Go Madagascar:While it's one for the adventurous, Madagascar has so much to offer, from staggering natural beauty to cheap haute cuisine and charming people, writes Adam Alexander
MADAGASCAR is huge. Huge in size – bigger than France – huge in heart, and if you believe what the Madagascan tourist authorities tell you, hugely in trouble.
Especially if you're unwise enough to read the deceptively upbeat-looking booklet they give you on the plane called Passport to Madagascar– attached to your visa entry form.
“Like every other country in the world we have our heritage but ours is in a very bad way,” it reads. “To such an extent that we ask ourselves whether we will have anything to leave to posterity.”
In what continues, almost relentlessly, as the strangest, most self-sabotaging introduction I have ever received to any country, it goes on: “This shows we have no sense of common good and that anything not belonging personally to us merits no respect. Over 50 years, our heritage has been devastated, ruined by ourselves by lack of foresight, by recklessness and for immediate personal gain, whilst the will to repair and reconstruct remains low if non-existent, despite the efforts to raise our awareness by successive leaders, all of which portends a bleak future.”
So, eh, welcome to Madagascar then.
Indeed, by the time you get to the booklet's final warning that "never before have we seen so much violence, hatred and crime in our country as in this period" you're not only braced firmly for the tragic story of Paradise Lost, but maybe even for trouble.
Which deliberate or not, also makes it the most cleverly disarming welcome I’ve ever had. As from that moment on, expectations utterly flattened, Madagascar began ambushing me left, right and centre on promise after wonderful promise it never even attempted to make.
Antananarivo is the capital of Madagascar. Tana, which is what they mercifully call it for short, is a beguiling place with cobbled streets winding up and down steep mountainsides through strange houses that look like something out of Hansel and Gretel, and could possibly be made of chocolate.
From dusk till dawn, the place is almost overrun with ladies of the night, but these are difficult times in Madagascar and a year-and-a-half after a popular deejay staged a military coup that has left the country politically and economically on a knife-edge, everyone is just trying to make a living the best and perhaps only way they know how.
It’s a city of millions of people apparently, but doesn’t feel at all crowded and is a lot tidier and safer and well-run than plenty of other African capitals you could mention. The mood is one of easy-come, easy-go, and it’s the usual African third world story: just because I’m white, I have a passport into anywhere – five-star hotels, casinos, plush restaurants. Even though I could be a bum, which of course – to borrow wisely from the Malagasy art of self-deprecation – is exactly what I am.
The next hugely pleasant surprise is the people. Some 25 years ago, the grande dame of Irish travel writing Dervla Murphy travelled the length and breadth of Madagascar, the world’s fourth largest island, declaring the Malagasy people (pronounced Mala-gash) the loveliest she had ever met. A quarter of a century on, may I second that, and add that even in these tough times the devastatingly honest self-deprecation I continued to encounter appears to be just another uniquely endearing Malagasy trait.
Not that some of the dire warnings aren’t true. Environmentally, Madagascar with 90 per cent of its plants and animals found nowhere else on earth, is in a profound crisis which demands world attention. Since the military coup and the disastrous withdrawal of foreign aid that followed, desperation in the form of crime and renewed deforestation has also reared its ugly head. But as Murphy rightly observed, the local population, more honest, hard-working and better organised than they would ever have you believe, can and still do “redeem every situation”.
The first thing you notice here – apart from the fact that you’re the only Irish person in town – is you can smoke. Which is just as well for the large number of French who live here in this former French colony as I’ve never seen people go through cigarettes like them.
The Cafe de la Gare next to the main train station in Tana is as plush as any bar/restaurant in Paris, and as you enthusiastically settle into a €1 Mauritian beer there, all around you people are smoking French-style – moodily, like film stars. Half of them even look like film stars as well – immaculately dressed Catherine DeNeuves and Robert Duvalls. You can tell immediately that they have a charmed life here – one that’s free and fun in every sense – but the chain-smoking and the candle-lit dinners also lend it a slight air of uncertainty, as if these were reminiscent of their last days in French Indochina.
Much as you can fall instantly in love with this, I knew I had to drag myself out of Antananarivo and the Cafe de la Gare with its chocolate croissants, pineapple tart and dreamy French ambience, and head into the Madagascan interior.
MY PLAN, INso far as I even had one, was to try and make it to Île St Marie – a tropical paradise island which was somewhere off the tropical paradise island I was already on.
I'd read that kayaking around Île St Marie is a top-five thing to do in Madagascar, and the vague notion of paddling around out-of-the-way villages on some lazy, palm-fringed island as opposed to Muddling Through in Madagascaras Dervla Murphy titled her gutsy foot-soldiering odyssey, seemed a much wiser choice for someone only here less than three weeks.
But how on earth to get there? In a country where the roads are best described as bits of tar between potholes, most people with any money in Madagascar generally opt to fly. But I was already drinking in the train station, and the idea to opt instead for a passenger train from the capital to the coast, which most people and guidebooks told me didn’t even exist any more, was as easy as popping next door.
Madarail seems like the perfect name when you first see its truck/train hybrid known as the Michelin. A train that runs on Michelin tyres, its single rail carriage of reclining wicker chairs has no less than three women dressed like flight-attendants bringing you complimentary croissants and coffee as you’re being ferried through Madagascan countryside, until eventually you start to feel like someone out of a Graham Greene novel.
Having read the latest National Geographic magazine and its report on the new Chinese-led rape of the Malagasy rainforests, I was braced once again for the worst as the Michelin left the capital on time with only seven other passengers on board. But instead what I got was lush green paddy fields of rice, quaint villages full of those chocolate houses again, and people staring out of their shuttered French windows and waving at us like something straight out of a fairy-tale.
Four or five charming hours later, arriving in a town called Andasibe where the Michelin ends and where you can catch the proper train to the coast – which Madarail assured me was running – I now faced a two-day wait in a place that just conveniently happens to be home to the biggest of all the 50 species of lemurs in Madagascar, and the last remaining 60 or so families left in the wild.
Known locally as the Indri, or the “Man of the Forest”, these long-limbed, human-like monkeys are best described by Lonely Planet as looking “like a four-year-old child in a panda suit”.
From a distance, they sound like whales, their sad and soulful cries travelling for up to 3km through their ever-dwindling forest habitat. Up close, it’s more like someone blasting at you with a vuvuzela. Which can leave you unwisely staring up their backsides through the treetops with your mouth open in stupefied awe.
But lemurs aren’t the only talented stars of Madagascan wildlife, and how my brilliant Malagasy guide Herman was able to spot so many rare and invisible chameleons for me, big and small, during our trek through the jungle together was not only a complete mystery to me, but must have been a surprise to the chameleons themselves.
THE TRAINfrom Andasibe to Tamatave on the east coast takes roughly 10 hours, costs €8, and is surely one of the most spectacular, forgotten train-rides in the world.
Descending from 4,225ft to sea level in 60 miles through dense rainforest, it’s a line that also had Dervla Murphy gushing 25 years ago for its “sheer dizzying melodrama”. “It would be no less famous than the Darjeeling or Quito lines had not inaccessibility deprived it of that glory which is its due,” she writes in her book. “And then there is the sudden joy of encountering what feels like a new world, as the Hauts Plateaux are abruptly left behind.”
Some 25 years on, as the same half-empty train shimmied its way through mile after mile of untouched virgin rainforest filled with orchids, flame-of-the-forest, and wild bananas almost close enough to pick from the train, I shot so many photographs of the immense, angry mud-brown river descending equally dramatically all the way alongside us, that I ran through my battery in only the first hour.
The “new world” the train left me in late that evening was the city of Tamatave – Madagascar’s most important commercial port, and gateway to my final destination of Île St Marie.
A tropical mad-house, crumbling, balmy Tamatave with its large number of foreign expatriate workers and pushy pousse-pousse drivers, has an air of disparity about it that doesn’t feel comfortable in these times, but is not the worst place to be stuck for a day or two when you can have a three course meal at a classy restaurant such as Le Verseau for as little as €5. Dishes that include fish in vanilla sauce, frog thigh with Provence accompaniment, zebu (cow) carpaccio, and due to misspelling and perhaps a loss in translation, cock meat cooked with red wine, and dick thighs with red wine sauce.
Madagascar may be an adventurous destination, but like the classy Air France flight that got me here, it is also a surprisingly sophisticated one – a place full of haute cuisineat rock-bottom prices, pristine resorts, and so many fascinating, out-of-the-way places that it would take you six months or perhaps a year to really do it any justice.
Even after a short bus ride from Tamatave, though, and a two-hour boat-ride across the sea, nothing really prepared me for the staggering beauty of Île St Marie. A place where you can watch humpback whales breech the near-horizon without even leaving your luxury beach-house, marvel as flying-fish chase each other through the glassy shallows, and witness fishermen wading through the water with spears a half-mile out to sea, the shallow reef water still only up to their knees.
In fact, by the time I found a Bounty wrapper lying on the beach I realised I wasn't going to have enough superlatives for this place. This isn't just paradise – as Casino Royaleproved with its opening scenes in Madagascar – it's a Bond location.
Nowhere did I feel this more than when I visited a nearby zebu festival on the island, which was like being transported into the night-time tropical voodoo scene in Live and Let Die.
As the smoke from a fire agitated a horned zebu tethered nearby – about to be slaughtered – drums were beating wildly, people dancing in the flame-light frenetically as if in a trance.
There is a “Festival of the Dead” here too, I was told, where people dig up their dead relatives and party with them for three days before putting their remains back in the ground again. The sort of party you really don’t want to be seen dead at.
Back at the beach house again, clouds of tiny tiger-striped fish were swimming in ballet formations next to the beach, tortoises were staggering through the lawns, and polite men in pirogues were floating up to my front door to ask me if I would like to be paddled to Île aux Nattes – another smaller even more beautiful paradise island next to the one I was already happily on.
The only danger here then is that is you will want to give up everything you have and move here. The kind of place that makes you wonder why you shouldn't do a Fletcher Christian and mutiny from the Bountyforever.
Which is probably why in days of old Île St Marie became the most successful pirate headquarters in the world, especially for English-born pirates.
"For the average pirate," writes Mervyn Brown in Madagascar Rediscovered, "starting life perhaps in a riverside slum on the Thames and having survived years of brutality and privation at sea, his 'retired' existence among the bamboos and the coconut palms, surrounded by his Malagasy family and ample supplies of meat, fish, exotic fruits and potent home-brewed alcohol, must have seemed closer to paradise than he ever expected to see."
After a few days, my blood pressure here had dropped to zero, my skin was starting to bronze, all my troubles had left me, and I was begging Air France to let me stay just another week.
I knew also by simply looking at the postcards here, that despite being charmed by the capital, seeing lemurs in the wild, taking a great train ride through the rainforests, and spending a week lazing and paddling by kayak around a tropical island, that I hadn’t even touched the sides yet of what Madagascar has to offer.
Indeed, if tigers are the poster-child of wildlife preservation, then Madagascar should be the poster-child of a world that needs urgent saving. As nowhere could be more beautiful. Nowhere more proof that heaven and hell are not just states of mind, but places too.
Adam Alexander flew from Dublin as a guest of Air France which has 10 UK and Irish departure points, including London Heathrow, London City (with subsidiary airline CityJet), Bristol, Southampton, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Dublin. Together with its partner airline KLM, Air France operates from 21 airports in the UK and Ireland. Fares from Dublin to Madagascar, via Paris Charles de Gaulle, start from €1,451 return. See airfrance.ie or tel 01-6050383.
Support Cetamada
This independent organisation who successfully lobbied the Malagasy government to help protect Madagascar's whales, needs support and volunteers to continue its terrific work, and is definitely the embryonic future of eco-tourism here. For further information contact Ceta Mada President Henry Bellon: president@cetamada.org, Téléphone : +261-32-40-88-937 or visit the websites: www.cetamada.com, or www.vohilava.com