Hotel Matlai, Zanzibar

On the second flight leaving Istanbul at 6:30 pm we found ourselves next to a man who appeared to be suffering violently from something like Covid. Having put on our Covid masks which we still carry, we asked a stewardess to be moved and this was done efficiently by the staff. The downside was that we ended up in different rows as the plane was very full. I watched a documentary on Lost Cities that I enjoyed. I also had quite an interesting chat with a young German who was sitting beside me. We discussed many things, including the woes of the world.

On the final leg from Kilimanjaro to Zanzibar the plane was more than half empty, so we were able to sit together. I then was absorbed in the lost city of the Kuelap & Chachapoyas, whose remains we have visited in Peru a few years ago.

So we landed in Zanzibar around 4:30 am local time, this being an hour ahead of Spanish time. We were collected in a taxi and driven the 90 minutes over roads that were being constructed over a lot of the route, to the Matlai Hotel. Here we were greeted by our Butler, Hashim, and other staff and received a coconut to drink. Then we slept until 10 am, so we got four hours sleep, and then I went back to sleep for an extra 90 minutes before noon.

They arranged a taxi to pick us up at Zanzibar Airport (I was impressed as our flight got in at 04.00 am) . It was a 90 minute ride to the hotel. There are currently a lot of road works en route, which are for some Indian Ocean Football tournament, and should be finished in under a year

We had 3 nights in the "hotel" villa , which has just 4 rooms. And 2 nights in the 2 room private villa. Both are in the same grounds, both were large and well appointed. They were well looked after by housekeeping. The 2 room villa is much more sumptuous, but that does not imply that the other rooms are not very good. The other building on the complex is their restaurant which includes both international and Vietnamese food. The food was the weakest point of our stay. It was perfectly adequate, but did not reach the heights of the rooms and grounds. The restaurant is a bit dark and gloomy. Mind you at lunchtime you can eat outside fronting the long sandy beach

Guests have "butler service" . They seem to have 4 butlers, one of whom is rostered on duty all the time. We usually took breakfast our our room balcony, and lunch and dinner in the restaurant

This is Africa, so you do get vendors if you are on the beach. But they are not persistent, and congregate several hundred metres away round a large hotel. Walking past them, merely holding up a hand to say you were not interested was sufficient to see them off. In the hotel ground were not even approached by vendors. They did not impinge on my enjoyment of this hotel.

Overall we were extremely pleased with our stay at Matlai, and would certainly return gain if we come back to Zanzibar



Matlai Hotel .....came in two buildings.	,,, the 4 hotels room on the left. The villa on the right	The villa and its own pool	And the other pool for the hotel rooms

Our first room	The bed was decorated at night	breakfast served on the balcony	was really whatever one wanted and order the night before

A posh bathroom	The pool from various angles	Chris had problems getting in to it at first, but got used to it	The boys meanwhile kept their fur dry

Around midday we had a very late breakfast of fresh fruit and then went down to the hotel office to check in, and had a tour of the grounds, the restaurant, spa, the beach, etc. I went for a swim in the pool and we chatted to a German and a Rhodesian/British lady who was staying here. We ordered our lunch and at 14.00 we went to the restaurant to enjoy it.

The restaurant was a four minute walk through the hotels gardens, although it could also be accessed from along the beach. We had problems with the waiter first telling us that we could not sit at a particular table because it was reserved and then presenting us with menus in spite of the fact that we had already ordered our lunch. This was overcome by our butler appearing. We then had a cold avocado soup and I had linguine with seafood and David had a chicken Marsala. These were both quite presentable and our table had a pleasant view over the beach. We declined a desert and then went on to choose what we would like for dinner, but we were presented with exactly the same menu as we just eaten. It transpired that we had in fact chosen lunch from the dinner menu and that we could have chosen whatever we liked from the full menu for both lunch and dinner, with a few exceptions for extras. We went back to our room where David had to renegotiate the homeward flight from the Seychelles with Emirates airlines who had suddenly changed the time of their flight from the Seychelles to Dubai by18 hours. Which would have left us with 18 hour layover in Dubai. In in end we settled for that flight and their offer of a free hotel in Dubai for the night

We read and relaxed all afternoon until it suddenly it was 6:30 pm. We showered and went down to the bar, the same venue as lunch and had two very enjoyable cocktails there, one with hibiscus and the other with dates. They were so yummy that we had another one each and then proceeded to a pleasant elevated table with a view over the beach. The lanterns on the beach were sometimes still and other times moved violently with a different wind conditions. Unfortunately, there were loads of small sand flies around and at the end of the main course I asked for the desserts to be served in our room so that I could escape the flies. We turned in soon after 11 pm. We filled in the menu for breakfast and left it outside our room


The restaurant was right on the beach	So we could eat outside on the beach	like this	or inside with more shade

Next morning we woke up at 8:30 am and I went for a swim. Back in time for a 9 am breakfast which was served on our balcony and was most enjoyable. Whilst we were eating, the room was made up and we then sat on the balcony till almost noon before going for a walk along the beach.

We walked northwards along the beach, passing several hotels and ending up in a very large one. We had to stop there as it was high tide, so we could not continue any further along the beach. At that point it started to pour, and we took shelter in the large hotel, looked around it including a couple of tourist shops As the rain eased , we wandered back through very light rain to our hotel. I then went for a swim before going to our restaurant for lunch at 2:30 pm. We had ordered this in advance by filling in a slip in our room as to what we wanted. We had now mastered the method of their menus which was not explained to as well by our Butler, Hashim, on the first morning . We were able to sit on the table that we have been refused the previous day as presumably the management knew that the German occupants of this table were not having lunch there this day. A curious thing about the way the hotel worked was that the waiters in the restaurant did not serve us, but our butler had to serve us.

We returned to the room and read till about 5 pm before going for a walk Southward along the beach for a good hour. We passed several groups of locals playing soccer on the beach and also a large number of small boats before we came to a local famed restaurant called the Rock. It was indeed built on a large rock island. At high tide one had to take a boat to it, but it was low tide so we continued on until we could see another large building offshore connected by a bridge but we did not have time to reach this before turning back in order to get back before dusk. We went down to the bar before 7.30 and enjoyed a couple of cocktails and then our dinner. There was a group of four Spaniards in the hotel and it was one of their birthdays and they gave us a couple of slices of the chocolate birthday cake they had been presented with by the hotel..


Quite a lot of local birds, who eyed our food	Various passers by on the beach	including Massai	Walking along the beach

Long stretches of sand	in both directions	The Rock at high tide	and at low tide

During the night David became ill and continued to be really poorly for most of the next day. He put it down to the spicy crab soup that he had had as a starter. So whilst he lay flat out on one of the loungers on our balcony I enjoyed my breakfast after I had had a very invigorating swim before 1 pm. I went for another swim.

The Internet was very weak all day so Podcasts were unavailable as well. Also all my WhatsApp contacts on the new phone seem to have vanished and there was just a range of telephone numbers which seemed very odd to me. David continued to sleep most of the day and I had another good swim before lunch of scrambled eggs and coffeeat 2 pm served on our balcony. The butler had provided David with three flasks of hydrating recuperative drink.

I read more during the afternoon and then had another swim around 5 pm. We managed to both go into dinner, David just had a couple of fruit smoothies and a bowl of plain rice whilst I had a Caipirinha, a tasteless green papaya salad and fried rice with prawns also a pannacotta with passion fruit sauce. An early night and hopefully David will feel better by tomorrow.


The boys meet the hotel owner	There were a lot of swings in the grounds	But the boys thought the notice was a bit unnecessary

Never the less they used the various	..sorts of swing..	..and never seemed to get into any trouble

It was raining very heavily as we woke up, but I was still able to go for a swim before breakfast. This was a very disjointed affair as a fresh fruit and yogurt etc did not arrive till at least 20 minutes after we had finished eating scrambled egg and cheese on toast. So we told the butler that we were not really very amused by this. As a result of this he came back and offered as a free massage which I availed myself at 11 o’clock . I quite enjoyed it but was not over the moon about it. Don’t know why. After the massage I had had another swim before lunch at 2:30. This time we took it on a table right down on the beach, which was an idyllic setting and I enjoyed it.

Back to the room for more reading and playing with a new mobile which was proven resistant to having sensible WhatsApp contacts. At 4:30 we went for a walk northwards hoping to go past the rocky outcrop at the large hotel. But we would not have been able get round for at least another quarter of an hour due to the tide not going out quickly enough. So we wandered back to the hotel and I had another swim and was approached by our butler with the proposition of moving to the two bedroom villa for the final nights, courtesy of the management. We went to look at this and I was overwhelmed by the magnificent Infinity edge pool and decided it was worth packing up just for 36 hours. So we effected this move in the next half an hour before going in to dinner at 7:30 and enjoying three cocktails given to us by the house: they seem to be feeling very guilty about David’s food poisoning. Also guilty about the palaver of the breakfast in the morning. We enjoyed our dinner, although the starter was again very poor, and then came back to the room with an extra cocktail, which I have so enjoyed. I went for a swim in the villa's infinity pool and was most impressed . Back to read for a while and write the diary


The villa was quite magnificent	breakfast served on the balcony by the butler	Just a little snack really	The boys ate most of it

A really lazy day, breakfast on the balcony of our new room, a really palatial building which reminded me of the White House or Mar a Largo. Huge white pillars and curved windows. The breakfast all appeared together with two of them bringing it. Four swims during the day, the first before breakfast and the last in the flood lit pool after dinner. We moved around the various loungers in the garden during the day, enjoying the ones right on the beach and also ones in a shaded shelter with less direct view of the beach.

Lunch as usual in the restaurant on the small table outside almost on the beach. We had a pudding for the first time after our main courses and in the evening the other six occupants of the hotel were watching Germany play Curacao in football World Cup after they had had an early dinner. We packed up ready to leave the room by 11 am in the morning although our taxi to Stone Town is not booked until 1 pm.


More and more food	Another glass of juice, I don't mind if I do	makes one very tired	very, very tired with food poisoning

Swimming by night	and by day	with infinity edge overlooking the ocean	There were sun shelters scattered throughout the grounds

We were woken up soon after 7:30 am. with the butler banging on our glass balcony doors. We ignored him: it seemed quite unreasonable. But then I had an early swim as I was awake and was quite hungry by the time breakfast eventually appears at 9.15 to 9:30 am. This was very pleasant and David tried a local dish for breakfast.

He went to pay, leaving Chris to finish packing the suitcases. He came back and said we did not have to sit outside for the next two hours until our taxi came, and that we could have our old room back for those hours, which was great news. We moved ourselves there and enjoyed the balcony. Chris had a last swim . The other six guests were all German and were shouting teutonically at each other in the pool.

At 1 pm the taxi came to take us to Stone Town and this took about 90 minutes, with a lot of major road works along the way. Very flat countryside and not much agriculture in the open spaces.

We checked in to our new Hotel in the centre of Stone Town, and bumped into our new tour leader, Olaf, at the reception desk. He was from Latvia. We then had three hours plus to ourselves to unpack in the comparatively small room with a tiny balcony, before meeting up again with the group at 6 pm. So we went out for an hour's walk around the town. After this Chris tried the shore side swimming pools which had lovely views, but were not deep enough to swim in, so were just suitable to do exercises in. Therefore I had to move to the main poo,l which was not quite so scenic.

There were eleven people in all on our tour and although the company had said that they were mainly British, in fact there was only two other people from UK. There were two from Canada, Bob and Jacinta, one from the north of the US, Carol: a British and Singaporean couple, Derek and Bee Cee, a single lady called Sue she also from England: two men, Josh and Rob from USA and married to each other.And another Singaporean who lived in Qatar called Ching. Plus the two of us. Olaf gave his introduction right next to reception which seemed somewhat stupid place with insufficient seating for it to take place and then suggested a meal in a restaurant nearby. Eight of us in total went to this restaurant, right on the beach,. It was a lovely setting beside the water and the service was good and wee thoroughly enjoyed our meal there which was good value too. Chris spent time talking to Derek . Bee Cee and Olaf . While David was talking to Ching, Sue and Carol. An early night before an early breakfast in the morning.