So you’ve rented a car! Congratulations. You now have total freedom to travel wherever and whenever you want throughout the island. Only challenge now is deciding where to go . . .

It’s easy to get lost in the endless resources available at your finger tips online when trip planning and there’s always those critical aspects of trip planning that you don’t want to get ahead of yourself with to allow the time and energy to explore local hot spots and take recommendations as you go from your travel. Zanzibar, Hakuna Matata, don’t over plan your trip.

Stonetown

No Car Needed.

If you’ve read my post on renting a car in Zanzibar, I mentioned that the first stop on our island tour was in Stonetown which you not only do not need a car for, but I would recommend not having a car for. The reason for this is Stonetown is essentially a single main driving one way loop that takes you along the tourist strip where you’ll pass the popular local fish market, Zanzibar Fort, the main beach and dock where the famous divers jump at high tide, and the night food market. The rest of Zanzibar is a complete maze of inner walkaways nestled between souvenir shops, boutiques, restaurants, on the rim closest to this main driving road and slowly fanning out to include more local accommodations and shop fronts. Stonetown is an extremely walkaway city, it’s flat, relatively small, and extremely safe as both locals and tourists stay up late into the evening daily by the water enjoying their time in the comfortable weather once the sun goes down. Even if walking isn’t your thing, book a hotel in the center of town and you’ll find everything you want to see and do within in mile radius of your booking. And if it’s not directly within that mile, it’s probably because you’ve been recruited my one of the many local tour guides that are hoping you’ll pay a suitable price for taking you to one of the other popular attractions Zanzibar is known for, such as Prison Island where you can spend the day sunbathing with giant tortoises or to one of the snorkeling reefs.

Paje

Car is helpful to get to other local beaches and attractions.

It’s once you’re outside of the city that you’ll have to make some decisions regarding a vehicle. We went to Paje first, which is a popular backpacker destination on the east coast of Zanzibar, directly across from Stonetown but on the opposite coast. to get to Paje, all we needed to do was follow one road out of the city to the east, and then after about 30 minutes take a right and follow a second road down south-east to get to the city that follows on the opposite coast as Stonetown. Getting to Paje, having a car was definitely the way to go. Paje has a real relaxed vibe, mixed population of locals and tourists mainly from Europe. We stayed at Bara Bara Eat& Sleep which felt like a combination of hostel and bed&breakfast with the quality of a boutique hotel. We had our own private room, free breakfast included selected from their quality vegetarian inspired menu, and access to an open-air rooftop lounge that looked out on the city. Our hotel was right on the main road that we drove in on.

The challenging thing, but also charming thing about Paje, is although it is walkable and although it is drivable, in some ways, it’s not exactly either. Like Stonetown, there’s a main street with shops, restaurants, and accommodations. Unlike Stonetown, this main street is not along the water, and in fact there is not a direct way to get from the main street to the beach at all. Any roads that lead to the beach are unpaved, and although there are many hotels and restaurants along the water, in order to drive here would mean testing your vehicle on the sandy up and down terrain of dirt beach roads. You’ll see large group of backpacking tourists instead of foot all along these unpaved roads, but you won’t be able to track where these groups are coming from or going to as a suitable pathway for yourself to find the way to the beach either. There are very few signs and most signs indicate hotel names that are on the water rather than beach access. This would mean parking at a hotel even if you did bring your car out this far. Luckily, you can cut through any hotel’s property to access the shore, and once you get there you’ll notice that somehow all the other tourists you saw on the main road also made it to the beach as well!

Jambiani (and nearby attractions)

Car is helpful to get to other beaches and attractions.

Jambiani beach is about a 15 minute drive south of Paje, and the town and beach are oriented in a very similar way. Here, we did manage to drive down close enough to the water and find parking at what either was, or maybe even still is, a hotel by the beach. At the very least no one came out to great us in the parking lot, but other cars seemed to be parked there too for beach access. We made this beach trip after investigating the Zanzibar cave swimming scene, which online will also boast as one of Zanzibar’s big attractions. Earlier in the day, we had asked the owner of Bara Bara where she recommended for Cave swimming and she had recommended a popular swimming spot called “Mallum” online would review as being 4.7 stars and a great addition to your trip. Mallum she told us should be reserved in advance online and is $20 a person to visit the cave. She said it was well maintained, organized, and easy to find. I wouldn’t know for sure, because instead of Mallum, we chose to go to a different cave called “Swahili Cave” only reviewed as 4.3 stars but with prices of $10 a person. The owner of Bara Bara told us this was the more “local” option, and whenever this is said in reference to a place, unless prices disagree with the statement, I choose that one. Swahili cave did not disappoint! There’s a small sign labeling it on the main road that can be followed off the paved road into what seems like the middle of no where on dirt roads. But luckily the signs continue and you find it nestled into the more rural island landscape. We had the whole cave pretty much to ourselves during the entirety of our stay and there was no time limit for how long we could spend there. I’m sure there are local guides that can easily take you here, but it was a very easy do it yourself activity that did not require a guide that was made possible spontaneously because we had a car.

Kizimkazi Bay

Car could be used, but tours include early morning drivers.

Swimming with Dolphins. Isn’t this the dream of many children everywhere? Well, in Zanzibar you can actually do this! And not in a captive, tamed, environment, but with wild dolphins out in the water at the south of the island. Locals will tell you that these dolphins are 100% wild, and that the fishmen know where to find them each morning because the first boat out always tracks them down. They’ll also tell you that the dolphins don’t mind people in the water with them because they swim so much faster than humans that often the dolphins are playful and will act as if it’s a game to see if you can find them. I’m not sure how much of these claims are true, all I know is that the dolphins are not directly harmed in any way and there’s seems to be no evidence that these are unethical tours online. We had Bara Bara book out Kizimkazi dolphin tour for us from Paje, but you can also book these tours from your hotel in Stonetown. Since this location is the southern most part of the island, it’s recommended to travel from one of these cities for it. Be prepared to wake up early on the morning of your tour. Most tours, pick you up from your hotel or accommodation at 5am which is why neither we nor our accommodation knew what would have happened if we were to have driven down ourself the morning of and showed up at the bay and searched for our own tour guide for a cheaper price. You probably could do this and likely it would be cheaper, but the fact is, it just wasn’t that expensive to have someone pick us up in Paje as part of the tour and this saved either of us from needing to drive when we were still sleepy on the opposite side of the road. You do need to get there by 6am as there were already a couple boats out at this time when we arrived and the dolphins were the most “social” from this time up until about 8am.

Pongwe

Car is helpful to find accommodation unless you booked hotel transfer.

One of the nice things about having a car, is it meant that we could stop along the way at other destinations spontaneously en route to our next accommodation. One of such places was Jozani-Chwaka National Park, home to the endemic Red Colombus Monkey. Visiting these little creatures is a popular attraction for many tourists, who often book half day or day trips from one of the cities to spend time in Zanzibar’s natural forest which once used to cover the majority of the island. Since it’s necessary to have a guide to enter into these forests, we got a private guided tour which included both a walk with monkey viewing and short drive out to see the mangroves in a wetland area closers to the shore with a park ranger. We didn’t need to book anything in advance, but it was convenient we had the car since this was the method of transportation our ranger relied on to take us to the second part of the park.

We arrived in Pongwe as the sun was beginning to set, roughly 6pm I might estimate, only to get totally and utterly lost finding our next accommodation stay. We were scheduled to stay at Queen Sheba Lodge, which looked to be just off the main highway by the water, but in actuality was pinned twice on google maps, once in a false location, and had no true signs indicating which was the correct side road to take. Needless to stay, by the time we actually arrived at the lodge the sun had gone down, we were very tired. We were surprised to find that not only was no one there to great us at the gate or the reception desk when we arrived, we actually were the only lodge guests that were even expected for that day. We had the whole resort to ourselves. Now this might have been pretty fun if this had been a busy beach, or there had been a walkable town, but instead we found ourselves in what felt like the middle of no where, no food options besides hotel food, and few people on the beach all of which seemed like families. Now, if I may offer a suggestion here . . . should you find yourself in a situation where you have booked multiple nights at a hotel or resort through a 3rd party site like booking.com and do not wish to stay more than 1 night (or no nights at all) here’s what you can do. BEFORE you check in, emphasis on the before, you can cancel your booking and will only be charged for the first night. If you’re like us and already did check in, you can offer to pay the hotel the deducted amount booking.com takes for the second night rather than stay there. That is to say, we stayed the first night and when we decided to leave the next morning instead of staying for a 2nd night, we paid for 1 night plus an additional $20 since booking.com takes roughly 20% commission for each night. This way we were able to again be spontaneous with our vehicle and take it up north the next day to Nungwi, a town that we initially didn’t have in our itinerary.

Nungwi

No car needed.

If I could change one thing about our trip, it might have been to skip Pongwe entirely and spend two nights instead in Nungwi at the north of the island. If you like large isolated resorts and are part of a family with kids, you might consider Pongwe to be a better option, but for us as a couple looking to be social and explore cuisine and attractions Nungwi was a much better fit. We had initially shied away from Nungwi only because we were already going to Paje which embraced the chill, backpacker lifestyle, whereas Nungwi is slightly more expensive, touristy with many resorts, and is known for its night life that can keep you up on the beach long into the night. Despite it being more crowed and the uptick on costs, I would consider it a must-see area of the island to get a great beach experience. It was also not necessary for us to book accommodation here in advance, or get a room right on the water at one of the fancy resorts. Instead we did some room shopping once we arrived, and found a quieter, hostel style private bungalow room at Sunrise Beach for a fraction of the price of anything we could find looking in advance online. This was all but right on the water, with only a 1 min walk until your toes were in the sand right in the middle of the popular strip of restaurants and dive shops. As a tourist in Nungwi, you do not need a car to get around. Most people come from Stonetown by private car or limo service, but if you’re feeling more adventurous and are traveling light you can also take the local bus and get off at the last stop. Once in Nungwi, everything is very walkaway (or boatable) to get around as you wish, meaning that the benefit of the car really comes from the amount you might save by driving rather than using a private service rather than the actual convenience of having a car once you get there.