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Emerson & Green

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  • 236 Hurumzi St.
     Zanzibar, Tanzania
    255-(77) 7423266
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aardwhite
aardwhite
First Reviewer
5 out of 5
Avg. Member Rating
1
Review
4
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Editor Pick

Emerson and Green

  • August 28, 2006
  • Rated 5 of 5 by aardwhite from London, United Kingdom
Emerson and Green

This award-winning hotel is totally affordable, but you feel like you are in the lap of African luxury from the moment you walk into the shady reception area. It lacks true mod-cons such as elevators but is all the more authentic colonial Africa for all that.

This is no identikit international hotel. It is a beautiful and sympathetically converted old trading house. Its history dates back to the end of the slave trade and was the place where local owners came to collect the government payoffs for giving up their entitlement to own their slaves.

Each room is determinedly individual, when we arrived we were given the choice of all the available rooms and we had a good look around them all.

Each room seemed to have a beautiful stone bath, and the choice of air conditioning (of sorts) or being open to the elements.

We chose the West Room on the Third Floor, up a vertiginous staircase climb (no elevators remember - though porters will take your bags). The room is all open to the air with the exception of the bed area itself. We enjoyed a 'bath a deux' under the stars in the cool of the Zanzibari evening.

There is a Tower Top restaurant at the very top of the hotel which has a very good reputation, unfortunately, such is its limited capacity and popularity, we were unable to secure a booking for the night we were there. We contented ourselves with Sundowners looking out across the harbour as the sun sank inexorably into the Indian Ocean beyond.

We ate at the attached and insanely cheap Kidude Cafe Restaurant, where we paid something like $7- $10 per head for a good meal with beers and wine.

The hotel cost itself was around $150 for the night, pricey in African terms perhaps but well worth the expense in terms of a unique and beautiful experience.

Waking early in the morning in the warm open air in an authentically appointed four poster bed by the voices of several muezzin issuing the call to prayer from the minarets of the numerous surrounding mosques is a wonderful way to be roused. In a trip of many memories that will stay with me for a lifetime, this is one of the very best.

From journal Zanzibar - Spice and Paradise

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