Madagascar is an island of huge variety and not a few extremes: from the tropical rainforests of the north east, where rain and sun splice the day at regular intervals, to the dry baking heat of the west and southwest coast, to the cooler central highlands, where winter can take root with freezing rain and biting cold.
Given the wildly different textures of climate and landscape, you would be well advised to sit down with a guidebook before deciding which bits of this beautiful country to sample. And it's not only beautiful: the country's isolation, for millions of years, helped to spark and then protect an explosion of unique vegetation and wildlife. When the current president tripled the amount of protected land on the island last year, WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature) described it as a “gift to the Earth.”
And visitors of an ethical bent may want to pay particular attention to the type of places they stay. Madagascar is a desperately poor country, but there are tour operators who will guide you towards places that offer the locals a chance to share in the wealth you bring.
The capital city is somewhere that could do with an injection of wealth. Antananarivo, known as Tana by the locals, is a hard city — edgy, noisy and not always pretty. It offers the visitor a harsh contrast to the breathtaking beauty of the country beyond its limits. At the very least, it acts as a corrective to the images of reef and rainforests that sell the island and allows you to appreciate the extreme forces that coexist here.
With street kids, prostitutes and, in places, near shanty-town conditions, it can seem intimidating, particularly with Isabella, my 14-year-old daughter, in tow. But it has its charms, and considering that this is a city where 30 percent of houses have no running water and escalating fuel prices heap hardship on the locals, it's a testament to their spirit that Tana is as energetic as it is.
A world away from the hard edge of the capital — and it would be difficult to find a more graphic illustration of the extremes on offer — is the resort at Anjajavy. Nestling in a stretch of protected dry deciduous forest on the north west coast, it is virtually unreachable by road; instead, we pick up a seven-seater plane from Tana airport, the 90-minute flight ending in a glorious descent as the pilot arcs over the small peninsula that houses Anjajavy. Half a dozen white sand beaches ring the tiny coastline and around one of these sit the two dozen or so wooden villas of the resort. The plane swoops over the hotel and swings round to land bumpily on a tiny strip of red earth. On one side of the landing strip a cluster of small children gather to stare at tourists from another world.
A 10-minute trip in a 4x4 brings you to the hotel. On arrival it's as if you've walked straight into the pages of Conde Nast Traveller — infinity pool, palm trees, beautifully appointed villas and a small army of workers dressed in brilliant white linen cleaning the decks or brushing the lawn. The delightful timber-framed main house leads to an outside terrace and a lawn fringed with flowers and palm trees. Just beyond it, the Mozambique Channel sparkles. Each villa has a deck with an inviting hammock facing the sea.
You could do worse than lie there listening to the waves and the bird song and watching the frisky lemurs dance among the trees, but there are myriad pursuits for those who eventually choose to leave the comfort of the hammock: walks and bike rides through the forest to spot any number of different species (hummingbirds, lemurs, malachite kingfishers); diving and snorkeling; and deep-sea fishing for marlin and tuna.
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