Welcome to Zanzibar!

old stone town waterfront beautiful building zanzibar tanzania

At least if you’re arriving in Stone Town by ferry from Dar (es Salaam), this stunning waterfront is your welcoming committee. The old, architectural beauties left over from the sultanate era. Starting from left to right, from the ferry port to the touristy Shangani area (which was far from my favorite part of Zanzibar City’s old town…):

  • Old Dispensary is in my opinion the most beautiful of them all! Didn’t try to go inside though, as I believe there are offices in there these days.
  • Palace Museum – skip!
  • House of Wonders is nice looking with its colonial America vibe. Inside you’ll find the Zanzibar National Museum, which I thought was just OK. If you have time to kill, why not.
  • Anonymously looking Old Fort was really…nothing. Besides being a good place for souvenirs. Somewhere within the walls you’ll find a few places where you can get the memento shopping done in one take. And best of all, it’s far from crowded with people.
  • Forodhani Gardens is a nice park to chill in. During the day it was quiet and relaxed, and at night when the very popular and enjoyable food market was on, it turned into something totally different. Food smelled heavenly, but being a bit worried about food poisoning, I sadly decided to stay away 🙁

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12 thoughts on “Welcome to Zanzibar!

  1. Ohhhh Zanzibar has been on my bucket list forever!! You’re soo lucky to have visited it 😀
    Found it funny that you said we should skip the Palace Museum hahaha

    Happy to have you on #MondayEscapes

    1. The Palace Museum is really not much to look at from the outside. The inside didn’t sound too exciting either. Rough Guides said: “…unless you’re an incurable furniture fetishist…”. I’m not… Enjoyed Zanzibar a lot, so I hope you make it there some day.

  2. The Anglican Church & the slave history and monument to me certainly was the key interesting & historical point of Zanzibar.

    While Livingstone Beach was the best place to kick back and have a drink at the waterfront. So very much at the waterfront that my wife had to fetch her flip-flops after the tide tried to steel them 😉 And, for a Dane, it was a major surprise to see a movie poster for a Danish film about (great!) bass player Moussa Diallo on the wall inside the building and hear that he’d played there many times 🙂

  3. I wrote of the slave market in a memoire of my time traveling, so I have taken the liberty of copying it below –

    In 1822 the British signed a treaty with the Sultan of Zanzibar to end slavery, but it took until 1876 before this trade came to an end. Of course the trade carried on to a lessor degree by kidnapping children and selling them to ‘customers’ in the Persian Gulf. Slaves escaped to freedom as late as 1931.
    David Livingstone (the explorer) estimated in 1857, that 80,000 thousand slaves died on the way to the Zanzibar slave market, and of those that lived 50,000 were sold to Sheiks and rich traders in the Persian Gulf. This slave market had nothing to do with the West African slave trade to America, which was outlawed in the UK in 1807.

  4. In the Anglican cathedral in Stone Town the alter is supposed to be the exact spot of the whipping post. The cathedral stands on a large part of what used to be the slave market.
    It is 50 years since I was in Zanzibar – one of these days I might return. :-o)

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