Valentine's Day falls in the middle of Kaskazi, which is the best thing that could happen to it here: February is the driest of the hot months, the sea sits at about 29 °C, and the evenings are still. If you are going to eat dinner outdoors beside the Indian Ocean, this is the time of year to do it.
Dinner at Zatiny
For Valentine's the kitchen writes a separate menu for couples, served by candlelight with the ocean doing the rest of the work. Tables are set apart from one another rather than in a row — with six rooms in the hotel, there is no version of this evening that involves a crowded dining room.
Ask your butler if you want the table moved. Dinner on the beach, on your own terrace, or beside the pool is usually possible with a day's notice, and for a lot of couples that turns out to be the version they remember.
The spa, for two at once
Bustani has two massage beds set side by side and two bathtubs, so a couples treatment is genuinely simultaneous rather than taken in shifts. The Romantic for Two package runs to five hours at 649,000 TZS per person: a floral bath for two, a 60-minute aromatherapy massage and a 50-minute facial each, and a candlelit dinner with sparkling wine. The five hours deliberately include the quiet gaps and the snacks between treatments.
If five hours is more than you want, any treatment on the Bustani list can be booked for two — and any of them can be done on your own balcony or beside the pool instead, since the therapists bring a portable bed.
The heart in the garden
There is a metal heart hanging in the hotel garden. Guests started attaching padlocks to it years ago, and enough of them have come back to do it again that it is now genuinely heavy with them. Some are engraved, most are not, and a few belong to couples who first came here on honeymoon and now arrive with children.
It is not a marketing installation and nobody will suggest it to you. If you want to add one, bring a lock — or ask, and one will be found.
The other things couples ask for
- A floating breakfast in the pool — the photograph everyone has seen, and it is genuinely good breakfast rather than a prop. Arrange it the night before.
- Sunrise, not sunset. This is the east coast: the sun comes up out of the sea in front of the villas at around 06:00. It is the single most underrated thing on this property, and it costs nothing.
- A private sandbank. At low tide you can walk out to the Mchanga sandbank; at high tide you kayak. Either way there is usually nobody else on it.
- A sunset ngalawa cruise — the local outrigger, on the water as the light goes.
Anniversaries, proposals and honeymoons
February is the busiest month for this kind of thing, but none of it is limited to Valentine's Day. If you are marking something — an anniversary, a proposal, a fortieth birthday — tell us when you book rather than when you arrive. A day's notice buys a decorated table; a fortnight's notice buys something considered.
The full picture, including what the honeymoon packages contain, is in our Zanzibar honeymoon guide.
Booking
Reserve ahead for Valentine's Day itself — six rooms and one restaurant means the evening fills early, and the spa's good slots go before the dinner tables do. Restaurant reservations, including for visitors not staying at the hotel, can be made on our reservation page.
