Day 3 – Zanzibar: A City You Listen To

At five in the morning, the choir began, and there was no arguing with it. It was still fully dark. The voices came from right across the alley, mostly women singing gospel, and they cut clean through the quiet and the sound of the sea against the harbour wall. We had been warned about this at check-in and had not really believed it. Now we lay in the dark and listened, because there was nothing else to do.

By breakfast the light had gone from black to blinding. My photochromic lenses turned dark the moment I stepped onto the terrace. The table was the first proper African breakfast of the trip: boiled plantains, boiled eggs, chapati, watermelon, tea and chai, and instant coffee, which still surprises me every time. Tanzania grows a great deal of coffee and drinks very little of it, and what you are handed is usually a jar of Nescafé.

We were leaving Dar that morning, so we packed the heavier bag and left it at Luther House. We would be back in four days to catch the Tazara, and there was no sense hauling everything to an island and back. On the way out we looked into the Azania Front Lutheran Cathedral, just across from the hostel, and I realised that was almost certainly where the choir had come from before dawn. The streets down to the port were full of children in school uniform, walking in the low winter light. It is winter here, in this hemisphere, a thing I keep having to remind myself.

The ferry terminal was its own small ordeal. Queues, checks, bags, and the two-tier fares: residents pay one price, foreigners pay roughly double. Then the surprise of a compulsory forty-four-dollar insurance fee, a tax wearing a different hat. You are herded first into a large shed full of chairs, made to wait, and then boarded row by row, oddly orderly after all the chaos of getting in.

The crossing to Zanzibar is scheduled at an hour and twenty. We spent it outside, at the stern, in the African wind, having skipped the sealed cabin with its air conditioning and soft seats. There is also a VIP lounge, triple the fare, where a few American passengers had settled in with gin and tonics at eleven in the morning. I preferred the wind. As the island rose out of the water you began to make out the pale coral-stone buildings along the front, the ones that give the old town its name.

I had chosen a guest house in the heart of the old town, inside the medina, and getting lost in those narrow stone lanes with their carved Zanzibar doors turned out to be the whole point. We had decided to spend our two nights in the capital instead, among the palaces and the taarab and the street food on the seafront, and I did not regret it for a second. It was something close to love at first sight.

Treasures of Zanzibar House sits on Tharia Street, hard to find in the labyrinth but not impossible. The room had a large enclosed wooden balcony overlooking a small alley, and a rooftop terrace where you could have breakfast or watch the sun go down over the whole city.

We had lunch at Lukmaan, a Swahili canteen in the old town, the kind of place where locals eat and the menu is a fat laminated book of photographs. Nothing is dressed up for anyone. The Zanzibari staples are all there and cheap: octopus and prawns in coconut, pilau and biriani rice, greens cooked down in coconut, cassava and green banana, with spice tea or a baobab shake to drink. One thing is worth knowing before you sit down. There is a buffet, where you point at what you want, and there is the printed menu, with a price beside every dish. Order from the menu. At the buffet, it is easy, as a foreigner, to end up paying whatever figure someone decides on the spot.

In the afternoon we walked the town with Salim. He was part of the local free walking tour, which is one of Lorena’s enthusiasms, though between the tips it usually costs us more than an official guide would. Salim took us past the House of Wonders and the Sultan’s Palace and into Darajani market, and to corners we would never have found on our own. At Darajani we bought little bags of vanilla and local cloves, the smell of them staying on our hands for the rest of the day. At one point he stopped and said, “You don’t visit Stone Town. You listen to it.” I have been chewing on that ever since.

In the evening we went down to the Forodhani Gardens market on the waterfront, where the grills smoke and the whole town seems to eat standing up. We drank fresh sugar cane juice, pressed while we waited, and ate mishkaki off the skewer in the smoke, near the pier where the local boys throw themselves into the water, a spot that has become popular on TikTok. Then the famous Zanzibar pizza from Mrs Maggo, which is not a pizza at all but a kind of stuffed omelette with meat and vegetables. Lorena had hers with vegetables and pineapple.

Back at the guest house my Airalo eSIM had simply refused to work all day, so the reception offered to sort a local SIM for me. It took a while. Khalfan, at the desk, was in no hurry about any of it. “The sea teaches us that everything arrives and everything leaves,” he said, while we waited. “You only have to know how to wait.”

Practical Notes

Where I stayed

Treasures of Zanzibar House, Tharia Street, Stone Town. https://treasures-of-house.hotels-zanzibar.net/en/
What I paid: $175.40 for two nights.
My take: A beautiful place in the heart of the old town, with an enclosed wooden balcony over the alley and a rooftop terrace good for breakfast or sunset over the whole city. Hard to find the first time in the labyrinth, but reachable, and worth being inside Stone Town rather than out at a beach resort if you have come for the town itself.

Where I ate

Lukmaan Restaurant, Stone Town. Simple, local, canteen-style Swahili food, popular with residents. Spiral-bound photo menu.
What we ate: octopus or prawns in coconut (7,000 TZS), pilau rice with chicken (5,000), greens in coconut (3,000), green banana in coconut (4,000); to drink, spice tea (3,000) and baobab shake (5,000).
Worth knowing: order from the printed menu, not the buffet. Every dish on the menu has a fixed price beside it; at the buffet it is easy to be charged a tourist price decided on the spot.

Forodhani Gardens night market, on the seafront. Grills, street food, eaten standing up.
What I ate: fresh-pressed sugar cane juice, mishkaki skewers, and the “Zanzibar pizza” from Mrs Maggo, which is really a stuffed omelette rather than a pizza. Lorena’s was vegetable and pineapple.
What I paid: a few pounds for the lot.
Worth ordering: the sugar cane juice and the mishkaki.

What I visited

Stone Town on foot with a local walking-tour guide (Salim), taking in the House of Wonders (seen from the outside only), the Sultan’s Palace Museum and Darajani market. The free walking tour works on tips, which in our case came to more than a fixed guide fee would have.

Getting there

Ferry from Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar, scheduled 09:30 to 11:15 (about 1h20).
What it cost: $77 per person for the fare, plus a compulsory insurance charge of $44 per person on top, not flagged clearly in advance, so budget both. Foreigners pay roughly double the resident fare. Boarding is chaotic at the entrance, then orderly by row. We sat outside at the stern; there is an indoor cabin and a pricier VIP lounge if you want them.
Booking: bought online in advance.

One thing I’d do differently

I would have bought a local SIM on arrival instead of trusting the eSIM. Mine never connected on the island, and the only reason I had a working phone that night was the patience of the man at the front desk.