We agreed to dive the Tumbatu Island area because it was easy and we are not very experienced (7 dive trips the past 7 years). Once underwater it didn't look much different than any other shallow (~10m/30ft) reef dive we've done, but I did enjoy the dives. There are many other, very diverse dive sites so you may want to look into which ones might interest you, compared to all the interesting things to do in Zanzibar.

I sat next to a guy who claimed he averaged 3 dive trips a year for 30 yrs and he found Zanzibar worthwhile, and was very jealous he didn't get to see the leaf fish. OTOH, my kids were very disappointed we didn't see any turtles.


I don't think so. We got it in advance, which was a surprisingly tedious, unintuitive online process. When we arrive in JRO, most of our plane (very full A350) got into the advance visa lines so that took a long time. The visa on arrival line was way shorter, but seemed to take longer so those people didn't seem to be done sooner. Your call.