5-Day Zanzibar Beach Escape

Met at Zanzibar International and driven to your beachfront resort: an hour or so depending on which coast you are staying on, through villages, banana plantations and roadside stalls piled with fruit. The rest of the day is yours: swim, sleep, or simply sit and look at water that is genuinely the colour it is in the photographs. Dinner is on the beach.

The Indian Ocean here sits at around 27 degrees year-round, which takes some getting used to if you are accustomed to European seas. There is no bracing moment of entry. You walk in and keep walking, and by the time the sun has gone the water is warmer than the air.

A private guided walk through Stone Town, the old quarter of Zanzibar City and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. You wander alleys barely wide enough for two people, past carved doors, into the old slave market, the Sultan's Palace and the House of Wonders. Lunch is at a local restaurant, and the afternoon is a spice farm where you taste and smell cinnamon, vanilla, cloves and nutmeg straight off the plant.

Stone Town is a genuinely uncomfortable place in parts, and it should be. It was the largest slave-trading port in East Africa, and the memorial on the site of the market does not soften it. The town's beauty (Omani, Indian, Persian and African layered into the same streets), is inseparable from that history, and a good guide will tell you both halves.

A free day. Swim, snorkel off the beach, read something for six hours, or book a spa treatment. The point of the day is that there is no point to it. In the late afternoon you board a traditional wooden dhow for a sunset cruise with champagne and canapés, anchoring in a quiet cove as the sun goes down.

Dhows have sailed this coast for more than a thousand years, carrying spices, timber and slaves between Zanzibar, Oman and India on the monsoon winds. The design has barely changed: a single triangular lateen sail, a hand-carved hull, and no engine unless the wind fails entirely.

A morning snorkelling excursion out to a nearby reef, where visibility is usually excellent and the fish are extraordinary: parrotfish, angelfish, moray eels in the crevices, and green turtles common enough to be a reasonable expectation rather than a stroke of luck. Dolphins are possible. The afternoon is at leisure, with an optional visit to Prison Island.

Prison Island never actually held prisoners. It was built as a quarantine station for yellow fever and is now home to a colony of giant Aldabra tortoises, gifted from the Seychelles around a century ago, some of them well over a hundred years old. They are entirely unbothered by visitors and will let you sit with them.

A final breakfast on the beach with no need to hurry, then the transfer to Zanzibar International for your flight home or onward.

Five days is the right length for Zanzibar as a trip in its own right, and close to essential as an add-on after a safari. Northern Tanzania is early mornings, long drives and constant alertness; this is the opposite, and doing them in that order sends you home rested rather than merely impressed.