Jozani Forest

A Forest in the Middle of a Beach Island

Everyone comes to Zanzibar for the coast — the white sand, the dhows, the impossibly clear shallows. So it surprises people that the centre of the island holds Jozani, a forest dense and green and humid, the last significant remnant of the groundwater forest that once covered much more of the island. We drove in from the east coast, leaving the heat of the beach for the closer, mossier heat of the trees, and within ten minutes I’d stopped thinking about the sea at all.

Jozani is the heart of Jozani-Chwaka Bay National Park, and it protects something genuinely irreplaceable: the Zanzibar red colobus, a monkey found only on this island and nowhere else on the planet. There are perhaps a few thousand left. They are unmistakable — rust-red backs, black faces, a punk crest of pale hair, and an expression of permanent mild offence. The local name translates roughly as “poison monkey,” because they were once thought to foul the trees they fed in, which did them no favours with farmers.

A guide walks you in, and the monkeys are habituated enough that you come within a few metres without disturbing them. A whole troop was working through the canopy and the low branches when we arrived, juveniles dropping almost to head height, mothers with infants clamped to their bellies, the dominant males watching us with the flat indifference of creatures who have decided we are neither food nor threat. I stood still and let them get on with their morning.

Keep Your Distance, Said the Guide, Repeatedly

The rule, repeated firmly and often, is to keep about three metres from the monkeys. This protects them — they share enough of our biology to catch our diseases, and a forest with a few thousand animals can’t afford a flu outbreak. It also, our guide noted dryly, protects you, because a colobus that decides your shoulder is a useful perch is not a souvenir you want.

Lia, who has more discipline than I do, kept the distance scrupulously. I was lining up a photo of a juvenile when its mother moved through a branch directly above me, close enough that I felt the leaves shift, and I understood the three-metre rule is more aspiration than guarantee when the monkeys haven’t agreed to it. Nobody touched anybody. But I lowered the camera and just watched after that, which was better anyway.

The Boardwalk Through the Drowned Forest

Beyond the colobus trail, a wooden boardwalk runs out into a mangrove forest on the edge of Chwaka Bay, and this was the part that stayed with me. The mangroves flood and drain with the tide twice a day, so the same boardwalk crosses dry mud in the morning and a shallow tidal forest by afternoon, the trees standing on their tangle of stilt roots in salt water.

We walked it near high tide, with the water sliding silently between the roots and small crabs and mudskippers going about their amphibious business below the planks. A mangrove is one of those landscapes that looks like nothing until you understand it, and then looks like everything — nursery, sea defence, carbon store, the literal edge between land and ocean. Standing there in the green half-light, with the tide doing its slow work, I thought it might be the most quietly impressive thing on the whole island. The beaches don’t make you think. This does.

When to go: June to October, the long dry season, for easy trails and active monkeys in the cooler mornings. Go early — the colobus are most visible just after dawn, and the midday forest is steam-room humid. Allow a half-day and combine it with the east-coast beaches you’ll have driven through to get here.