A few years ago I came across a map of Africa drawn by Victorian explorers. In the north and south every village, wadi and water source had been logged. But the middle bit was a big unknown — “Unexplored,” it said.
I’ve travelled fairly extensively through this region, so I know the explorers weren’t thwarted by inconvenient geology. It’s gentle and hilly, like Devon. Fruit dangles from every bush and there’s a meaty treat hiding behind every tree.
Yet somehow, for 20 years, all of those famed British explorers — Speke, Livingstone, Burton, Baker and Stanley — couldn’t even find Lake Victoria, which is twice the size of Belgium. All the Africans in the region knew where it was. So did various German missionaries. Arab slave traders had even built a town on its shores. But those swashbuckling British heroes, with their Royal Geographical Society (RGS) funding, were stumped. Could it be that they weren’t actually looking for it?
Almost all their expeditions began in the Zanzibar archipelago, the main island of which is about 20 miles from the coast of mainland Africa. It was here that the young men would buy and hire all they needed for their perilous missions. But did they actually go on them? If I had come from Victorian Britain — with its tea parties and dreary literature — and found myself on a tropical island ringed by turquoise seas, I’d be fairly tempted to think: “Sod it, I’ll just stay here.”
Today, Zanzibar is in what I call the tourism sweet spot. You can stay in a hotel with air conditioning and a fridge full of Kilimanjaro beer, but the coastline hasn’t been carpet-bombed with three-star casino resorts, and the hinterland isn’t full of hipsters getting tattoos until the trust fund runs out. There aren’t even any nightspots themed around the island’s most famous son, Freddie Mercury.
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However, the downside of being in the sweet spot is that the airport doesn’t have air conditioning and the government makes you fill in an intolerable number of forms when you arrive (and this was pre-pandemic).
My girlfriend, Lisa, and I stayed on the east coast, at Xanadu Villas. There are just eight rooms — although when I say “rooms”, ours was more a skyscraper. There was a living space on the ground floor, and even though it had a high, domed ceiling, there was a huge bedroom above it; and then, even though that had a domed ceiling as well, another bedroom above that. Oh, and then above that there was a rooftop plunge pool. You ate where you fancied eating. Mercifully it also had no gym — I liked that.
We were there in February, when it was hot and so humid that it felt as though you were moving about with a warm, wet mattress on your back. But despite this I’d occasionally heave myself out of my shaded beach sofa and waddle on to the beach, which at low tide gave off the seaweedy smell of my childhood summer holidays in Cornwall.
The sand was odd — fine, like cement dust. But the sea was odder, because it was hotter than Princess Margaret’s bath. At one point a thermometer I borrowed recorded that it was 37.3C. Lisa loved it — she said that she never knew when she was having a hot flush there. I didn’t like it, though, so I’d waddle back to my book and spend the next hour wondering whether I wanted a beer. Life is slow in Zanzibar. “Pole, pole” is what the locals say — it means “slowly, slowly”.
Occasionally we’d summon up the energy to play a local board game called bao. It’s very simple — you place a number of pebbles into what looks like a Yorkshire pudding baking tray, then move these pebbles about while someone from the hotel staff says, “No, not that way”; then, after an hour, the winner is the player nearest the mantelpiece.
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The Victorian explorers would fill their days by writing letters home saying that — while doing brave and manly exploration — they’d been infected with an improbable disease or bitten by a lion that was 17ft long. Then they’d get Humphrey Carruthers-Parsley, who’d been bloody good at art at Eton, to draw a picture of the huge beast, and by return the RGS would send another £5,000.
Sometimes they did go on to the mainland for what Prince Andrew would call a straightforward shooting weekend. Speke, in particular, loved shooting — later in life, on a mate’s estate near Bath, he even accidentally shot himself, dying 15 minutes later.
To run these shooting parties they’d take “porters”, and so much opium that they had usually broken their scientific equipment by the second day. One chap travelled up the rivers of Tanganyika on a 90ft yacht; another brought along his “wife” — a 6ft-tall Romanian blonde. And occasionally they’d happen upon a hillock or a brook, which they’d report to the RGS, which would then send another £5,000. These guys — they weren’t explorers; they were just on a gap year.
We weren’t, though, so we went on a tour of a spice farm. I didn’t think I’d enjoy it: tours are never interesting — it’s always too hot and the guide tells you everything they know, which is far too much. All I ever think when I’m on a tour is, “For the love of God, can we go for a drink now?”
As Zanzibar is Muslim the answer to that is “no”, so I was forced to listen to the guide talking about all the trees we saw, and after a while something strange happened: I started to become interested. Did you know that the roots, bark and leaves of a cinnamon tree all smell completely different?
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I also learnt that spices cure all known maladies — turmeric for cancer, cinnamon for diabetes, cardamom pods for hiccups. And this prompts a question: how could those explorers have been as ill as they always claimed?
On most Indian Ocean islands there is very little to see outside the resort where you stay. On Zanzibar, however, there’s Stone Town. Built with money from the Arab slavers, it’s a warren of streets too narrow for the average American. There’s the obligatory market full of art galleries selling stuff that isn’t art, and at sunset you are serenaded with a religious cacophony as the Anglicans and the Catholics try to be heard above the Muslim calls to prayer.
It’s a losing battle. In the whole of his career as a missionary the total number of people Livingstone converted to Christianity was — drum roll — one. And he lapsed as soon as the pious Scot went on his way.
Dolce & Gabbana hasn’t arrived in Stone Town yet, but the locals have obviously seen at the airport the prices that western brands charge, and have decided that this is what westerners will pay for crap — I paid £6 for two bottles of water and a Fanta in one backstreet café.
Stone Town was the setting in 1896 of the shortest war in history. In just 38 minutes British warships destroyed the lighthouse and the palace, damaged the House of Wonders — the first building in east Africa to have a lift — and sank Sultan Khalid bin Barghash’s yacht. Seven minutes later he surrendered.
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We stayed at the Park Hyatt, because Park Hyatts always make sense in far-flung city centres, and we ate on the rooftop of the Emerson on Hurumzi, where you had to be at the communal table bang on 7pm for the set menu with local entertainment — afterwards we agreed it was the worst meal we’d ever endured.
Two days later, though, we visited the Rock. This Italian-run shack sits on an outcrop that can only be accessed at low tide. AA Gill used to say that the quality of food in a restaurant is always inversely proportional to the quality of the view. Well, the view from the Rock is sen-bleeding-sational, so go there, for a drink — unless you want to know what a Pirelli tyre dipped in Fairy Liquid tastes like.
That became the worst food I’ve ever eaten, until the flight home, when the stewardess gave me a vegetarian curry.
When Speke returned from his travels, he broke the code of omerta and told the RGS that he’d found Lake Victoria, and Ripon Falls, through which the Nile begins its long journey to Cairo. His furious colleagues rushed home to say, “No he hasn’t” — they spluttered and suggested that other lakes in the region were more likely contenders as the source, even though many were 1,000ft closer to sea level than the mighty Victoria.
The RGS saw that there was confusion and came up with £5,000. So everyone built themselves a yacht and went back to Zanzibar, where they remained until the invention of the portable camera and the new expression “picture or it didn’t happen”.
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Today we have a choice of where we go. There are countless pinpricks of coral in the Indian Ocean. I’ve been to most of them, and my favourite is Fregate Island in the Seychelles. Madagascar is stunning, but the lavatories are still a long drop from acceptable; Réunion is fine if you like ring roads, and Mauritius and the Maldives work well if you have absolutely no imagination.
Zanzibar is not geologically interesting — it looks like the Netherlands after a good ironing — and I came home with an industrial bout of viral gastroenteritis. But it has history, it has a soul, and it’s one of the few places in the world where British people can walk about on a cushion of moral righteousness, because — thanks to gigantic PR efforts made by the otherwise useless Livingstone — we were the ones who abolished slavery there. It’s quite unusual for Brits to go to a museum about this sort of thing and come out feeling better about ourselves than we did when we went in.
Jeremy Clarkson was a guest of Abercrombie & Kent, which has five nights’ full-board at Xanadu Villas from £3,000pp, including flights and transfers (abercrombiekent.co.uk)
Visiting Zanzibar: what you need to know
It’s hard to know how badly Zanzibar and the rest of Tanzania have been affected by the pandemic. John Magufuli, the late president, was in full Covid-denial mode right up until he disappeared from public life at the end of February. He died on March 17, allegedly as a result of the virus, leaving a legacy of scepticism characterised by the unwillingness of officials to acknowledge the pandemic, a slow vaccine uptake and refusal to share data with the World Health Organisation. But things may be looking up under President Samia, who has engaged Tony Blair to handle Tanzania’s fight against Covid-19.
Across the strait the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar (RGZ) is even vaguer on the issue, but everyone is eager to get the devastated tourism industry up and running. Air France’s inaugural direct flight to the island from Paris landed last month, and Etihad will launch flights via Abu Dhabi on November 26. Alternatives include KLM via Amsterdam, Ethiopian Airlines via Addis Ababa or Kenya Airways via Nairobi.
Tourist visas are issued on arrival in Zanzibar at a cost of £36. The RGZ also requires international visitors to fill in an online health-declaration form (healthtravelznz.mohz.go.tz), and you will also need a negative PCR test certificate not more than 96 hours old; you will have to take another test, costing £18, before you leave the airport.
Mask-wearing is not enforced. But remember that Zanzibar is largely Muslim, so dress modestly away from resorts.
Chris Haslam
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