Cairo to Zanzibar: Eight Weeks Down the Starboard Side of Africa

We were staying at the Marriott Zamalek, which sits on an island in the Nile and is exactly as absurd as that sounds for someone who usually sleeps in places with shared bathrooms. Michelle had sorted it. I was not complaining. What I was doing was forgetting my vaccination card in the States — the one Kenya requires at the border — which meant a frantic series of phone calls, $58, and the world’s most patient Marriott front desk staff helping me get a replacement delivered before our August 22nd departure to Dar es Salaam. Classic start.

The city during Ramadan is a particular thing. Street food vendors disappear entirely from sun-up to sundown, which gutted my usual survival strategy of eating whatever costs less than a dollar from whoever’s cooking on the sidewalk. But we stumbled into a genuinely good night at Khan al-Khalili — the old bazaar — where I spent two hours sparring with shopkeepers who all turned out to be good sports once they figured out I wasn’t buying anything. Then Bob and Anna showed up. Bob and Anna were teachers at a school in Alexandria, friends-of-a-friend-of-a-friend through about six degrees of separation that Michelle had somehow worked out. They took us for pizza (everywhere Egyptian was closed for Ramadan) and then steered us to a pub where I found Luxor White, a German hefeweizen-style beer at 8% that made the whole evening significantly better. When strangers hand you cold beer in a Muslim country during a fasting month, you thank them properly.

The pyramids are real. I know that sounds obvious but after enough travel photos and movies you half-expect to be disappointed, to find they’re smaller than you thought or fenced off or somehow diminished. They are not. They are enormous chunks of stacked sandstone in the middle of actual desert, and the Sphinx is right there too, noseless and enormous and completely unbothered by the guy trying to sell me a camel ride twenty feet away. I paid just under $10 for twenty minutes on “Mickey Mouse” with a driver named Sam and I will not apologize for that. The Cairo Museum of Antiquities — no air conditioning, roughly the size of a small city, crammed with things that have no business being real — deserves a full day minimum. The mummies alone.

The felucca ride on the Nile at night was the best forty minutes in Cairo. Single-mast, about six meters, our captain knowing exactly what he was doing with a sail configuration I’d never seen before. Away from the horns, away from the touts, away from the taxi drivers who wanted three times the right price for every single ride. Just a warm breeze off the river and the city lights doing something genuinely worth looking at from the water. Cost us almost nothing. Worth more than most of what cost us something.

My nose knew we’d landed before my eyes opened. Cairo hits you in a specific sequence: first the exhaust, the sand, the particular thickness of air that a city of twenty million people and approximately zero emissions standards produces. Then the ears — horns, prayers, metal on metal, the general sonic chaos of a place that doesn’t really sleep so much as shift registers. Then the eyes, and honestly the eyes never fully adjust. You just stop flinching and start paying attention.

That’s how eight weeks on the starboard side of Africa begins. Not with a plan. With a nose full of Cairo.

The Red Sea Doesn't Care How Tired You Are

The bus to Hurghada left at 8am and took six and a half hours. Michelle insists it was a dump. I maintain it was a perfectly functional tour bus. We watched an action film in Arabic, listened to Muslim prayers over the speakers, and were definitively the only English speakers on board. I thought that was great. Michelle’s exact words were “I thought we were going to be kidnapped.” Traveling with me can be a mixed experience.

I nearly left my wallet and phone in the overhead compartment when we arrived, realized it about thirty seconds after stepping off, and sprinted back on before the bus moved. Our taxi driver from the stop turned out to be an Arabic teacher who drove afternoons because, as he put it with zero bitterness, “everywhere teachers don’t make enough money.” He recommended a dive operator called Blue Divers without us even asking.

The Red Sea in August is basically a warm bath that happens to be extremely salty. I floated in it that first afternoon like something that had no business staying on the surface. The actual diving the next day was a different story. Our divemaster Ashyaf was excellent, and Johnny — a Swedish patent attorney who spoke flawless English and had clearly done this a hundred times — rounded out our group of three. The reef down to ten meters: lionfish, a massive moray, clownfish doing their clownfish thing, a spotted ray on the second dive, sea snakes, and schools of fish that had no interest in us whatsoever. Lunch between dives was rice, lamb meatballs, potatoes, and mini Cokes on the boat deck. One of the top five dives I’ve done anywhere. The dive company showed up at our hotel that morning as “Prince Divers” instead of “Blue Divers,” which set off every scam alarm I have — but a quick call confirmed they were just sharing clients between operators. Sometimes the thing that looks like a hustle is actually fine.

Zanzibar Will Make You Miss Your Boat and Find a Better One

Getting to Zanzibar from Dar es Salaam meant navigating the ferry terminal, which is the kind of place where everyone wants something from you and the correct response to most of it is a firm, pleasant no. My new friends “G” and “Picasso” — met somewhere in the organized chaos of Dar — walked me through it. At the other end, Dullah was waiting. Dullah was the boyfriend-of-a-friend hookup, a good rasta from Stone Town who had exactly zero interest in taking me anywhere I didn’t need to go and a very strong interest in making sure I ate well. He took me for barracuda curry overlooking the harbor. Outstanding. Then he sorted my Tanzanian SIM, pointed me at an ATM, and put me in a taxi north to Nungwi.

The dive the next morning nearly didn’t happen. I came back from breakfast to find the boat had already left — massive tides, apparently — and the dive operator was delivering this news with the kind of shrug that suggested this was my problem. One of the local guys working there made a phone call. Ten minutes later I was in a nineteen-foot Zodiac inflatable getting hammered around the north point of the island in eight-foot seas, outrunning a storm, the driver running low on fuel. We arrived at the dive site to find the main boat wasn’t there. A neighboring dive company’s boat came by, I hopped on, and waited. Massive schools of fish — I mean a hundred thousand fish moving as one thing around me — plus eels, scorpionfish, colors that don’t translate to words or photos. Worth every minute of the Zodiac experience. Worth the storm.

Stone Town later in the trip with Dullah, Beth (a lawyer from LA), and Rudy (a Costa Rican living in France) was a full day worth doing slowly. The old slave market site is one of the most sobering hours you’ll spend anywhere on this continent — don’t skip it, don’t rush it. The night fish market that followed was the tonal whiplash you needed: table after table of fresh food on skewers and between naan, local kids wanting to sing Michael Jackson and demonstrate the moonwalk, cold beer with a group of Austrians we’d somehow adopted. The tortoise sanctuary on Prisoner Island had animals up to 180 years old that had seen more of history than most museums. The snorkeling there was terrible, for the record. The jellyfish particles made it feel like swimming through a cloud of tiny needles.

Verdict

Cairo to Zanzibar in a month is a lot of ground, a lot of buses, and a genuinely stupid number of taxi negotiations. Egypt during Ramadan limits your food options and closes half the city before sunset, but it also means you end up at a pub with two teachers from Alexandria who become the best part of your week. The Red Sea diving is legitimate — not overhyped, worth the detour from Cairo — and Zanzibar is the kind of place where everything goes sideways and somehow turns out better than the original plan. The through-line for all of it is the same: the taxi driver who moonlights as a teacher, Dullah with the barracuda curry, G and Picasso at the ferry terminal. Every useful thing that happened on this leg came from talking to someone who actually lived there. The pyramids and the reefs are real and worth your time. The people are what you’ll actually remember.

Got questions about routing, costs, dive operators, or how to navigate Zanzibar’s ferry terminal without losing your mind? Drop them to the Ask WildWilliam AI — it knows this route and it’ll give you straight answers.