Zanzibar Island Warnings Or Dangers Tips by toonsarah Top 5 Page for this destination

Falling coconuts

If you spend some time on a beach in Zanzibar (and almost every visitor does), be careful where you sit. A palm tree may provide some welcome shade, but a coconut landing on your head could cause major injury, possibly even death. Staff at our hotel were pretty vigilant in checking the trees regularly and picking any coconuts that appeared ready to drop, but even so we avoided sitting beneath any that had nuts on them.

Hassle from would-be guides

The least-appealing aspect of our stay in Stone Town was the amount of hassle we were subjected to by touts, would-be guides etc. One in particular made a real nuisance of himself. He would wait for us each morning as we emerged on to Kenyatta Road from our hotel and waylay us with demands that we buy his services as a guide. Each day we would shake him off by telling him we already had plans – a tour booked, shopping to buy. Each day he would say “Maybe tomorrow” and to shut him up, sometimes we would say “Maybe – or maybe not”. On our final morning he was there as usual, with the usual pleas to take a tour with him. When we said that we were leaving that morning (and no thank you, we didn’t need an airport transfer), he became quite abusive, claiming that we had promised him that we would take one of his tours and that he had been relying on that promise to feed his family that week. Our consciences were clear as we had made no such promise, and we didn’t really believe his claim about the money as we’d seen other tourists agree to one of his tours, but the encounter left a sour taste in our mouths at the end of what had been an otherwise great week.

This isn’t to suggest that all guides in Zanzibar adopt such hard sell techniques, nor to create the impression that the people here aren’t warm and welcoming, which they almost uniformly are. But do be aware that there is a culture of fairly aggressive touting for business and that, perhaps unsurprisingly, local people are likely to see tourists as a relatively easy source of money.