Pongwe Beach, Zanzibar

Where to stay at Pongwe

Pongwe in four lines

• The bay holds its water. A pocket of reef close inshore means swimming is usually possible when the beaches either side have drained.
• Very small, and very quiet. A handful of hotels, no village strip, and nothing to walk to after dark.
• An hour from the airport. $40 to $50 by taxi, on the north east coast between Kiwengwa and Chwaka.
• Check your specific hotel. The bay is short and the effect fades at either end of it. This is a beach where the exact address matters.

Why the water stays

The reef comes close to shore here and curves around the bay, leaving a deeper pocket inside it. When the tide drops and the flats either side of Pongwe drain out to the horizon, that pocket holds enough water to swim in.

It is not the same as the northern tip. The bay is small, and at the very lowest spring tides it goes too. But for most of the month, most days, you can get in the water when your neighbours a kilometre away cannot.

This is a genuine geographic quirk rather than marketing, and it is why a handful of small hotels have quietly clustered here for years.

What it costs you

Size. Pongwe is a bay, not a coastline, so there is no long beach walk and no choice of where to sit. On a busy week the hotels fill their own stretch of sand and that is all the sand there is.

And isolation. There is nothing here beyond the hotels: no village centre to speak of, no restaurants outside them, no bars. Kiwengwa is fifteen minutes north if you need any of that.

What to do with the days

Not much, on purpose, and Pongwe is small enough that the hotels are the village. There is no centre, no shops and no restaurants outside them.

The swimming is the point, and being able to do it at three in the afternoon when the coast either side has emptied is genuinely unusual here.

For anything else, Kiwengwa is fifteen minutes north with resorts, shops and boat operators. Matemwe and the Mnemba boats are half an hour further.

Snorkelling from the beach

The reef that shelters the bay is close enough to swim to, which almost nowhere else on this coast can say. There is decent coral and reef fish on it, and you need nothing but a mask.

Go at high water, when there is enough depth over the coral to swim without touching it. At low water the reef is barely covered and swimming over it damages it.

It is not Mnemba, and anyone whose trip is built around reef should be at Matemwe. As something you can do before breakfast without booking anything, it is hard to beat.

Choosing a hotel here

There are only a handful and they differ more than the size of the bay suggests. Some sit directly on the sheltered pocket, some are a few hundred metres along where the water behaves like the rest of the coast.

That distinction is the whole reason to come, so it is worth confirming rather than assuming. Ask directly whether you can swim in front of the hotel at low tide.

A good one answers plainly, because it is the question everybody asks them.

How Pongwe compares on the east coast

Every east coast beach shares the same tide. Pongwe is the exception that is worth understanding, because the reef sits close enough inshore to trap water in the bay.

It is one of the three coasts a Zanzibar honeymoon usually lands on, and a small bay with a handful of hotels and no village to speak of, so bring a book and expect to eat where you sleep. How the tide works explains why one bay behaves differently from its neighbours.

Should you stay at Pongwe

Questions people ask about Pongwe