There were groups of men in white robes and skullcaps playing pool in small cafes and cramped shops selling everything from spices to television sets to long rolls of multihued cloth. It had the same feel as Cairo or Damascus or Lahore -- the urban design of Zanzibar is the same as the one imprinted all over the Islamic world.
Some of the most baroque edifices lie along the waterfront, including the former palace of the Omani sultans, which overlooks the harbor and a towering old mansion called the House of Wonders, which has a museum of Swahili culture on the ground floor. There are surprising finds everywhere, like the pink Art Nouveau exterior of the Cine Afrique, a shuttered movie theater in the north of the old town, along a street running east of the port.
One stroll took us to an Anglican church that stood on the site where slaves who had been brought in from the mainland were sold. Nearby was a small museum dedicated to the memory of the slave trade -- two musty cells in a dungeon evoke the cramped quarters in which manacled Africans were once imprisoned, after they had been marched to the coast from the continent's deep interior and dumped on ships.
`Spice tour'
At night, locals gather at Forodhani Gardens, a strip of park on the waterfront right outside the House of Wonders. Before sunset, cooks begin setting up grills and tables along the water and laying out skewers of raw seafood. You can stroll along the stalls and pick different delicacies that are then grilled in front of you by lamplight, and wash it all down with mugs of fresh sugar-cane juice.
One popular attraction is a "spice tour," which virtually all the travel agencies in Stone Town run. Our guide, Fuad, drove us past the former home of the British explorer and missionary Dr. David Livingstone and into the gentle hills outside town, where sprawling plantations have been set up to grow and harvest cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon, peppercorn and other spices. Stopping at one plantation filled with lush tropical plants, we rubbed some cloves between our fingers and sniffed it.
"This is Zanzibar's cash crop," Fuad said. "But the Tanzanian government pays farmers so little for it that people often try smuggling it into Kenya." With that, he drove us to another plantation, where we ended the tour by devouring kingfish cooked in a rich coconut curry.
It is along the coast, though, that Zanzibar is at its most vivid. One day we took a minivan up to the beach at Kendwa, a small fishing village on the northwest shore of the island that is free of the crowds at the more popular backpacker resort of Nungwi. There was absolutely nothing to do there but laze around, eat seafood, read books and go swimming in the turquoise waters.
The beach had three or four small lodges with simple bungalows right next to each other, and the one where we stayed, Kendwa Rocks, had a reputation for having wild full-moon parties.
On our last night in Kendwa, we watched the blazing red orb of the sun sink into the ocean. The wind picked up and sped the dhows through the waters, their white sails puncturing the twilight calm.
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