Latest guides

The question is malformed, and that is why the answers are useless Search “is Zanzibar safe” and you will get a page of confident yeses, most of them written by someone who has never been, several of them with an affiliate link to a hotel underneath. You will also find a handful of alarming anecdotes,…

“Spice farm” is not a protected term Nobody licenses the phrase. It covers a working smallholding where a family grows cloves and cardamom and lets visitors walk through it; a demonstration garden planted for the purpose, where a dozen species are gathered within thirty metres for convenience; and several arrangements in between. All three are…

One forest, and a lot of paid encounters Zanzibar’s wildlife is sold in a single brochure, and it contains two very different products. One is a protected forest holding a monkey that lives nowhere else on earth. The others are arrangements in which an animal is brought to you, or you are taken to an…

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…

The two words that ruin a week “Options available.” It appears on almost every Zanzibar hotel page and it is the least informative phrase in travel. It can mean a kitchen with a separate vegetarian section and a chef who understands why you are asking. It can also mean the same grill, the same oil,…

The same beach, twice a day A Zanzibar beach is not one place. On much of the island the sea withdraws a long way at low water and returns at high, and the beach in the photograph you booked from exists for part of the day rather than all of it. This is not a…

The claim Ask this question online and almost every answer we found is “yes, easily” — and almost everyone answering is selling property in Zanzibar. We are not. So here is what the signed law itself says, with the schedule and page for every figure. The short version: the question is framed wrong. Zanzibar’s land…

The comparison everyone makes, and why it is wrong Search for Zanzibar wedding costs and you will find the same framing repeated everywhere: book local and pay hundreds, book through an international agency and pay thousands. The implication is that the gap is markup, and that the fix is to cut out the foreign middleman.…

What Nungwi is Nungwi sits at the northern tip of Zanzibar, and its defining feature is geographic rather than architectural: the tidal range here is far smaller than on the east and south-east coasts. The sea stays swimmable through the day. That one fact explains almost everything else about the village — the density of…

What Paje is Paje is a kitesurfing village on Zanzibar’s south-east coast that also happens to have a very good beach. That order matters: if you arrive expecting a quiet swimming resort and find a lagoon full of kites, you have picked the wrong village — and if you came to learn to kite, there…