Indian Ocean · Madagascar
"Seventy million years of uninterrupted evolution."
Ninety percent of everything living here exists nowhere else on earth. Lemurs in spiny forest. Baobabs at the red-dust hour. The world's oldest island — still largely itself.
West Coast · Highlands · Northern Tip
When Madagascar broke from Africa seventy million years ago, it took its own evolutionary path. Everything that followed is unlike anything else on the planet.
Ring-tailed lemur, Berenty Reserve
KODAK PORTRA 400 · 14 ▶
Field Notes
"The baobab doesn't look like a tree. It looks like a tree drawn by a child — everything wrong, and completely right. There are six of them over the road."
KODAK PORTRA 400 · 15 ▶
Nosy Be, northern Madagascar
Five moments in Madagascar
The Avenue of Baobabs at dusk
Near Morondava on the west coast, a dirt road flanked by twenty-five ancient Grandidier's baobabs — some over a thousand years old, trunks twelve metres around. They exist nowhere else on earth in this density. In the last forty minutes of daylight the laterite road turns the colour of fire and the baobabs turn silver. There are photographs of this. None of them are adequate.
Ring-tailed lemurs at Berenty
Madagascar separated from Africa before primates evolved, so lemurs evolved here entirely in isolation for sixty million years. Berenty is a private reserve in the dry south where they're habituated and abundant — not captive, free-ranging in gallery forest that borders sisal fields. They come to you. Juveniles fall asleep on researchers' shoulders. It is one of the most disarming wildlife encounters on the planet.
Tsingy de Bemaraha
UNESCO World Heritage Site. A karst limestone plateau eroded into tens of thousands of razor-sharp needle spires — the tsingy — standing up to 120 metres high and impassable except by via ferrata and suspended bridges. The word means "where one cannot walk barefoot." Nothing else looks like this. The lemur species found only inside the spire ecosystem are found nowhere else on earth.
Whale sharks at Nosy Be
October to December, the north coast. The Nosy Be Marine Protected Area sees regular whale shark aggregations around the plankton-rich upwellings. Snorkelling with them is permitted in the MPA. Twelve-metre animals passing close enough to feel the current. The population is now researched and photo-ID'd — there are individuals here with twenty-year records in the database.
Night chameleon spotting
With a torch and a guide in any of the rainforest reserves. Chameleons sleep on exposed branches at night — visible, still, and astonishing. Madagascar has over half the world's chameleon species, from the Parson's (the largest, the size of a house cat) to the Brookesia micra (one of the smallest reptiles on earth, fitting on a fingertip). Find both in one evening in Montagne d'Ambre.