MADAGASCAR
ALEX MEAD, EDITOR- AT- LARGE It may have been the tomato frog, an amphibian so vibrantly painted it could be a living Warhol. Or maybe the tenrec, an animal akin to a punk hedgehog with Eighties-style highlights. The technicolour panther chameleon – the Pzazz lolly of reptiles – could also have done it, as might any one of the 60 lemur variants that have made Madagascar famous thanks to their animated DreamWorks avatars.
Whichever one of the 25,000 or so Madagascan animal residents you first came across – be it on pages print or digital – would have left you captivated and wanting to find out more about this fascinating island. For reference, mine was the fossa – like a cougar muddled with a mongoose.
Just 400km from the east coast of Africa, yet first populated by Indonesians arriving on outriggers from the third century, everything about the giant island of Madagascar – the fourth biggest in the world (Greenland is the first) – is full of intrigue.
The biodiversity is immense: it’s one of only 17 countries declared ‘megadiverse’ by Conservation International, with
WWF reckoning some 95 per cent of
Madagascar’s reptiles, 89 per cent of its plant life, and 92 per cent of its mammals exist nowhere else on Earth.
Such wildlife can’t live in one landscape, so
Madagascar obliges.
Along with some
11,000 plant species
– including the iconic baobab tree, thicklimbed but with an intricate bonsailike topping – the residents are spread across lush rainforest, grassy plains, forested mountains, wetlands, mangrove and tropical coastline. Go beyond its sandy shores and you’ll find 250 islands and The Great Reef, 450km long and home to many of the country’s 300 species of coral and 400 species of tropical fish.
It’s not just the potential of discovering wildlife you never even knew existed that makes Madagascar my next stop, it’s also the people.
A mix of the original Indonesians who settled in the highlands and the East
Africans who settled along the coast, they speak both Malagasy and French, due to colonial rule from 1800s to 1960.
And they’ve plenty of yarns to tell, from tales of the ‘mad queen’ Ranavalona to the legends of the pirates that operated in the 17th and 18th centuries. Add to this, the country’s famed vanilla, its curious love of rugby – 30,000 people watch the national side – and the fact that bare-knuckle fighting is a popular sport, and Madagascar has always felt like a country you’re sure to return from with countless stories of your own. Colourful in every possible way, Madagascar represents every reason you travel.