We left Ngorongoro Crater Lodge at 9.00am and headed for the airstrip near Lake Manyara. As we returned through the small town that we had passed on Day 8, Tim told us that a former president of Tanzania once visited the town and commented on how well informed and educated the residents must be since they all went about their business with a newspaper under their arm. Little did he realise that the newspapers were out of date and were just carried about so they had some paper to hand to roll their snuff!

We made a brief stop in the town in order to post our postcards and reached the airstrip at around 10.30am, looking forward to the most relaxing leg of our honeymoon. We flew back to Arusha (20 minutes) where there was a plane already waiting for our transfer to Stone Town, Zanzibar (1 hour 30 minutes). Once we reached Stone Town, we were transferred by road to the north-east of Zanzibar (1 hour) where we got our first glimpse of our ultimate destination - Mnemba Island. A speedboat took us across to this private island by which time we had parted with our footwear, ready for barefoot paradise. The only footwear we needed from now on was flippers for snorkelling the coral reef!

Our journey was shared with an Italian named Luigi and his wife who were visiting Mnemba for about the twentieth time. We had an impressive welcome from quite a number of staff who were singing and clapping on the shoreline as we arrived, and greeted us with Champagne. It was only later, on speaking to other guests and hearing about their respective welcomes, that we realised the grandeur of our's might have been partly influenced by the fact that we were accompanied by such a well-known regular as Luigi.

We met our butler, Big Ali, walked around the island for the first time (about 20 minutes), had a Champagne sundowner with warm, freshly roasted cashews, followed by dinner which included a delicious prawn curry. Big Ali showed us how to make 'Mnemba Mix' to dip our bread into - a splash of vinegar, splash of oil, half a chopped green chilli and some fresh lime juice (the ingredients for which were on our table each evening)... yum! We could already tell that we were going to love Mnemba... it would be hard not to.