Mafia Island from Zanzibar

When to go to Mafia, month by month

Whether Mafia is worth it depends on your month more than anything else. The whale sharks, the outer reefs and the humpback whales each have their own season, and they only overlap for part of the year. Pick the month you travel. The calendar for Zanzibar itself is in when to go to Zanzibar, and the two line up well from November to February.

Pick your month for the detail

JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec

November

Go. A day trip works, three nights is better

Sharks settled in the bay, calm water, and prices lower than they will be in a month. Short rains are possible but rarely stop the boats.

Whale sharks: best. Diving outside the bay: best. Humpback whales: none.

Swimming with whale sharks at Mafia

Every season a group of whale sharks gathers in the bay off Kilindoni, on the west coast, to feed on the plankton that collects around the fishing boats. Most are young males of four to nine metres, and they come back year after year, which is why Mafia is more reliable than anywhere else on the Tanzanian coast.

How the trip works

You leave Kilindoni harbour in the morning in a small boat with a guide and a spotter. The sharks are usually found within half an hour, feeding at the surface in water a few metres deep. When one is found, the boat stops ahead of it and you slip in with mask and fins, a few at a time, and swim alongside until it dives or moves on. Then back on board to find the next. Two to three hours in all.

Booked on the island, the trip costs roughly $60 to $120 a person depending on the size of the group, plus the marine park fee if the operator has not included it. Lodges on Chole Bay add the drive across the island. Nobody can guarantee a shark, but in December, January and February most boats find one.

The rules in the water

The code of conduct most operators brief is short, and a good guide enforces it:

• Stay at least three metres from the head and body, four from the tail.
• No touching, no riding, no swimming in front of the mouth.
• No flash, and no scuba on a snorkelling encounter.
• One boat per shark, and a handful of swimmers at a time.

What goes wrong at Mafia is crowding. In peak weeks several boats sometimes close in on the same shark and put a dozen swimmers around it. Ask before you book how many boats go out and whether they share a shark. Pick an operator who says no to that, even if it costs ten dollars more.

A day trip from Zanzibar, or a stay

The day trip works: morning plane, the boat out to the sharks, lunch in Kilindoni, evening plane back. It gives you one chance, though, and if the sea is rough or the sharks are far out that morning, there is no second try. Two nights on Mafia give you two mornings and time for Chole Bay, for not much more.

Mafia whale sharks by plane, with lunch

Flights, the snorkelling boat, lunch in Kilindoni and the flying foxes.

4,5(2 reviews)· 8 h

From$201per person

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Mafia whale shark snorkelling and flight

The same day out with a different operator, worth comparing on the date you want.

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From$181per person

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Prices and durations read from GetYourGuide on 24 September 2026, and indicative. These are partner links: the price is the same for you.

How to get to Mafia Island from Zanzibar

Fly. The ferry is for travellers with time and a tight budget, and from Zanzibar it takes two days.

The small planes leave from terminal 1 at Zanzibar airport, the old domestic building a short walk from the international terminal. They run to a schedule but work like a shuttle: some days the Mafia flight goes direct, others it stops in Dar es Salaam, and in low season a flight with few bookings can be merged into another. Reconfirm the day before.

Arriving on a long-haul flight? Flying into Dar es Salaam and on to Mafia first, then to Zanzibar, saves backtracking. How to set that up is in our guide to flights to Zanzibar.

Mafia Island Marine Park and diving at Chole

Created in 1995, the park covers the south of the island, Chole Bay and the islands in it. The $23.60 daily fee applies from the moment you are inside it, which on Chole Bay means as soon as you check in. Lodges add it to your bill.

• Chole Bay. Sheltered coral gardens at 5 to 15 metres, diveable and snorkelable all year, even in the windy months. Where beginners train and everyone does their first dive.
• Kinasi Pass. The channel where the bay meets the open ocean, dived on the incoming tide as a drift: groupers, turtles, reef sharks, big schools of fish. For divers with some experience, from October to March.
• The sandbanks. Mange and Marimbani appear at low tide off the south coast, and a lodge boat takes you out for a morning of snorkelling and a picnic on the sand. The nearest thing Mafia has to the Safari Blue, without the forty other boats.
• Chole and Juani. Chole Island has the ruins of a nineteenth-century trading town, with fig roots growing through the walls, and a colony of fruit bats. On Juani are the older ruins of Kua and a tidal lagoon you swim into through a gap in the rock. Turtles nest on Juani and Jibondo, mostly from June to August.

Compared with Zanzibar, the reefs here are in better shape and see far fewer boats. If you are still deciding where to learn, certify in the calmer, cheaper water off Unguja first: our diving guide compares the centres and the prices.

Zanzibar and Mafia: how many nights

Each travel day on the small planes costs you half a day, so a stay shorter than three nights gives you very little on the island. Here is how the nights usually split.

Coming from a safari? Nyerere National Park, the old Selous, has direct flights to Mafia, and a safari followed by the beach is the other way people fit Mafia in: safari, Mafia, then Zanzibar for the flight home.

Is Mafia Island worth it?

It is a different trip from Zanzibar rather than a better one. Worth the flight for some people, a waste of two travel days for others.

Mafia or Zanzibar? Mafia wins under water. Zanzibar wins everywhere else: Stone Town, the beaches, the choice of hotels, the price of a boat trip. The two islands work best one after the other, not as a choice.

Mafia or Pemba? Both are the quiet islands you go to after Zanzibar. Pemba, which is part of Zanzibar and closer, has the wall diving and the better visibility. Mafia has the whale sharks and a marine park that suits snorkellers as much as divers. More in our guide to Pemba Island.

Where to stay on Mafia Island

A dozen places in all, and the lodges are mostly full board, since there is almost nowhere else to eat. Count $200 to $450 a person a night on Chole Bay, meals included, and much less in Kilindoni.

Utende, on Chole Bay

Where nearly all the lodges are, on the sheltered east side inside the marine park: Kinasi, Pole Pole, Shamba Kilole, Butiama and Mafia Island Lodge. Closest to the reefs and the dive centres. The whale sharks are on the other side of the island, 40 minutes by road, and the lodges drive you over.

Chole Island

A small island a few minutes by boat from Utende, with the ruins, the fruit bats and a single eco lodge, Chole Mjini, whose rooms are tree houses. No cars and no electricity to speak of. For people who want the quiet more than the comfort.

Kilindoni, the main town

Simple guesthouses and bungalows at $30 to $80 a night, next to the airstrip and the harbour the shark boats leave from. The cheapest way to see the sharks on two or three mornings. Few beaches worth the name, and the reefs are an hour away.

Where Mafia is, and why it has that name

Mafia lies 20 km off the Rufiji delta, south of Dar es Salaam, and about 200 km south of Stone Town. The main island is some 50 km long and belongs to the Pwani region of mainland Tanzania. Zanzibar, which is Unguja and Pemba, has its own government, and Mafia is not part of it. The Tanzanian visa you arrived with covers both.

The name has nothing to do with the Italian mafia. It probably comes from the Arabic morfiyeh, a group of islands, or from the Swahili mahali pa afya, a healthy place to live. The island was a trading post long before either meaning mattered: the town on Chole once handled gold from the Zimbabwe plateau.

About 66,000 people live on Mafia and the islands around it, according to the 2022 census, mostly from fishing and coconuts. It is a conservative Muslim island like Zanzibar: cover shoulders and knees in Kilindoni and the villages.

Questions people ask about Mafia Island