From The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, December 2008

Hunched down on his haunches, Juma Hajji Salim, the village witch doctor, wafted his hand over the smouldering tin can and consumed its intoxicating fumes with slow, deep inhalations. His eyes grew bloodshot and swollen, his muscles tightened and he curled into himself, like a cat. The watching crowd of foreigners and villagers took a collective step away, down the beach, towards the sea.

Behind the witch doctor, tethered to a stick, a solitary goat stood munching the lush grass, blissfully unaware of its impending fate.

‘This is the result of some serious haggling,’ whispered Marcus Lewis, one of the joint owners of Fundu Lagoon, an eco-resort on the Tanzanian island of Pemba. ‘At first they wanted human blood and the sacrifice of a menagerie of animals. But I managed to negotiate them down to one goat for each new villa we’re building.’

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Still, I thought, poor goats.

It was exactly what I’d come to this obscure corner of the Indian Ocean for, though. Pemba is a small island off Unguja, itself a small island off the coast of Tanzania. Together, these green specks make up most of the Zanzibar archipelago – once the world HQ of the spice (and slave) trades, but now increasingly popular as a beachy add-on to an East African safari holiday.

As little as five years ago, even the ‘main’ island of Unguja was fringed with gloriously basic beach accommodation (no electricity, no room keys and no menu – just tell the fisherman at breakfast whether you fancy squid or snapper for dinner). And while there are still a few of these places left on Unguja, those who want to experience the Zanzibar of untrodden palm jungle, empty sands and unfortunate goats are best off on Pemba. That, anyway, is where I was headed – although I couldn’t resist a stop in Stone Town, effectively Unguja’s capital. It was here, after all, a millennium ago, that Arab and Persian traders, sailing on the monsoon winds, made Zanzibar the place to swap precious cargoes of Chinese porcelain and cloth for African ebony,

ivory and spices. The islands soon became independent sultanates, so wealthy that everyone wanted them – and they were passed, in turn, from Portugal to Muscat and Oman through battle. By the 17th century, African slaves began appearing on the shopping lists of foreign traders, leaving blood in the margins of Zanzibar’s history books. Eventually, after a brief stint as part of the British Empire, then independence and a violent revolution, the islands became part of the newly-formed Republic of Tanzania in the 1970s.

Reminders of this turbulent past crop up regularly in the old capital. Recently made a World Heritage Site, it’s a cat’s cradle of narrow streets, riddled with churches and mosques. Our hotel, 236 Hurumzi, was right in the heart of the hullabaloo, a huge palace built by one of the richest men on the continent, whose close ties with the sultan enabled him to construct his house as the second highest in town (after His Majesty’s own modestly-named ‘House of Wonders’). Now it has opulent rooms and a restaurant on the roof, the Tower Top, for surveying the goings-on below.

Once we had settled in, we took a lazy meander, dodging eager tour guides until we reached the Anglican Cathedral, the oldest Christian church in East Africa. Wandering the narrow streets of Stone Town, it was easy to imagine the islands as they were 200 years ago: a thriving trading centre for silks, spices – and souls. Peering into some nearby slave cells served us a grim reminder of the island’s dark past.

We returned to the hotel via the House of Wonders – a multi-layered colonial confection with a cavernous interior stretching up several floors, now home to a magnificent culture museum – and dined barefoot in the Tower Top restaurant. Slowly, the sun dipped below the horizon, accompanied by a lullaby of muezzins delivering the call to prayer across the city. It was every bit as exotic as I’d dreamed, but the next day I discovered that much of the island has changed. Circling it by car, it became clear that international resorts and an army of honeymooners have captured the best beaches. If we wanted to see more of the sleepy, mysterious old Zanzibar we needed to leave Unguja.

Local guides suggested the modern world had not yet fully reached Pemba, one of 50 or so island beads strung along the necklace of the Zanzibar Archipelago. So, a couple of days later, we paid £75 to board a tiny 13-seater plane – and soared across a stretch of turquoise H2O. As we descended towards Pemba, a thick natural carpet unfurled beneath us: the reason Arab traders had called the island ‘El Huthera’ – the green. After landing near Chake Chake, the capital, we headed to Mkoani, a fishing port in the south. We hopped aboard a taxi-boat and were whisked around headlands of twisted mangrove forests, past fishermen casting their nets from battered dhow boats. There are few hotels on Pemba, and visitors tend to stay at Fundu Lagoon, all that remains of a short-lived building boom on the island 10 years ago. As we entered a calm stretch of water, the skipper gestured to an impossibly long sandy beach across the lagoon and said: ‘There’s Fundu.’

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