7-Day Zanzibar Honeymoon Beach Escape

Met at Zanzibar International and driven to your beachfront resort, where check-in happens in your villa over a glass of champagne rather than at a desk. The day is yours to do nothing with, and dinner is served on the beach as the light goes.

Arriving here after a safari, as most honeymooners do, is a deliberate piece of sequencing. Northern Tanzania is early alarms, long drives and constant looking; Zanzibar is the correction. Give yourselves the first day entirely: the island is not going anywhere and neither, for a week, are you.

A private guided walk through Stone Town, the old quarter of Zanzibar City. The alleys are narrow enough that you walk in single file, and the doors (carved Omani and Indian teak, some studded with brass), are what everyone photographs. You visit the site of the old slave market, the Sultan's Palace and the House of Wonders, take lunch locally, and finish at a working spice farm.

The town is a UNESCO site because of what it is made of: Persian, Omani, Indian and African architecture pressed into the same square kilometre by a thousand years of trade. It is also a place with a hard history, and the memorial at the old market makes no attempt to render it comfortable.

A day with nothing in it. Swim, snorkel from the beach, read, or arrange a private dinner for the evening. In the afternoon there is a couples treatment at the beachside spa, and the day ends with cocktails by the pool as the sun goes down.

Zanzibar's tides are dramatic and worth understanding, because they shape the day. On the east coast the ocean can retreat several hundred metres at low tide, leaving a vast shallow lagoon that is wonderful for wading and useless for swimming. The staff will tell you when the water is coming back in.

A free morning, then a private sunset dhow cruise in the afternoon: champagne and canapés on a hand-built wooden boat, anchoring in a quiet cove to watch the sun drop into the Indian Ocean. Dinner afterwards is a private chef on the beach.

The dhow is the same design that carried this coast's trade for a millennium: one triangular sail, a carved hull, and the monsoon winds that once took these boats to Oman and India and back on a yearly cycle. Sailing one at sunset is a cliché of the island for the very good reason that it is lovely.

A morning snorkelling trip out to a nearby reef: parrotfish, angelfish, moray eels in the coral, and green turtles which are common here rather than rare. Dolphins are a genuine possibility. The afternoon is at leisure, with an optional trip to Prison Island and its giant Aldabra tortoises.

Zanzibar's reefs sit within a marine ecosystem running the length of the East African coast, and the water is warm and clear enough that snorkelling requires no skill at all. If either of you dives, the walls off Mnemba are among the best in the region and easily arranged.

A full free day. The option worth taking is the private island picnic: a boat out to a deserted sandbank, lunch set up on the sand, snorkelling off the edge and nobody else within sight for several hours. Or you can decline the boat entirely and stay exactly where you are.

The sandbanks are a genuine Zanzibar peculiarity. They surface at low tide, exist for a few hours as perfect strips of white sand in the middle of turquoise water, and then vanish completely. Having lunch on one tends to be the photograph that ends up on the wall.

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

A week is enough to have properly stopped. Most couples arrive off a safari still running on adrenaline and airport queues, and leave having read entire books, learned the tide table by heart, and eaten a great deal of grilled fish. That is precisely what the island is for.