Three Islands Almost Nobody Visits
The Comoros get fewer foreign visitors in a year than Zanzibar gets in a fortnight. That is the single most useful fact about the place. Three volcanic islands sit in the northern Mozambique Channel, halfway between Mozambique and Madagascar, with an active caldera, a whale nursery, a thousand years of Swahili trade, and no tourism industry to speak of. It is possible to spend a week here and not meet another foreign traveller.
The Union of the Comoros is three islands: Grande Comore (Ngazidja), where the capital Moroni sits at the foot of Mount Karthala; Moheli (Mwali), the smallest and greenest; and Anjouan (Nzwani), steep, crowded and the heart of the ylang-ylang trade. A fourth island, Mayotte, voted to stay French in 1974 and is now an overseas department of France. The Comorian government still claims it. You will hear about this within your first hour in Moroni, and it is worth understanding before you arrive.
The French called them the Perfume Islands, and for once the colonial nickname was accurate. The Comoros grow more ylang-ylang than anywhere on Earth, and the oil distilled from those yellow flowers has gone into French perfume for a century. Add cloves and vanilla, and the whole of Anjouan smells faintly sweet on a still evening.
This guide covers when to go, how the flights work (the internal ones are the real problem), the visa, what each island is for, honest safety and health context, and what a private trip costs.
When to Go
The Comoros have two seasons, and the wrong one is not a mild inconvenience. It is the cyclone belt.
May to October is the dry season and the only sensible window. Days run 25 to 29C, humidity drops, the seas calm, and the trade winds keep the nights comfortable. This is also when the humpback whales are in the Moheli Marine Park. They arrive from Antarctic waters to calve in the shallow bay off Nioumachoua, usually from July into October, with August and September the most reliable months. If whales matter to you, book August or September and do not compromise.
November to April is hot, wet and unstable. Temperatures climb past 32C with humidity to match, Karthala disappears into cloud for weeks, and the Mozambique Channel produces cyclones between January and March. Cyclone Kenneth in April 2019 killed people on Grande Comore and flattened villages on the north coast. Internal flights and boats stop at short notice. We do not run trips in this window.
One exception worth knowing: green turtles nest at Itsamia on Moheli every night of the year, with the peak between March and July. So a late June or early July trip gives you nesting turtles at the tail of the peak and the first whales of the season in the same week. That is the date we aim for.
Getting There and Getting Around
International Flights
Prince Said Ibrahim International Airport (HAH) is on Grande Comore, about 20 kilometres north of Moroni. There are no direct flights from Europe or North America. You connect through one of four East African or Indian Ocean hubs: Addis Ababa on Ethiopian Airlines (the most frequent and usually the cheapest), Nairobi on Kenya Airways, Dar es Salaam on Air Tanzania, or Saint-Denis on Air Austral from Reunion. Ewa Air also links Mayotte to Moroni and Anjouan several times a week, which is the route to use if you want to combine the French island with the Comorian ones.
Schedules are thin. Some routes run three times a week, so a missed connection can cost you two days. Build a night in the hub on the way in. We usually route guests through Addis with an overnight, which also avoids the 3am arrivals Ethiopian favours.
The Visa
Every nationality can get a visa on arrival at Moroni. It costs about 30 euros (or the equivalent in US dollars or Comorian francs), is valid for 45 days, and takes ten minutes at a desk before immigration. Bring cash. The airport ATM works when it feels like it. You will need a passport valid for six months, and a yellow fever certificate is required if you have come through a yellow fever country, which includes Ethiopia and Kenya on paper. Officials rarely check, but carry it.
Island Hopping: The Part That Goes Wrong
This is the crux of any Comoros trip. Getting between the three islands is unreliable, and the way you handle it decides whether the trip works.
Two small carriers, AB Aviation and R'Komor, fly 19-seat and smaller aircraft between Moroni, Fomboni on Moheli and Ouani on Anjouan. Flights are cancelled for weather, for maintenance, and sometimes because not enough seats sold. A flight scheduled for Tuesday morning may go Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday, or not at all. Tickets are usually paid in cash at the office in Moroni, not online.
The alternative is the sea, and we are direct about this: do not take the public ferries or the open speedboats (kwassa-kwassa) between islands. They are overloaded, the channel between Anjouan and Moheli is rough, and boats go down every year. A chartered, properly equipped boat with a skipper we know is fine in calm season. A wooden boat with 40 people and a single outboard is not.
Our answer is slack. A nine-day itinerary across all three islands has two internal flights and a spare day built around each. If the flight goes on time, you gain a beach afternoon or a second distillery visit. If it slips a day, nothing downstream breaks. Seven days with no slack in the Comoros is a plan for missing your international flight home.
Grande Comore: Moroni and the Volcano
Moroni is small, about 60,000 people, and its old medina is one of the most intact Swahili towns anywhere. Coral-stone alleys run downhill to the Old Friday Mosque, on the waterfront since 1427, where the tide comes up to the wall at high water. Look for the doors. Heavy carved teak and mangrove, studded and framed, the same tradition as Lamu and Stone Town, and here nobody has turned them into a boutique hotel.
Ask at the National Museum (CNDRS) to see the coelacanths. In 1938 a fish thought extinct for 65 million years turned up in a South African trawler, and the living population was eventually traced to the deep volcanic drop-offs off Grande Comore. The preserved specimens in Moroni are as close as you will ever get to a living fossil.
Mount Karthala is the island. It is one of the largest active shield volcanoes on the planet, 2,361 metres, with a summit caldera three by four kilometres across. It erupted in 2005, 2006 and 2007, and the crater floor still steams. The climb from the village of Mvouni or Boboni is a long day: five to seven hours up through farmland, montane forest and heath onto a bare ash plateau, then a night camping on the rim and dawn over a crater that fills the horizon. You need a guide, a porter for water (there is none up there) and a proper sleeping bag. It drops to single digits at night.
Lac Sale on the north coast is a crater lake beside the sea, deep green and salty, with a view back down the lava fields to Mitsamiouli. Combine it with the beaches at Chomoni and Bouni on the east coast, which are black-lava-and-white-sand and usually empty.
Moheli: Whales, Turtles and the Marine Park
Moheli is why you come. It is the smallest island, the least populated (around 50,000 people), and the site of the country's only national park. The Moheli Marine Park protects the south coast around Nioumachoua and the string of forested islets offshore.
From July to October humpback whales calve in the sheltered water here. You can watch from the beach at Nioumachoua, and a small boat gets you within a respectful distance of mothers and calves in water so clear you see the whole animal. Spinner dolphins are resident, dugongs are present but rarely seen, and the reef around the islets has never been fished hard.
Itsamia, on the east coast, is one of the most important green turtle rookeries in the western Indian Ocean. The village runs the conservation programme itself, and you walk the beach after dark with the guardians who patrol it, watching females dig, lay and return to the sea. Nesting happens every night of the year.
Accommodation on Moheli is village guesthouses and a couple of small ecolodges at Nioumachoua. Clean, simple, cold showers, good grilled fish. There is nothing else. That is the deal.
Anjouan: Ylang-Ylang and the Medina
Anjouan is the steepest and most crowded of the three, with terraced hillsides that look more like Rwanda than an Indian Ocean island. Mutsamudu, the main town, has a medina older and more tangled than Moroni's, a 1780s citadel above it, and a harbour that has been trading with Zanzibar and Arabia for centuries.
The reason to come is the distilleries. Ylang-ylang flowers are picked at dawn and distilled the same day in copper alembics over wood fires, a process that has not changed in a hundred years. A family distillery near Bambao will walk you through it, and you leave with a small bottle of oil that costs a fortune in Grasse. Clove and vanilla plantations cover the same hills.
The road over the interior to the east coast and the waterfalls at Tratringa is rough but worth a day if the internal flight timing gives you one.
Safety, Health and the Practical Realities
Politics. The Comoros have a history of coups (more than twenty attempts since independence in 1975) but the last successful one was 1999. The January 2024 presidential election brought a week of protests in Moroni and a curfew; it passed. Day to day, the islands are calm, crime against visitors is rare, and the main risk to a foreigner is a moped in the medina. We check the situation before every departure.
Malaria. The Comoros were malarial for a long time. A mass drug administration programme starting in 2007 cut cases dramatically, but transmission has not been eliminated and cases rose again after 2020. Take prophylaxis, sleep under a net on Moheli, and use repellent at dusk. There is also dengue.
Medical care. El-Maarouf hospital in Moroni is basic. Anything serious means evacuation to Reunion, Nairobi or Johannesburg, which is why your insurance must cover medevac. Our earlier piece on travel insurance for frontier destinations covers what to look for.
Money. The Comorian franc is pegged to the euro at 491.97 KMF. Euros are accepted almost everywhere and are the currency to bring. Cards work in perhaps three hotels in Moroni and nowhere else. ATMs exist in Moroni and Mutsamudu and fail regularly. Bring what you need in cash.
Culture. The country is 98 percent Sunni Muslim and conservative in the countryside. Cover shoulders and knees in towns, ask before photographing people, and do not drink alcohol in public. Beer is available at a few hotels and the odd bar in Moroni. During Ramadan the pace slows further.
Language. Shikomori (a Swahili language) at home, French in offices and Arabic in mosques. English gets you almost nowhere outside the airport. A French-speaking guide is essential.
What It Costs
Independent travel here is cheap and difficult. Guesthouses run 25 to 60 euros a night, a grilled fish dinner is 5 euros, a Karthala guide and porter about 80 to 100 euros for the two days. The hard costs are the flights: 900 to 1,500 dollars return from Europe via Addis or Nairobi, and 80 to 150 dollars per internal hop, cash, on a schedule that may not hold.
Our nine-day private expedition across all three islands starts at $4,650 per person for a group of up to five. That covers a full-time Comorian guide, all internal flights and the reserve days around them, a chartered boat in the marine park with a skipper we know, the Karthala climb with porters and camping kit, the Itsamia turtle walk, distillery visits on Anjouan, the best available accommodation on each island, and every transfer. International flights and visa are on top. For comparison, the only other operators running the Comoros regularly are a handful of French and German outfits selling group departures of 8 to 12, at similar or higher prices per person.
Is the Comoros Right for You?
Yes, if you want whales from a beach, a night on the rim of an active volcano and a medina where the doors are older than most countries, and you can live with cold showers, cash-only everything and an internal flight that may or may not leave on time. The reward is an Indian Ocean archipelago that still feels like the ocean it sits in: unhurried, uncommercial, and nothing like Zanzibar or the Seychelles.
No, if you need a schedule that holds to the hour, a pool, or a beach bar. Go to Mauritius. It is a two-hour flight away and very good at that.
If you want to stand at Nioumachoua in August and watch a humpback calf surface fifty metres off the sand, tell us the month and we will build the trip around the flights.
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