Paje Beach

This guide to Paje Beach near Zanzibar City follows two Dutch backpackers, Dim and Melanie, who wandered down the African coast in the mid two thousands searching for steady wind and open water, and nailed together a wooden shack they called Kite Centre Zanzibar. It explains why the reef offshore and the two seasonal winds, the Kaskazi and the Kuzi, made this stretch of sand so suited to kitesurfing, and how more than a dozen schools now line the same beach. It also follows the seaweed farmers working the same shallows at low tide, a trade far older than the kites. Look out at the lagoon and you can watch both kinds of work happening at once.