Orange silk billowed overhead, and the maitre d', in traditional East African garb, guided diners to Arabian-style pillows. ''Jambo," he said, a Swahili greeting.
This was our first night in Stone Town.
Later, we moved six miles to the south, across an aquamarine sliver of the Indian Ocean, where moonlight shined on the sandy paths of Chumbe Island.
At first it seemed silent, but soon the waves were beating a steady percussion on the coral rocks that form this small island. Then came the wind, rustling through the coral rag forest of mangrove trees and clam fossils, one of the few such remaining ecosystems in East Africa.
The 14 guests -- the maximum generally allowed on this island at any one time -- flipped on their solar-powered flashlights and made their way to the main lodge building. There, they ate by hushed candlelight, overlooking the dark, rushing water that hides one of the best-preserved coral reefs in Africa.
Before my husband and I came here, we couldn't explain why we so wanted to visit Zanzibar. Maybe it was the name -- those Zs evoking the mystery and romance of sultans and princesses, of tropical beaches and clear water.
Stone Town and Chumbe Island gave us our answer.
Zanzibar is a place where the pristine beckons alongside the exotically imperfect, where carefully preserved nature flirts with a city shaped by centuries of human impact.
And both sides are surprisingly authentic. Although more tourists are discovering Zanzibar -- and more hotels and touts are ready for them -- we still felt like travelers getting a peek at a different world, not ticket-buyers at a well-orchestrated production.
It is only in the last decade or so that Zanzibar has courted tourists at all. After the 1964 revolution, which overthrew the last of the sultans and combined the islands of Zanzibar and mainland Tanganyika into the republic of Tanzania, the socialist government was not interested in Western visitors.
But in the 1980s, the price of cloves plunged worldwide, hurting Zanzibar's leading export. The government started to encourage seaweed farming, and, in the early 1990s, tourism.
