Forodhani Gardens is a park on the northern side of Stone Town which nightly hosts a gathering of a few dozen vendors selling various street foods. It is a scene not to be missed, and starts coming together when vendors set up around sundown. Most of them fall into one of three categories:

• Seafood: A seemingly endless expanse of a huge variety of fresh-from-the-water fare–squid, lobster, shrimp, mussels, plus six or eight types of fish, and bread, potatoes, green bananas, and falafel as side dishes, which all get cut up and combined on order, then grilled, splashed with lemon and chili sauce, and topped off with some greens



• Zanzibar Pizza: an envelope of thin dough stuffed with the filling of your choice: meat, chicken, fish, vegetables, bananas with honey, peanut butter, or Nutella, and fried on a flat grill



• Sugar Cane Juice: the hardest-working men at the nightly gathering have to be the ones who toil over the two-roller hand-cranked press to make this lovely concoction. They send each stalk through over and over again, folding it in half and adding ginger and lime slices until every last drop of the sweet liquid has been expelled down the sluice and into the jug at the bottom.

A heaping plate of fresh seafood atop coconut bread, followed by warm, sweet bananas grilled inside oily dough, all washed down with fresh sugar cane juice, while people watching and enjoying the evening Indian Ocean breeze?! Yes, please!