Tours in Zanzibar

Walk into Stone Town in the late afternoon and let yourself get lost. The lanes are narrow enough that you can touch both walls, the carved wooden doors are studded with brass, and the smell shifts every few steps from cloves to frying dough to sea salt. Nobody has a map out for long. You turn a corner and find a barbershop, a school letting out, a tiny mosque, men playing a board game on a step.

Head toward Darajani Market and the town gets louder and more honest. This is where people actually shop: fish on one side, spices and fruit on another, plastic basins and secondhand shoes in between. Go in the morning if you can. Then walk down to the waterfront at dusk, where the Forodhani gardens fill with food stalls and families, and the old Sultan's palace and the House of Wonders watch over the front. Ask your guide about the Old Fort, the Anglican cathedral on the former slave market site, and the Freddie Mercury house. All of them can be arranged as a visit on request.

Then leave town, because the island is more than its capital. On the east coast the tide goes out a very long way, and the water over the flats turns every shade of turquoise. Paje and Jambiani are where you walk barefoot on soft white sand, with seaweed farmers working the shallows and kite surfers out on the wind. Further north, Michamvi Pingwe has The Rock, a small restaurant on a coral outcrop that you reach by walking or by boat depending on the tide. Along the way, fishing villages still build dhows by hand on the beach.

A private day lets you choose your pace. Spend longer in the market, skip a beach, add a spice farm or Jozani Forest, where the red colobus monkeys live. Zanzibar rewards people who stop when something looks interesting, and a local guide makes that easy. If there is somewhere you want to see that is not listed below, ask. A guide can usually build it in.