Madagascar: stranger than fiction

By Condé Nast Traveller

11 March 2014

Jenny Zarins
Madagascar: stranger than fiction
The Indian Ocean is full of snazzy places, but everyone's secret favourite is a newly revamped little spot off the coast of Madagascar - the island of Tsarabanjina. By Lisa Grainger.
It's six fifteen in the morning and there's not another person in sight. A couple of terns swoop above my head, the first dawn rays sprinkling their white feathers pink. Coconut-palm fronds jangle in the breeze. Waves tumble on to sharp black lava rocks. And on the edge of a small rockpool, something wriggles. It looks like a small fish, but it's on a rock, so it can't be. I edge closer. Dozens of little creatures suddenly squirm and plop into the water, darting behind underwater crevices. They are fish, but not as we know them.
In Madagascar, the sight of seriously odd creatures should come as no surprise. When the great supercontinent of Gondwanaland fractured and split up about 165 million years ago, wildlife was marooned 400km from mainland Africa, on the island that came to be known as Madagascar. Many of the original species flourished; others slowly adapted.
Pictured: Tsarabanjina island, Madagascar
Jenny Zarins
Madagascar - stranger than fiction
Today, the country has 12,000 species of plants, more than three-quarters of which are found nowhere else. It has more than 300 species of frog (and a new one found about every eight weeks) and half of the world's chameleons, including the biggest (the size of a cat) and the smallest (just three centimetres). It has lemurs that are unique to the island. And it has mudskippers, the ancient amphibious fish I discovered on my dawn walk.
Exploring Madagascar, with its rainforests, gem-blue clear seas and chalk-white beaches, I start to understand why David Attenborough referred to it as 'an evolutionary cauldron, producing increasingly extreme forms of life'. Being here is a bit like being transported to Jurassic Park - with aliens. Look up a tree and you might see a lime-green-and-pink-splodged chameleon, catching flies with a red tongue as long as your forearm, or a praying mantis disguised as a dead brown leaf, or a lurid orange millipede with golden legs that ripple in a wave. And, of course, you might see a walking fish.
Pictured: The beach at hotel Constance Tsarabanjina
Jenny Zarins
Tsarabanjina Island, Madagascar
I am not normally awake at dawn. But on Tsarabanjina I don't want to stay in bed a minute longer than I have to. One of 12 islands in the Mitsio archipelago off the north coast of Madagascar, it was developed as an eco-resort by an enterprising South African adventurer, Richard Walker, for guests to live out their Robinson Crusoe fantasies in comfort.
Developers aren't often popular with locals, who understandably resent invasions of their land, water and resources. But around here there's hardly a Malagasy man or woman whose eyes don't sparkle when you mention Walker's name. 'He took 100 of us who had only ever fished before, or worked in the forest, and he taught us new skills,' says Manzari, who built the hotel's bar with his own hands and now, as head mixologist, shakes up a mean, fresh-coconut Piña Colada laced with vanilla-infused rum. 'He taught us to be cooks and barmen and housekeepers which, now that there are not-so-many fish, is much better than being a fisherman. Mr Walker has given us a new life.'
As well as hills and forest and two long stretches of beach, Tsarabanjina has just 25 wooden guest chalets, all shaggy thatched roofs and airy verandahs. Most guests spend their days sunning themselves on the daily swept sand, on loungers or hammocks strung between feathery-leafed cassia trees, converging at the bar for cold coconut cocktails, followed by plates of giant prawns and lobsters. Mine are spent fossil-hunting on the island's fringe of weather-beaten, mineral-rich rocks, luminous with swirls of ochres and rusts, and cut through with black tongues of hardened lava - and out at sea.
Pictured: Island life
Jenny Zarins
Diving in Madagascar
Exploring the waters over three days - catching jack fish for lunch, diving on rainbow reefs, motoring by catamaran to the inhabited fishermen's island of Grande Mitsio - there are no obvious signs of the widely reported plundering of the seas by Chinese, South Korean and Japanese fleets. The waters glimmer with fish. And the corals, says the resort's French dive-master Nicolas Richer, are considered by many to be the most beautiful in the world after those of the Barrier Reef.
Diving off the edge of the Fourth Brother, one of five rounded rocky islets 15 minutes by speedboat from Tsarabanjina, I can see why Richer lost his heart to the Malagasy seas. The underwater scenery is trippy in its theatricality, designed by a god inspired by Jackson Pollock and inhabited by hilariously overdressed creatures. Fringed pink sea cucumbers crawl beside ultraviolet-edged coral; golden anemones flutter delicate fingers at shoals of synchronised yellow fish; lobsters with wackily painted shells wave striped whiskers at monsters with blue lips, orange-spotted skins, lacy tails.
Pictured: Fishermen and aubergine

Jenny Zarins
Constance Tsarabanjina, Madagascar
After an hour in this underwater circus, it's almost a relief to get back to the simplicity of Tsarabanjina. This is a no-shoes, no-news, hang-loose place. The air-conditioned thatched bandas, newly revamped by the island's owners, Constance Hotels and Resorts (Le Prince Meurice, Halaveli Maldives), have all the basics - hot showers, capacious wardrobes, fridges with cold drinks - as well as outdoor banquettes and hammocks for afternoon snoozes, and fragrant coconut oil to drench sunburnt skin. Lunches are simple but delicious arrays of just-grilled fish, with salsas and limes, fresh pastas and crunchy salads.
Drinks are infused with the perfumed juice of passion fruit, mango and guava. And the staff clearly enjoy what they do: leading walks around the hotel's gardens, planted with endemic species, inhabited by jewel-coloured fody birds and long-tailed paradise flycatchers; giving massages in an beachside banda cooled by sea air; accompanying excursions to Grande Mitsio island, where giggling children chase chickens on the beach and men mend nets under fat-armed baobab trees.
Pictured: Grilled fish on Tsarabanjina island
Jenny Zarins
The people of Madagascar
Of all the unique and beautiful creatures on Madagascar, perhaps its people are the most fascinating. Descendants of Indonesian sailors and adventurers and the Banta people of Africa, as well as immigrants from China, India and the Middle East, their facial features vary as widely as their languages (of which 18 are spoken). The capital, Antananarivo (known as Tana), is equally exotic.
In the surrounding valleys, farmers tend terraced rice paddies; there are mud double-storey houses with shutters and thatched roofs and also modern, high-rise blocks. Renaults, Peugeots and Citroën 2CVs last seen in Europe in the 1970s jam the roads, overtaken by brightly painted ox-carts carrying charcoal and man-powered rickshaws overloaded with bananas. And controlling them are gendarmes in smart blue uniforms and high, starched caps adorned with golden braid, a reminder of the island's former French colonial masters.
Pictured: Children on Tsarabanjina
Jenny Zarins
Antananarivo, Madagascar
I was guided around Tana by the affable, well-informed Kenny Andriamaronjaka, who brought the traffic-jammed city to life with fascinating historical detail. The island was once ruled by Malagasy kings and queens, a few heroic and others positively not, some of whose belongings are stored in a palace-turned-museum that overlooks the city. The museum officially closed a few years ago, but there's usually a guard willing to open up for a small fee. Most of the grand, dome-roofed building is derelict and has been ransacked (the royal crown was stolen in 2012) but a few precious possessions - a bronze tea set given by Queen Victoria, silver-embroidered silk boots from George V, a brass shield studded with precious gems - reside under rather bizarre paintings of Napoleonic-looking monarchs clad in fine silks and red coats. In a corner stands the red-velvet chaise used to transport the most ruthless queen, Ranavalona I, likened to Caligula, who had Christians hurled off a nearby cliff.
Pictured: Antananarivo
Jenny Zarins
Traditions of Madagascar
What the museum illustrates most clearly is what a complex, multi-ethnic society this is, and how powerful the people's beliefs are in their ancestors' spirits. These beliefs - that ancestors still control life - is not, I discover, confined to rural communities. Even in the capital, certain days are associated with colours, and specific actions forbidden. On Monday, or Black Day, people avoid wearing dark clothing; I am quickly reprimanded for pointing at a tomb (extremely bad form that could invoke the wrath of the spirits) and am clearly out of order when I question the tradition of male relatives eating children's foreskins at ritual circumcisions (oh yes, they do).
Sadly, I'm not here at a time when the most lively traditional ceremonies are held, the famadihana, during which ancestors' bones are exhumed and given a public airing before being re-wrapped and placed back into the elaborate family tombs to the accompaniment of song, dance and raucous rum-drinking.
Pictured: Grande Mitsio island life

Jenny Zarins
Lemurs of Madagascar
I am here in May, the most glorious time of year, when the skies are cobalt and cloudless, the nights cool and misty, and the forest leaps with lemurs. The entire eastern coast of Madagascar was once covered in trees; today, most has been logged or burnt for charcoal and replaced in patches by fast-growing eucalyptus. But there are little pockets that have been preserved: the one closest to Tana, called Andasibe, is just 170km away, or four long hours' drive on terrible roads.
Nothing can prepare you, as you hike through dark, primeval forest muggy with the scent of leaves and moss and millions of years of decay, for the howls of indri lemurs calling their companions. Like the cry of an inconsolable woman, or the sliding off-key shrieks of a trombone, they echo in the quiet reserve, making the hair on my neck stand on end. But when I catch sight of them - all thick, soft black, grey and white fur, with little round faces, long noses, and shiny, fluffy tails - they look so sweet I want to squeal out loud myself.
Because the lemurs are protected by a team of guides, they're not particularly fazed by us watching them. Slowly, they shuffle about the branches above our heads, munching on leaves, hanging upside-down to reach particularly delicious bunches of berries and picking at each other's fur with human-like fingers topped with spookily black, perfectly polished nails.
Pictured: A golden-crowned sifaka lemur
Jenny Zarins
Vakôna Private Reserve, Madagascar
Over three days, trekking in low bushland, in bamboo thickets, on hilly slopes and muddy jungle, we spot seven species in total. In thick patches of undergrowth, we find little brown bamboo lemurs nibbling on shoots. Clambering up a hillside we witness a troop of the most beautiful of the species, the aptly named golden-crowned sifaka. At night, by the light of a torch, we see the shy mouse lemur doing its circus impression, swinging and bouncing like a trapeze artist on speed. And at the more visitor-friendly Vakôna Private Reserve, where several lemur species have been habituated to humans, we come into contact with the species that every child who has seen Madagascar longs to encounter: the ring-tailed lemur (or King Julien VIII).
Pictured: South Beach in Tsarabanjina
Jenny Zarins
Madagascar - stranger than fiction
As the agile little striped critters climb on to my shoulders, licking salt off my neck with their rough, cat-like tongues and shyly taking banana pieces from my fingers, as I giggle with childish delight, I realise just how lucky I am to experience them at such close quarters. Like so many forms of life on this ancient island, lemurs are highly endangered, and given the rate at which the forest is disappearing, soon there may be none left at all.
For now, Madagascar is still a place in which you can discover the wonders of evolution, from prehistoric mudskippers on the volcanic rocks of Tsarabanjina to King Julien himself. But if you want to see these remnants of a bygone age, you'd better be quick. Visitors once stopped in Mauritius to see the dodo.
Pictured: A comet moth
Jane Webster
How to get to Madagascar
GETTING TO MADAGASCAR
Audley Travel (+44 1993 838585; www.audleytravel.com) offers a 12-night tailor-made trip to Madagascar from £4,295 per person sharing, including seven nights full-board at Constance Tsarabanjina and three nights at Vakôna Forest Lodge in Andasibe, international flights with Kenya Airways and local flights with Air Madagascar, guided road transfers and shared boat transfers.
First published in Condé Nast Traveller March 2014.