MENAI BAY – On Distant Sandbanks

The resolve of Patricia and the Italians for more adventurous sightseeing holds true and so for my final day on Zanzibar I decide to join them for the excursion they’re taking with the tour company Safari Blue, who operate in the Menai Bay Conservation Area on the south of the island. Zanzibar’s costal flora and fauna have trouble competing with the growing numbers of resorts elsewhere on the coast, so the protection of Menai Bay is all the more important.


Modern dhow heading towards Kwale Island...


... and not so modern canoe moored in the shallow waters closeby.

We start the day travelling by dhow from the beach at Fumba to nearby Kwale Island. It’s a journey carried out in traditional style… except, perhaps, for the outboard motor on the stern of the dhow. Conservation area or not; Menai Bay is another big business opportunity for Zanzibar’s tour guides. There are half a dozen other dhows racing across the open water to try and get to the prime beach and snorkeling sites on Kwale Island. I’m suddenly reminded why I do most of my travelling alone.

Tour guide Idris, though, obviously has a spider sense about him and so steers us away from the crowds and into some of the mangrove lined bays around the island. The mangroves, along with the turtles who visit them to breed and lay eggs, are one of the primary conservation projects on Kwale. At low tide, with their rocky bases slowly eroding, the statuesque trees look particularly stunning in their isolation.


The northern beach of Kwale Island as the morning's boats arrive.

We return to the northern edge of the island where it’s (yet) a(nother) stunning day on the beach and in water which is all kinds of shades of blue. Accompanied by (yet) a(nother) wonderful seafood lunch. It would be easy to spend days in Zanzibar and do nothing else if one so wished; be driven off to beautiful beaches everyday and do much the same thing time after time. Watching half a dozen groups doing the same thing around us, I found myself missing my dulla-dulla. I still had my lucky find copy of “All Creatures Great and Small” to read. Which had an added interest for animal – obsessed Patricia. Explaining the finer points of James Herriot’s writing style to an Italian on a white sand beach was a rather surreal use of an hour.


In the water off the coast of Kwale. Sea and sky... perfect blue.

At sunset, and with the prevailing winds allowing us to actually sail back to the mainland, we stopped off on a sandbar for final photos and to watch the waves in the gathering dark. Reflecting on the week, the day in Menai typifies a lot of Zanzibar. It certainly feels like a place where the ancient and the modern have collided and are looking to find an easy peace. The thing about Zanzibar, and I see this as a good thing, is that it doesn’t seem to do the modern very well. From what I’ve seen of the resorts and Stone Town, they’re at their best when dealing with simple pleasures and local seafood. The dhow motor breaks down a fair amount; the sail doesn’t.


Patricia and I on a sandbank in Menai Bay. We're squinting, incidentally, because the setting sun is shining directly into our eyes!

The trip to the airport the following day is typical. Air travel does not suit Zanzibar yet. Checking in is like living a newsreel of the arrivals at Ellis Island. Lines of passengers are everywhere, snaking in and out of the shack like terminal. You may or may not get checked in before your flight leaves, and even then all that enables you to do is to join one of the many other lines dealing with luggage, visas and immigration (of which there are many; all unmarked) There appears to be one computer in the entire building, as check in staff write information on pieces of paper and then disappear for ten minutes before coming back with boarding passes. In the days of large, anonymous airport terminals (and large, anonymous island beach resorts) Zanzibar’s is a lot of fun. It does things at its own pace and you just have to go with it. Of course, I my judgment here might be influenced by the fact that, after my check in attendant returned from his mysterious visit to the back office, he told me that my flight was overbooked and I’d been upgraded to business class for my flight back to Nairobi.

Well, you can take this whole ‘travelling on a shoestring’ thing a bit too far, can’t you?


Shell on the sand in Menai Bay.