Ocean Boutique Hotel

Ocean Boutique Hotel is on Dongwe beach, on the south-east coast of Unguja, the main island of Zanzibar, so you fly into Abeid Amani Karume International Airport outside Zanzibar Town and cross the island by road, about fifty-five minutes, on a private transfer we arrange to meet you off the plane.

Coming from a northern Tanzania safari there is a daily scheduled light-aircraft service that connects straight through: Seronera in the Serengeti at a quarter to eleven in the morning, changing at Arusha, into Zanzibar at twenty past two, which puts you on the beach in the middle of the afternoon.

The other Serengeti strips, Grumeti, Ndutu, Singita and Fort Ikoma, feed the same aircraft. From Dar es Salaam it is a twenty-minute hop, with three flights a day.

If you would rather not spend the middle of the day on a flight with several stops, we can put in a private charter, typically a Cessna Caravan or a Pilatus PC-12, from your safari airstrip straight to Zanzibar at the hour that suits you, and the same road transfer takes you on to Dongwe.

Baggage on the scheduled aircraft is fifteen kilograms a person including hand luggage, packed in a soft bag so it fits the hold, and we can book you an extra-allowance seat at thirty kilograms if you are travelling with camera equipment.

One piece of paperwork to know about: every foreign visitor to Zanzibar must hold the islands' own inbound cover from the Zanzibar Insurance Corporation, bought through the government portal before arrival, and no policy bought elsewhere is accepted in its place. We flag it in your travel documents so it is done before you fly.

Yes. TravelHealthPro, the UK's official travel health service, rates all of Tanzania below 1,800 metres as high risk for malaria, naming Zanzibar in that line, and recommends antimalarial tablets for it. The CDC in the United States draws the same boundary on its page for Tanzania and Zanzibar, listing every area under 1,800 metres.

Dongwe is a beach at sea level, so it sits well inside that advice, and neither source sets any month aside, so it holds in the dry half of the year as much as in the rains, however fresh the breeze off the ocean feels after dark.

We are travel planners, not medical professionals, so we do not make recommendations about tablets.

Which ones suit each of you, and how they sit with anything else you take, are questions for your own doctor or a travel clinic, best asked with your dates in front of you, and if Zanzibar follows a safari it is worth taking the whole route to one appointment so the two are considered together.

The practical, non-medical part is simple: cover arms and legs from dusk and keep repellent to hand at dinner by the beach. The rooms have mosquito nets over the beds.

No. It is an adults-only hotel, made for couples and for friends travelling together rather than for families, and the rooms follow the same idea: of the eighteen rooms, every one of which faces the sea, fifteen are doubles for two, eighteen square metres with a private balcony looking straight at the ocean.

The other type is a triple, a canopied king bed in the main bedroom with a single bed in a separate small room of its own, which is for three adults travelling together rather than for a couple with a child.

The hotel takes guests of fourteen and over. If there is a young adult in your party, tell us at enquiry and we will have it confirmed in writing before anything is booked.

For a family with children we would steer you to one of the Zanzibar beach hotels that take them, and there are good ones on this same stretch of coast; tell us the ages and we will suggest the right one.

Not at every hour, because this is a tidal coast and Dongwe feels it as strongly as anywhere on the east side of the island. Twice a day the water draws back a long way towards the reef offshore, leaving firm sand and rock pools where a few hours earlier there was enough water to swim in, and twice a day it comes back.

Sea swimming is best in the hours either side of high tide. Each tide falls roughly an hour later than the one before it, so that window walks through the day across a week: an early morning swim at the start of a stay can have become an afternoon one by the end.

The range is at its biggest around the new and full moon, when the water goes furthest out and comes furthest in. The pool above the beach covers the hours when it is out, and we send you the tide times for your dates before you travel.

Low tide is not a write-off. It is when the snorkelling is at its best at the Blue Lagoon, a well-preserved patch of reef a couple of kilometres up the coast and a few minutes away by boat, which is the closest good snorkelling to the hotel; if you only take one boat out in a short stay, take that one.

The rock pools left behind on the shore fill with small marine life, and the tides are part of what the place is for rather than a fault in it: the sea, the wind, the light and their movement are what set the shape of the day here.

Less than at most places on this coast, which is the point of it.

There is a pool looking out over the Indian Ocean with palms around it, sun loungers and shade along a long stretch of white sand, and one beachfront restaurant kept for guests of the hotel, where the cooking is Swahili and seafood with a light Mediterranean and Asian hand and there are always vegetarian and plant-based dishes; breakfast is by the sea and dinner is outside.

The beach and pool bar does cocktails, fresh juices and coffee. For anyone who wants to move rather than rest, a nearby dive centre runs guided dives and PADI courses, a surf school takes lessons, and there is a racquet centre a short drive away at Bwejuu with padel, pickleball and touchtennis.

When you want to go further, we arrange the excursions from Dongwe. A full day on a traditional dhow, sailing, swimming and snorkelling in the sheltered water, is the one most people take. Jozani Forest is half a day, walked with a naturalist guide along shaded trails and mangrove boardwalk for the Zanzibar red colobus monkey.

A boat from Kizimkazi goes out into the Menai Bay Conservation Area, a marine protected area of 470 square kilometres declared in 1997, where Indo-Pacific bottlenose and Indian Ocean humpback dolphins live all year; they are watched from the boat, never swum with, and nothing about a wild animal can be promised in advance.

Beyond that there are the spice farms, Changuu with its giant tortoises, the dhow builders and turtle pool at Nungwi, and a day in Stone Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, for its markets and alleys.

June to October and mid-December to February. June to October is the cooler, drier half of the year: daytime highs settle around 29 or 30 degrees and July is the driest month of all, with about 45 millimetres of rain across the whole month.

From mid-December the island turns hot, February being the warmest month at about 34 degrees, and the rain holds off until March. The long rains come with the south-west monsoon from March to May, April by far the wettest month at close to 360 millimetres, with a second, shorter wet spell in November.

Dongwe has one advantage in the hot months that the sheltered west of the island does not: the north-east monsoon blows in off the ocean across the east coast, so there is nearly always a breeze on the beach.

Pack light cotton or linen, swimwear, a wide hat and high-factor sun cream, reef shoes for the rocks and coral, and a light long-sleeved layer for the evenings and the mosquitoes. Zanzibar is almost entirely Muslim, so bring something that covers shoulders and knees for Stone Town, the villages and the spice farms.

If you are flying in from a safari on the light aircraft, all of it has to go into a soft bag within the fifteen kilogram allowance, hand luggage counted in, unless you have taken the extra-allowance seat.