Zanzibar Tanzania
9
Cruises availables
At departure or passage at this port
Emerald Waterways (1 Cruises)
Frequently Asked Questions
At the port of Malindi, immediately alongside the old town. Larger ships sometimes anchor offshore and tender passengers in. Either way, the entrance to Stone Town is a five to fifteen minute walk.
The historic heart of Zanzibar City, a UNESCO World Heritage site: a Swahili town where Africa, Arabia, Persia and India mixed over centuries. Carved balconies, uniformed schoolchildren, spiced coffee sellers and the smell of cardamom make up its shifting backdrop.
Because you read a house’s history on its door. These dark wooden doors, carved with scrollwork and studded with brass points, carry Indian motifs, calligraphed verses and symbolic chains inherited from Omani merchants. Every lane holds several.
Better to give up on one. The lanes look alike, cross and close again: getting lost is how you find what matters. The quarter is compact and you always end up back at the waterfront, which limits the risk of truly going astray.
The seventeenth-century Old Fort and the tall white silhouette of the House of Wonders, which frame the Forodhani gardens. In the evening locals gather there around the seafood grills, and lateen-sailed dhows glide past the city exactly as in the explorers’ engravings.
It stands on the site of the former slave market. Its altar is said to mark the place of the whipping post, and the memorial of chained figures in the courtyard stops every visitor. Local guides pass on that painful history with dignified seriousness.
You crush cinnamon leaves, scratch a turmeric root, learn to spot climbing vanilla and clusters of pepper. Cloves above all made the sultans’ fortune and still perfume the drying sheds — the island was long one of the world’s leading exporters of that one spice. Allow a half-day, about fifteen kilometres from the centre.
Yes. Changuu Island, known as Prison Island, is about thirty minutes by boat from the Stone Town beach. The old quarantine building forms the backdrop to a colony of giant Aldabra tortoises, some over a century old. The clear water around the islet suits swimming and snorkelling.
Stone Town on foot fills the half-day: the carved doors, the Old Fort, the House of Wonders, the Anglican cathedral, Darajani market and the birthplace of Freddie Mercury, a son of Zanzibar. Spice plantations or Prison Island mean giving up the old town.
Spices bought at the plantations or at Darajani market: cloves, cinnamon, turmeric, vanilla, pepper. They extend the call into your kitchen for months, and they are the souvenir truest to what the island actually is.
