As Sartre would agree, for contemporary travellers hell is other tourists. As my greying, long-haired hotelier in Stone Town despaired, Zanzibar 15 years ago was “a paradise”, yet now mills with sandy, sunburnt Europeans in flip-flops, clutching bottled water.

Kindred riffraff hold up an unwelcome mirror, for other tourists are an embarrassing reminder of what we ourselves look like.

Thus real luxury tourism requires an extra layout of time, effort and dosh to ensure that you do not bring with you half the population of Dulwich. For stalwarts willing to hop three different planes, slump through two charmless layovers in grotty African airports with no AC, board a minivan and then catch a speedboat, paradise is still on offer.

A stomach-churning half-hour plane ride in a 20-seater from Stone Town’s airport, Pemba lies 50 miles northeast of Zanzibar. About half a million, mostly Muslim, Tanzanians inhabit this leafy, lumpy island, which is bursting with gargantuan papaya, jackfruit and mango trees, like the set of Jurassic Park. Locals survive by subsistence farming of cassava and plantains, as well as from harvesting Pemba’s one famous cash crop: cloves.

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It was the clove connection that first attracted me. Maybe I betray my weakness for pumpkin pie, but when my companion on this trip first told me about an island permeated by the aroma of cloves, I had to go. Thus when a minivan picked us up at Pemba’s airport in Chake Chake, I strained out of the windows with petulant sniffs.

Yes, the tin-roofed houses of red clay and sticks were picturesque. Women in bright kangas and men on bicycles with baskets of fish were agreeable reminders that I had finally ventured further afield from my London flat than Borough High Street. But where was the perfume of cloves?

At last, as the van drew toward the southern port of Mkoani, mats spread with a spiky brown nubble lined every verge. In town, hilariously, swathes of cloves were spread to dry not only down the road’s meridian, but out on the tarmac, where cars and cycles crunched across the crop.

The van infused with the smell of hot whisky. Pay dirt. That jar of umber nails in my spice cabinet would never seem the same again. If nothing else, when I next mull wine I will wash them first.

The island has a few primitive hotels and diving hostels, but there’s really only one place to stay on Pemba.

Granted, it’s pricey. But even in its low-end hillside huts, £205pp per night includes meals and booze; for that price in New York City, you’d be lucky to get a single bed at the Y and a Nathan’s hot dog. Unless you’re clinging to youthful bohemian pretensions, which I long ago swapped for a hot shower and some assurance that nobody would steal my laptop, after all the bother getting there, you might as well spring for Fundu Lagoon.

Fundu’s speedboat dropped us on the jetty. Thatched in coconut palm, tasteful tented accommodations lined a beach of the kind of fine, white sand used in hotel ashtrays, before a sea of such a surreal aqua that it looked Photoshopped.

At first glance, the vista resembled those mendacious panoramas in travel brochures that, in reality, prove upholstered in edge-to-edge beach towels, where vendors hawk bad, melting ice cream, and droves of paunchy fellow nationals in loud swimsuits wish you weren’t here, either.

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