Private Jozani Forest and Salaam Cave Tour, Zanzibar

Jozani Forest and the red colobus monkeys

Jozani Chwaka Bay National Park is the only national park on Zanzibar, covering around fifty square kilometres of groundwater forest, coral-rag scrub and mangrove between the island's two bays, about thirty-five kilometres south-east of Stone Town. It is best known for the Zanzibar red colobus, a monkey with a rust-red back, white chest and a black face that lives only on this island and has become its unofficial symbol.

On the Jozani Forest tour your park ranger leads you along shaded paths where the colobus troops feed in the trees, often low enough for good photographs, alongside Sykes monkeys and the occasional bushbaby or duiker. Please keep your distance and never feed them. The walk takes roughly an hour. Is Jozani Forest worth visiting? For anyone who likes wildlife, yes: the monkeys are habituated, calm and easy to see on most mornings, though as with all wildlife sightings cannot be guaranteed.

The mangrove boardwalk

A few minutes' drive from the forest entrance, a raised wooden boardwalk leads out over the mangrove swamp towards Chwaka Bay. The walk is flat and easy, about twenty minutes there and back, and your guide explains how the different mangrove species prop themselves on stilt roots, breathe through pencil-like pneumatophores and shelter young fish and crabs in the tidal mud.

The light under the mangrove canopy is beautiful in the morning, and at low tide you can watch mudskippers and fiddler crabs on the flats below the boards. The boardwalk is included in the Jozani entry and forms part of every visit to the national park. From here the private vehicle takes you south along the coast road towards Kizimkazi, around thirty-five minutes away.

Salaam Cave and the sea turtles of Kizimkazi

Salaam Cave sits in the fishing village of Kizimkazi at the southern tip of Zanzibar. It is a natural limestone cavern whose floor is a pool of clear water, and it has become a rehabilitation centre for sea turtles rescued from fishermen's nets, mostly green turtles with some hawksbills. The keepers explain how the animals are cared for and released, and the entry fee supports that work.

You climb down into the cave, where the water is cool and only a couple of metres deep, and swim alongside the turtles while feeding them seaweed from the bowls provided; the turtles come close, so children are delighted. Follow the keepers' instructions: do not grab the shells or block the animals. Allow about an hour here, including time to shower and change. Swimming with turtles in Zanzibar is often the highlight of the whole holiday.

Kizimkazi village and the southern coast

Kizimkazi is one of the oldest settlements on Zanzibar. Its small mosque at Dimbani holds a Kufic inscription dated to the early twelfth century, making it among the earliest surviving Islamic buildings on the East African coast, and the village is also the departure point for dolphin boats in the mornings. On a private tour you can ask the driver to pause here for photographs of the fishing boats before the drive back.

From Kizimkazi the return to the south-east coast hotels takes under an hour, to Stone Town about an hour and to the north about two hours. If you are choosing a start time, the earliest departures give the coolest forest walk and the quietest cave. How to get to Jozani Forest without a car is a common question; with this tour the private vehicle handles the whole route from your hotel door and back.