The mistake is treating it as an attraction list
Stone Town, the old quarter of Zanzibar City and an inscribed UNESCO World Heritage site, is usually presented as five or six landmarks with a route drawn between them. Visitors follow the route, photograph the landmarks, and leave with the impression that they have seen a small town with a few old buildings in it.
They have seen the route. The town is the lanes between the stops: doors, shade, cats, the shift from Omani to Indian to European detail on the same street, a market that is not staging anything for you. The thing that is actually worth the day is the walking, and the walking is free.
This matters practically, not just romantically. Once you understand that the value is the walking, the sales pitches around it become easy to read.
Where the money goes wrong
Three places, reliably.
The guide who attaches himself to you. Someone falls into step, is friendly, is genuinely informative for twenty minutes, and then there is a price — usually at the point where you are furthest from where you started. This is not a scam so much as an unstated transaction, and the fix is unglamorous: agree whether this is paid work, and what it costs, in the first minute rather than the fortieth. A guide worth having will answer that question without any awkwardness at all. The awkwardness is the signal.
The gates. Several of the sites people come for charge admission, and the fee is not always the whole of it — a “guide included” arrangement at the door is common and is sometimes an additional expectation rather than an inclusion. Ask what the ticket covers before you buy it, at the window, out loud.
The sunset dhow. Sold on every corner at a price that moves considerably between the first quote and the fourth. Whether it is worth it is a matter of taste; what it costs is a matter of who asked and when, which is a bad property for a price to have.
We are not going to publish figures for any of these yet. We do not hold them from a source we can name and date, and a plausible-sounding number would be worse than none.
The building most guides still list
One of the landmarks that appears in nearly every published Stone Town itinerary suffered a structural failure and has spent much of the time since closed to visitors. Whether it is open on the day you arrive is exactly the kind of fact that goes stale on a travel page and is then copied forward by everyone who reads it — which is why we are not going to state its status from a desk in another country, in either direction.
Check it locally, in the week you travel. The general lesson is the more useful one: in Stone Town, a building’s presence on a list is not evidence that it is open, and the lists are old.
The former slave market
The site of the old slave market, and the Anglican cathedral built on it, is on the standard route, and it is the one stop where the standard route does the visitor a disservice — it is generally allotted the same twenty minutes as a fort and a market.
It is a memorial. The holding cells beneath it are small in a way that photographs do not convey. If you go, go with time, and consider going without a camera in your hand. We have no interest in ranking it against anything.
What we hold today
Very little, and we would rather say so than pad the page. We hold no verified admission fee, no verified guide rate, no verified opening hour for any site in Stone Town. What we do hold, verified and dated, is what it costs to get there from the airport: the published rate cards are on Zanzibar airport transfers, where the figure that catches most people out — rates quoted per vehicle, not per person — is set out with its sources.
If Stone Town is the point of your trip rather than the stopover, the coast question changes shape: where to stay covers choosing a base, and the south-west side of the island is the part of the beaches page that concerns you.
The method behind every figure we publish is how we price. What we have not been able to verify is in our open questions register, and what we get wrong goes in the corrections log, dated, permanently.