, and we had to be pointed in the right direction every once in a while, but we eventually made it. It was really fun to walk around and see all the fresh seafood out for sale, as well as all the colorful tropical fruits and vegetables. I managed to buy some spices as well. Quite the hustling and bustling place, as you would imagine.
Nearing the market
The fish selling area
You can go with fresh...
...or dried
Also lots of veggies to choose from
All the beans you ever wanted
Or a million varieties of bananas
After the market, we found a coffee house to enjoy some Zanzibari coffee (well, Mikael had the espresso and I, the coffee hater, chose to consume my coffee in the form of chocolate coffee cake). We then started looking for a restaurant which had been recommended to us, which, according to our map, was located on the same street as the coffee house and couldn’t be more than a block away. Ha. We must have spent an hour trying to find it, wandering the entire vicinity of the neighborhood and getting turned around a million times. It was so frustrating – even though we theoretically knew where we were on the map and where we wanted to go, we just literally could not get there! We eventually gave up, but ironically, a little bit later on we walked out of a store and found ourselves standing right in front of the very place we had been looking for, so in the end we did manage to make a reservation for later that evening.
Later in the afternoon we went to a place called the House of Wonders, which was at one time a ceremonial palace, but is now a museum. It was very interesting to read about the Swahili culture of the East African coast. They also had a giant traditional dhow set up in the middle of the museum and talked a lot about the dhow culture of the Indian Ocean. The crazy thing is, the old original boats didn’t use nails at all – the boards were sewn together.
The House of Wonders (no longer in its glory days)
Views of the city from the top
The boards sewn together on the old dhow
After that, it was so hot we had to go swimming in the pool at the hotel, which was nice because it was secluded in the middle of a shady courtyard. In the evening, to celebrate Easter, we managed to retrace our steps back to the fancy restaurant where we had made reservations earlier. It was a rooftop open air restaurant, with a very small seating area requiring you to sit on cushions. It was really fun to watch the sunset over the city and to eat the delicious Swahili food. One of my favorite restaurant experiences of all time, I think!
The rooftop seating area
Enjoying dinner
The next morning we were picked up in Stone Town and transferred to our beach resort on the northeast coast of the island.
Our arrival drinks
The room area
With lots of hibiscus around
Wow. It was sooooo beautiful! The main building in the resort was quite nice – huge, open air, tall ceilings with thatched roofing. The lodge had multiple layers leading down to the beach (it was built into the side of a hill, and at the top you had the restaurant and front desk, then going down a few shops, lots of seating nooks where you could just relax or have a drink, then a bar, then a pool, then eventually it opened up onto the beach). On the beach there were a few chalets and umbrellas and chairs, as well as another bar.
An incredibly big roof
Looking down at the different layers of the lodge from above
The pool
The main lodge as seen from below
The beach area at the bottom
A nice hammock to relax in
I love palm trees!
The beach itself was like nothing I’ve ever seen. The water was crystal clear and bright turquoise, with white sand stretching on endlessly. The waves were only breaking extremely far out. You could walk for over 30 minutes and still only be in waist-deep water and not even be close to reaching the breaking waves. And of course the water was like bathtub temperature. It was so much fun! The resort was the perfect place for relaxing.
See what I mean about how amazing the water was?
Trekking out
Everyone in Zanzibar is also incredibly friendly. Most people speak English, at least in the tourist industry. It was funny though, because most of the tourists on Zanzibar are Italian. Who would have thought? It was kind of like when Mikael and I were in Namibia and everyone was German. Apparently there are direct flights from Italy and most of the big resorts are owned by Italians. At least half of the people at our place were Italian. Mikael and I were mostly taken to be South African because we spoke English, but then when people asked where we were from it was rather hard to explain that I live in South Africa but am from the U.S. while Mikael lives in the U.S. but is from Sweden, yet sometimes we were paying for stuff in British pounds (I had some leftover from a trip a long time ago)…basically each person who asked us where we were from got a different answer, whichever response was easiest to go with at the time. It was fun to talk to people though. And as soon as you bring up the UEFA soccer games, people immediately become at ease and start talking endlessly about their favorite teams, etc. It’s funny to say, but being able to talk about soccer is always such a great way to start a conversation with many Africans. They’re usually pretty surprised when a white American girl likes to watch soccer and says she plays too, haha. Mikael and I watched a few games at night with some other guests and members of the staff on the one tv at the lodge.
Sadly, I didn’t pick up too much Swahili while were there. Only jambo (hello), sawa sawa (ok/it’s all good), hakuna matata (no problem/no worries, as most people probably learned from The Lion King), and asante sana (thank you very much). There is a Zanzibari song called “Jambo Bwana” (hello sir) and everyone sings it to tourists and restaurants and shops are constantly playing it because they think tourists like it. People come up to you in the street and start singing Jambo Bwana and try to sell you CDs. The unfortunate thing was this means I was stuck singing “Jambo Bwana” in my head pretty much the whole week, haha!
The other nice thing about Zanzibar is that the island is so small, you can get anywhere in just about one hour, making it very feasible to do day trips even if you’re based at a more remote resort. One day while we were there, we took a spice tour at a village in the middle of the island. I loved it. It was so fascinating to learn about how all the spices we see in the supermarket are actually grown. Our guide took us around the village compound and would point out a plant, pick off a leaf, and ask you to smell it, and all of sudden you would realize that something that looked just like a regular tree was actually a clove tree, for example.
It was also interesting to get a feel for village life, watching people working in the rice fields, seeing the mud huts, and watching the chickens and cows run around.
Walking through the forest area
Walls made with mud
Working in the rice fields
The start of the spice tour: turmeric plants
And the roots where the spice comes from
Cardamom plants
Inside the pods that are found on the vine type things at the bottom of the plant are the cardamom seeds
I had no idea that vanilla grew as large bean-like pods on a vine. Apparently each one is $5-6 because it's so hard to grow and maintain.
Papaya
Giant banana leaves
You can go for the red variety
Or the green
Our guide holding a starfruit
Lemongrass
Mandarins
I actually had no idea pinapples grew up from the ground like that. I don't know, I think I assumed they grew from a tree.
A cocoa tree
I also had no idea how cocoa beans were grown, which is sad, considering how much I love chocolate!
Believe it or not, that's nutmeg!
On the inside is the nutmeg seed, which looks nothing like what we're used to seeing until it's dried
A coffee tree
Coffee beans
I also had no idea that peppercorns grow on vines like this
It's a bad picture, but maybe you can still see the peppercorns. Apparently black, red, green, and white peppercorns all come from the same vine, it just depends how long you let them stay on the plant/how you dry them/whether you peel the outer layer off in terms of what color you end up with. (The white ones are most expensive because you have to boil the red ones and then peel the skin off and let them dry, or something like that.)
A clove tree
It's a little hard to see, but the small stem-like buds shown here are picked and then dried to produce cloves
A cinnamon tree! It was amazing how powerful the smell of the bark was. I have never had such fresh cinnamon as that available at the lodge to sprinkle on your food. It was so much more powerful, like chewing Big Red gum, haha!
Of course I knew what a ginger root looked like, but not the plant on top
After the tour, we were fed lots of fresh tropical fruit (oranges, papaya, banana, pineapple) and then watched someone climb a coconut tree (which I actually found quite an amazing feat, given the height of the tree and the fact that there are of course no branches) and bring us coconuts. They cut off the top and I tried the liquid inside, and also the flesh, but as a coconut hater, I didn’t really like it. However, I will admit that fresh coconut is not at all like the dried coconut flakes and this stuff I could actually eat without wanting to throw up immediately, at least.
Climbing the coconut tree
Cutting open the coconuts
Politely drinking as much as we could stomach
The guys giving the tour were also quite handy with the grass weaving and made us lots of necklaces and hats out of grass. A blatant attempt just to please the tourists of course, but still fun.
A nice grass tie for Mikael
And hats too!
Another day, we took a trip to the southern end of the island to see the dolphins. Ironically, the one day we signed up to go out on a boat was the one day it absolutely poured rain. When we arrived at the harbor amidst a torrential downpour and our guide was still making preparations to go out on the boat, I was more than a bit skeptical and also very curious as to how he could possibly still be intending to go out with the weather like that. Well, he was very enthusiastic about the whole thing, saying that in fact it was the best weather to see the dolphins because when it gets hot and sunny they go into deeper water and don’t come up to the surface as much. We were the only boat out on the water at first, but I was comforted by the fact that other tourists were soon following suit, hoping that our guide wasn’t insane after all. It was a rickety old wooden boat that someone had to carry the motor out and attach manually, and then people were sitting in the back bailing out the rain water the whole time, haha.
Our lovely boat
At least the rain wasn’t too painful because it was warm. However, I will say, I was incredibly wet after the whole experience, though it was fun to see the dolphins. Most people go out to go scuba diving with the dolphins, but I opted to just sit on the boat, having never been scuba diving before and not wanting my first time to be in the open ocean in the middle of a monsoon. Mikael at least jumped in once. We followed one pod around for a while, and they do get very close to the boat. However, it’s just impossible to take good pictures of them, as by the time they surface and you push the button, they’ve already disappeared again. Not to mention the fact that it’s hard to focus when moving up and down on a boat, and the rain didn’t help either.
This is a blurry picture, but it's pretty much the only one where I managed to get a head in the shot, haha
Most people on the other boats were scuba diving, however it looked like very hard work to jump off as the boat neared the dolphins and then swim as fast as you can to try and catch them before they took off
The color of the water was still beautiful despite the storm coulds
Coming back into shore, amidst tons of kids messing around in the water. I get a bit nervous when little kids who can't be more than 3 or 4 are left alone to play in the water, but I guess that's life here...
Anyway, the whole experience turned out to be fun in the end. Yeah, despite the monsoon season, I’m so glad we went to Zanzibar in April. With the exception of that one boat trip, the rain really wasn’t an issue, and even better, it meant there were tons less tourists. There were at least 5 boats out there with us that rainy morning, and apparently during high season there would be 5 times that number, plus you would have to sign up for activities way in advance as opposed to the day before. (Our lodge was probably only 20% full as well, which also made it very pleasant.)
Afterwards, the rain let up (of course just as we were pulling back into shore), and we had lunch at a beach restaurant – grilled barracuda and fried octopus legs (which were actually really good!). Over lunch, we told our guide about the Zanzibar song that plays on NPR (Zanzibar is very far…you can’t get there by car…or something along those lines), and he thought that was absolutely hilarious and could not stop laughing.
After lunch, we set off for the Jozani forest in the interior of the island, the only place in the world where the endangered red colobus monkey lives. It was so much fun to watch the monkeys! They are obviously quite used to people walking in the forest, so they come very close to you. At first you walk into the forest and don’t see anything, and then all of a sudden you realize they’re truly everywhere. They are so cute! It was fun to watch them playing with each other and jumping from tree to tree, and occasionally scampering around on the ground.
This monkey isn't actually a red colobus, but I can't remember what it was called. 99% of what we saw was the red colobus, however.
Look how long their tales are! Apparently to help them balance, especially when they fly from tree to tree
So cute! I especially love how their hair sticks out around their face
See what I mean by how close we got?
Baby!
This one reminded me of that statue, "The Thinker"
After the monkeys, the other interesting part of the forest to see was the mangrove forest area. When we went it was low tide (and apparently the seawater comes in from quite far away), so there wasn’t much water around, but that made for better viewing of the open tree roots. There was a nice boardwalk that led through the forest and it was really beautiful to see all the crazily intertwined tree roots. It was also kind of odd to be walking through a forest and see crabs and snails, which probably would have felt less weird if it had been high tide.
The boardwalk
A little bit of water still there during low tide
Very interesting roots
It's hard to see, but there's a giant crab coming out of the hole in the middle of the picture
And giant snails on trees too
The last couple of days at the resort, we mostly just relaxed. It was an all inclusive package, which was really nice because then you didn’t have to worry about carrying money around and could just get food and drinks whenever you wanted. Yeah, it’s a rough life when you spend the day transitioning between the dining area, the pool, the beach, and 2 bars. Haha, it was a daunting task, but we managed to successfully sample all local Tanzanian beers (Kilimanjaro, Tusker, and Serengeti). We at least got some exercise in by playing some ping pong. Oh, and we did a bunch of kayaking too. It was the best way to get out to the coral reefs near where the waves were breaking, since it took impossibly long to walk out that far. We attempted walking a few times, but eventually got thwarted by sea urchin colonies each time. I’m not particularly brave and the idea of stepping on a pokey sea urchin didn’t excite me very much. The kayaking was great though. I loved just sitting in the kayak and looking over the edge and watching everything in the coral. It’s so funny to see all the tropical fish you normally see in fish tanks out in the wild. Unfortunately, I also discovered that looking over the edge of the boat into shimmering water and trying to focus on things below while bobbing up and down in the waves also makes me quite nauseous, but I tortured myself and kept going back for more.
Kayaking out by where the waves were breaking, where all the coral was
It's really hard to take pictures of stuff underwater, but the water was very clear, making for great viewing of the coral and fish. And lots of sea urchins too!
The view during another attempt to wade out as far as we could go
We also took some walks along the beach, which of course means being bombarded by people trying to sell you stuff. At one point we came across a group of grass stalls set up, and the hilarious thing was that each stall had a different name like Gucci, Versace, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, etc. We even found one with called Ikea! It’s funny what people think will attract tourists to buy stuff.
Just enjoying the scenery as we walk along
Our trusty kayak
Ikea :)
And selling sea shells by the sea shore
Lots of nice dhows to be seen as well
Perhaps the most impressive feat of the trip was that I managed to make Mikael wake up to watch the sunrise multiple mornings in a row, haha! Since we were staying on the east side of the island, sunset was unfortunately not an option. I loved the sunrises though, especially because we were the only ones on the beach at that time of day, making it very peaceful.
Even on the day it was very cloudy, it was still very pretty
It was also interesting to watch the early morning fishermen head out and a few people biking by or women walking around with loads of wood on their head to start their tasks for the day.
A fisherman heads out with his spear. Once when we were out wading in the water a guy showed us the seaweed farms (they hook up support strings in between poles, which apparently helps the seaweed grow?) and he also managed to stab an eel with his fishing stick when we were out there. You have to have good aim for that!
When you walk along the beach, with each step you take it seems like little white spiders are running away from you, but they are actually crabs that feel you coming and then scurry into their holes too fast to see. But it turns out when you just sit down to watch the sky and no one else is around, eventually they come out of their holes and you can get a good look at them. It was fun to watch them work really hard to dig sand out of their holes.
They blend in incredibly well! It's hard to see, but there's one in the very center of this picture
This one is easier to see because his eyes are at least very visible
And if the baby ones survive, eventually they'll get to be giant like this one
After such a wonderful time, it was really sad to have the trip come to an end. After 5 days at the beach resort, we headed back to Stone Town where I was dropped at the airport and Mikael had to spend another night, since the cheaper flight he found didn’t leave until the next day. I’m still really glad it worked out so well for us to meet up, and it was such a great place to spend the week. I very much recommend Zanzibar to everyone! Hakuna Matata is truly the motto for a Zanzibar vacation :)
What a great post! I feel like I got to go to Zanzibar too! Thanks!
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