Pemba Island

Getting to Pemba takes commitment. The ferry from Zanzibar takes roughly six hours depending on how the captain feels about it, the small plane from Dar es Salaam is expensive and intermittent, and the channel between the two islands runs fast enough that rough crossings are common. All of this is why Pemba remains what it is: one of the least visited islands on the East African coast, with a reef system in a condition that reminds you what diving was like before the reefs started dying.

I made the crossing on a slow ferry in February, arriving in Chake Chake — the main town, which is a small administrative center more than a destination — just as the afternoon light went horizontal across the clove trees. The smell hit me on the boat. Cloves, faintly, then more strongly as we entered the harbor, a smell like Christmas cake but sharper, more medicinal, coming from ten thousand trees on the hills above the port.

The Clove Economy

Pemba produces perhaps seventy percent of Tanzania’s clove crop, and during harvest season (July through October) the whole island’s logic reorganizes around it. Families that own trees pick them green and spread them to dry on tarpaulins by the road, on rooftops, anywhere flat and exposed to sun. The dried cloves turn dark brown, the processing smell intensifies, and the roads are lined with drying racks for weeks. I watched a woman sort through a pile the size of a small car by hand, extracting imperfect buds at a pace that seemed superhuman. She explained through a translator that she’d been doing this since she was seven.

The clove economy has been in trouble since the socialist-era trading boards collapsed — prices are volatile, trees are aging, young people leave for Zanzibar or the mainland. But the trees remain, covering Pemba’s interior in a dense shade canopy that also makes the island among the greenest things I’ve seen in East Africa.

Diving the Walls

Pemba’s reputation in the diving world rests on its walls. The island sits at the edge of the Pemba Channel, where the Indian Ocean floor drops sharply, and cold upwellings from the deep bring nutrients that feed coral growth at densities I’ve only seen matched in a few places in the Pacific. The walls at sites like Manta Point and Fundo Island drop vertically from about five meters to beyond a hundred, covered in seafans the size of dining tables and black coral bushes and schools of fish in numbers that made me stop kicking and just drift.

I did four dives with a small operation based at a camp near Wete in the north. The guides knew the walls site by site, knew where the napoleon wrasse lived and where the guitar sharks rested on the sand flats below the wall’s base. The water temperature was twenty-four degrees and very clear. I came up from a sixty-minute dive and could not believe how much had happened.

Ruins and Mosques

Pemba’s Swahili history is older than Zanzibar’s in some respects, and the ruins at Ras Mkumbuu — a headland at the end of a red-dirt road through the clove forest — contain mosque remnants from the tenth century, one of the oldest Islamic sites in sub-Saharan Africa. It takes a while to get there and you’ll likely have it to yourself, which is either peaceful or slightly unnerving depending on how you feel about standing alone in a ruin while the Indian Ocean wind comes through the coral-stone arches.

The People

Pembans are Shirazi — descended from the Persian settlers who preceded the Omani Arab period on this coast — and they maintain a cultural distinctiveness from Zanzibar that comes up quickly in conversation. The local dialect, the food, the fishing traditions all have a slightly different shape. I ate a fish curry in Wete that was built around a coconut base different from anything I’d had in Zanzibar, sweeter and less sharp, with cardamom in places you didn’t expect it.

When to go: June through October is peak diving season — clearest visibility, calmest seas, and the clove harvest adds a sensory bonus. February and March are also good for diving and heat is more tolerable. Avoid April to May (long rains) when boat access becomes genuinely difficult.