The island time forgot and then remembered

Drifting away from the African continent over 160 million years ago, Madagascar evolved in almost complete isolation, making it a vast petri dish of unparalleled biodiversity. Exploring the island by boat, helicopter and perilous trek reveals its human histories, too.

Text and photography by Masoud Golsorkhi

Earlier this year, whenever I mentioned a forthcoming trip to Madagascar, beyond the quips about the animated film, the most common response was, “Where is that, exactly?” The question isn’t surprising. The island – the fourth largest on Earth – had been missing in action for several hundred million years.

One hundred and sixty-five million years ago, a landmass began its long drift eastward from the African continent, carrying with it a cargo of ancient life forms that would spend the next few geological epochs evolving in splendid isolation. I know that exoticising places is a terrible colonial habit, but this island is as wild and strange as it gets: a remarkable laboratory of evolution that has produced animals and plants seen nowhere else on Earth.

The break from Africa during the Jurassic period, followed by a second rupture from India roughly twenty million years later, left Madagascar adrift in the western Indian Ocean like an ark without a homing harbour. Lemurs, endemic to the island, arrived on floating vegetation perhaps fifty million years ago, and have evolved into more than a hundred species, ranging from the mouse lemur, weighing around 50 grams, to the now-extinct, gorilla-sized Archaeoindris. The island has developed chameleons that fit on a fingertip and others the size of housecats. Its flora grew equally idiosyncratic – baobabs with swollen trunks storing water against drought, octopus trees with writhing limbs and the traveller’s palms which always unfurl their fans of leaves toward the east.

The natural treasures of Madagascar are the principal draw for travellers, but the tourism industry remains underdeveloped. The country’s economy is instead based on exports of agricultural commodities like rice, coffee, tea and vanilla, in which it holds 90% of the world’s market. Besides the remote location, there’s little to no infrastructure to host visitors. This is exactly the kind of challenge that animates Time and Tide, the luxury travel company that cut its teeth on high-end African safari camps in Zambia.

Their philosophy of leaving a light footprint on the locations and locals is carried over to the luxury resort they operate in Madagascar. I stayed in two Time and Tide resorts on an archipelago to the north of the island in late summer of this year. We landed on the largest of the islands, Nosy Be, a reasonably well-developed tourist destination with an international airport, after a stopover in the East African hub of Addis Ababa. Arriving at the bustling airport, you soon spot the more intrepid European travellers to Madagascar – Nosy Be is ringed by a series of resorts all along its coastline.

After a short drive to the harbour, we took a small boat to the much smaller island of Nosy Komba and the home of our first stay, Tsara Komba. Approaching the resort from the sea with its calm, crystalline waters is as close as it gets to the feeling of accidentally discovering a totally wild and uninhabited desert island – only, this is one that happens to have a sliver of cultivated garden and a handful of small thatched buildings perched atop it. The island has no pier: you have to leap off the boat and get your feet wet on arrival, but fret not, as ice-cool towels are handed to you by welcoming staff. On arrival, it turns out that the humble thatched roofs visible from the ocean hide eight rather luxurious villas cut into the volcanic cliff. The villas, well camouflaged in foliage, offer a shaded look out over the impossibly perfect bay. The ocean is glass-like and warm, the sand almost white and soft underfoot. Calling it a resort doesn’t feel right. It’s almost like visiting a Bond baddie’s hideout, but a baddie who’s helpfully constructed a handful of adjoining guest houses. During our stay, Ursula Andress didn’t come out of the water carrying a bag of shellfish, although I wouldn’t have been surprised if she did.

During our stay, Ursula Andress didn’t come out of the water carrying a bag of shellfish, although I wouldn’t have been surprised if she did.

There are fewer places to map out the destructive footprint of our species on the planet than Madagascar, which began long before the invention of jet flight or when the first tourist leapt off the boats. The conventional narrative held that Austronesian voyagers from Borneo made the improbable four-thousand-mile journey across the Indian Ocean around 500 BCE in outrigger canoes. More recent archaeological evidence suggests human presence may extend back to 2500 BCE, though the island’s full colonisation likely occurred in waves between 300 and 1000 BCE. They would have found plenty to dine on: elephant birds standing ten feet tall and laying two-gallon eggs, and massive tortoises grazing like cows on the highlands. The first human settlers may have paired them with rice and bananas, which they brought with them, and over the dinner table would have spoken a language that evolved into Malagasy, its vocabulary still echoing its Southeast Asian origins. African peoples crossed the Mozambique Channel in subsequent migrations, contributing to the genetic and cultural synthesis that defines Madagascar. The Malagasy people emerged as neither purely Asian nor African but a distinct fusion, their 18 ethnic groups sharing a common tongue while maintaining separate traditions, from the cattle-herding Bara of the south to the rice-cultivating Merina of the highlands.

Clinging to the volcanic slopes, Tsara Komba is a testament to the marriage of high-end hospitality and an ambition for minimal environmental impact, an extension of the deep-rooted ecological reverence on which Time and Tide prides itself. With only eight suites, it offers a level of seclusion and service that is hard to imagine, never mind match. Each of the six Ocean View Rooms and two larger Ocean View Suites is a masterpiece of Malagasy woodcraft, constructed from locally sourced materials. Thatched roofs and organic natural materials clash beautifully with high-end, understated decor and crisp white linens, and together create a palette of muted soft colours that frame the technicolour dreamcoat of verdant flora and green-blue ocean. Each villa has a private terrace opening onto breathtaking panoramas with a flurry of tiny exotic birds creating a soundtrack to your “forest-to-reef safari”, a Tsara Komba speciality that encapsulates the unique dual-world experience on offer. Mornings can be spent trekking through the island’s forests, accompanied by guides, and afternoons are for exploring the vibrant underwater world of the archipelago. Meeting the inquisitive stare of a green turtle the size of a washing machine, popping his head up for a second before drifting away, is an experience never to be forgotten.

While the experience of Tsara Komba seemed like the very height of jungle luxury, we were unprepared for the nosebleed elevation offered by the next stop. Half an hour’s helicopter ride away on the northeastern edge of the archipelago, on the tiny private island of Nosy Ankao, sits Time and Tide’s other, even more exclusive resort: Miavana. If Tsara Kumba is rustic chic, then Miavana is haute couture. Opened in May 2017, it features 14 luxury villas designed by the Johannesburg-based practice Silvio Rech and Lesley Carstens, incorporating local hand-cut stone and Malagasy wood. The villas, which are dotted along the shore on one side of the island, are more refined and a lot more luxurious. They come with adjacent children’s or staff quarters, should you want to bring your own, while the more deprived travellers amongst us will have to do with the two personal butlers standing by to offer gracious and cheerful service, 24 hours a day. Each villa comes with a private pool and your own private beach at the bottom of the garden, the size of Brighton’s – although here there’s no one there to intrude on you other than the occasional family of lemurs, lazily working their way across the treetops clutching their young.

If you think that having access to 24-hour butler service translates to molly-coddling, think again. The adventurous approach of a company that started by designing lion-proof tents by the Zambezi shows a deliciously healthy disregard for the safety of their guests. If you are partial to having a boa constrictor fall on your head during a trek in the bush, read on. But don’t be too alarmed; the reptile in question was only eight feet long and was softly slumbering on a high branch, digesting a meal visible in its middle the size of a lamb, with the only issue being that it had miscalculated the robustness of its perch.

Miavana gives its guests access to multiple helicopter expeditions, and we took one such opportunity to travel to a seasonal campsite on the mainland and trek to the high plateau to spot a family of latte-coloured Crowned Sifaka lemurs, one of the lemur species considered at most risk. We flew over what could be the set of Jurassic Park: landscapes made by what must have been the greatest volcanic eruption of all time, sculpted by millions of years of erosive rain, to create a fantastic landscape made of many thousands of upside-down ice cream cones, each the size of a Manhattan highrise. All of this was overlaid on what is considered to be the largest cave system in the world, containing vast unexplored lakes. It’s impossible to imagine gaining access to this place by any other means.

Before the arrival of cartoon characters, Madagascar was most alive in the general imagination as it was drawn by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in his 1943 masterpiece, The Little Prince. His version was Asteroid B 612, which was covered with Madagascar-native baobab trees. The prince must spend all his time maintaining his planet – weeding and clearing the thirsty trees, and cleaning out the volcanoes – so that his home planet doesn’t become overrun. Miavana, which means “to bring together or reconcile” in the Malagasy language, also sees their mission as a project of conservation. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, intrepid as he was, never actually made it there – but Miavana might agree with the book’s protagonist, the little Prince, who wisely observed that “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” .