4-Day Zanzibar Island Hopping Budget Escape

Met at Zanzibar International and taken to your hotel in Stone Town, only twenty minutes from the airport. The afternoon is free to walk the alleys and the waterfront and start getting lost, which is the correct way to see this town. Dinner is at a local restaurant.

Staying in Stone Town rather than at a beach resort is the whole idea of this trip. You are inside the old city, a few minutes from the night market at Forodhani Gardens where the seafood grills fire up at dusk and the waterfront fills with people. It costs a fraction of a beach resort and puts you somewhere far more interesting.

A morning guided walk through the old quarter: the narrow alleys, the carved doors, the site of the old slave market, the Sultan's Palace and the House of Wonders. Lunch locally, then out to a working spice farm in the afternoon to taste and smell cinnamon, vanilla, cloves and nutmeg growing.

Zanzibar built its wealth on cloves, and for much of the nineteenth century the island produced most of the world's supply. The spice farms are still working operations rather than exhibits, and the tour is genuinely hands-on. You crush leaves, scrape bark, and eat fruit you will not have seen before.

A morning boat trip out to Prison Island, home to a colony of giant Aldabra tortoises (some well over a hundred years old), and to a nineteenth-century quarantine station that gives the island its misleading name. The afternoon is free on the beach or by the pool, and the day closes with a sunset dhow cruise with drinks and snacks.

The tortoises are the draw, and they are remarkable animals: slow, enormous, entirely indifferent to people, and old enough that the largest were alive before the First World War. The snorkelling off the island's reef is good too, and usually included in the boat trip.

A final breakfast, then the short transfer to Zanzibar International for your flight home.

Four days on a budget covers the essentials of the island: the old town, the spice trade that built it, the reef, and a sunset on a dhow. What it does not include is a week of lying on a beach, which is easy enough to add if you want it. Zanzibar's east coast guesthouses are among the best value in East Africa.