The Green Adventure
A different kind of Zanzibar tour for curious holidaymakers.
Tired of spice tours, dolphin tours, Stone Town tours? Tourists can now explore the sustainable side of Zanzibar including a delicious farm-to-table dinner, modern timber construction and a living botanical garden.
It’s hot. But it’s always hot in Zanzibar. And before we have even fully started, we grasp two important lessons: dense tropical gardens, a canopy of banana trees, palms and mighty baobabs, can reduce temperatures up to six degrees. And so can engineered-timber houses which insulate buildings much better than normal concrete buildings.
We are standing on the ground floor of the modern Pavilion mall in Zanzibar’s eco-city Fumba Town. Isaki Mallya, our guide, points to a huge map of the development near the airport: “We want to show you what Zanzibar is and what Zanzibar is becoming”, he says.
The graphics on the wall are stark, maybe even shocking: Zanzibar has grown by almost 50 per cent in ten years, from 1.3 million to 2 million people. “Every year 10,000 new homes are needed”, Isaki explains, an investment consultant by profession. “Today we see what we don’t see lying at the pool in the hotel”, says Astrid Meier, a first-time visitor to the isles and to Africa. “I am interested in how people live here”, the social worker from Düsseldorf says. Her husband seems a bit lackluster – the heat is nagging him.
The new Green Tour is a Zanzibar excursion of a different type. In eight stages, from an afternoon walk through the islands first green city, to an inside-look at green building technologies, to a country sunset dinner, visitors see first-hand how the booming tourism destination prepares for the future.
From the Pavilion rooftop, we look down on rows and rows of shiny white bungalows on the turquoise shores of the Indian Ocean. “It all started under a Mango tree in 2014”, the guide points out; now more than 1,400 houses have been sold.
A good part of the new town is built with engineered timber which binds CO2 instead of omitting it into the atmosphere. Cobblestone roads and natural tree gullies allow rainwater to sink into the ground. Who lives here? “People from 60 nations”, explains the guide.
A green drain just in front of us contains a leguminous tamarind tree. Its brown fruit can treat diarrhea, constipation, fever, and even malaria, Isika tells us. A few steps ahead, a QR-code on a small botanical signboard beams us into the world of the evergreen natal mahagony tree, “with sweet-scented flowers attracting bees and birds to your garden.” How beautiful it must be to live in the midst of a tropical botanical garden!
As the sun sets, we find ourselves on a wooden deck above the sea, digging into mchicha (Swahili for spinach) with coconut, mtembele sweet potato shoots, sipping tamarind-gin-cocktails. The Msonge farm, supplying all these goods, is an organic family business nearby, we learn.
But the Green tour is not yet over, in the last light of the day, each one of our group is called to plant a palm tree along the seafront of Fumba. By now the heat has gone down somewhat. As we touch the red soil with our hands, Isaki says rather matter-of-factly: “Now you have left your mark in Africa”.
And I watch Astrid and Sergina from Düsseldorf shyly wiping a tear from their eyes.
The Green Adventure
Interactive 1/2 day excursion, max 10 people, hotel pickup and drop-off.
Ph. +255 677 087 959
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