Everything at Miavana was like that. A step beyond expected, miles beyond what seemed possible. My villa, for example, was built from hand-hewn rock and had sliding glass doors. It also had its own private pool and a sunken bath – too much luxury for one person, almost. Outside, the resort’s horticulturalist was painstakingly rehabilitating the Nosy Ankao habitat. Thousands of non-endemic plants have been removed and more than 60,000 native plants added. This, in Madagascar’s seasons – at certain times of year, the wind is scouring, the heat a blanket. The land was slowly being made to look wild again. In this fragile, often damaged country, it felt as if erasing the impressions left behind by humankind was the greatest luxury of all. The day before I left the island, five endangered crowned lemurs – two males, two females and a baby – were released into the forest a a short distance from the villas, the first step towards rehabilitating the island’s primate population. It seemed like a kind of restorative justice, a gesture toward repairing all the land. That evening, in the resort’s Cabinet of Curiosities – a whimsical museum-library containing, among other treasures, the skeleton of an extinct Malagasy hippopotamus – Russell Mittermeier, the man who literally wrote the book on Madagascar’s lemurs, gave a stunning presentation. If Richard Branson had suddenly dropped through the roof in a hot-air balloon, I don’t believe I would have spilled my drink. That was Miavana: to bring together. keep Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton’s novel set in preapartheid South Africa, with me at all times. I can open it I anywhere and read it like a Bible. And like a holy book, I have committed parts to memory. “Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and custom that is gone … Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end.” Anjajavy Le Lodge (anjajavy.com) is a resort in Madagascar’s northwest overlooking the Mozambique Channel. It is surrounded by 750 hectares of protected land, scalloped by isolated beaches and limestone cliffs, and covered with wild baobab forests that remain untouched after hundreds of years. It is run by Cédric de Foucault, who is descended from French settlers who came to the island three or four generations ago. His The lounge at Miavana
N O T E V E R Y T H I N G C A N B E H E A L E D , B U T S I N C E L A N D A N D W I L D L I F E A N D H U M A N W E L F A R E A R E I N E X T R I C A B L Y L I N K E D , I T S E E M S L I K E A G O O D P L A C E T O S T A R T From left: a female crowned lemur – a group of which was recently moved to the island of Nosy Ankao, where Miavana is located; a farmer with his herd of zebu cattle near Mandrare River Camp staff at Anjajavy is almost entirely local – Sakalava is the name given to the people around here. There’s a trail around the refuge, which I took one afternoon. I saw Coquerel’s sifakas and common brown lemurs; collared iguanas were everywhere. I may have seen a fossa – the threatened, catlike mammal found only on Madagascar – though it seems unlikely. Another afternoon I paddled around the peninsula to a nearby village to meet with a local elder. I was accompanied by Anjajavy’s naturalist, a young veterinary student named Rasoanaivo Hoby Ambininitsoa, who is doing doctoral research on lemurs. The elder showed us around a traditional Sakalava home: the wooden platters used to winnow rice, the machetes for chopping wood, the guitar for making music, the mats for sleeping. And then he quickly made a small fire, rubbing two sticks and blowing gently. As flames licked the kindling, he sat back, smiled and sang us a song so sweet it made my throat hurt. When he was done, Ambininitsoa asked if he could sing us another, which he did. After that we thanked him and walked back into the bright sun. “What he knows about ... ” Ambininitsoa said, turning to me as if it had just occurred to her too. “If we lose that, we lose everything.” When Queen Ranavalona issued her kabary in 1835, she hadn’t intended a massacre of her people. “I welcome all wisdom and all knowledge which are good for this country,” she said. All of it, as long as it didn’t disrupt the wisdom and knowledge of her own people. How tenuous and difficult and essential is that balance between what has always been here and what arrives on these wild shores from elsewhere. Anjajavy seems to be striving towards it. “The tragedy is not that things are broken,” Alan Paton wrote 70 years ago. “The tragedy is that things are not mended again.” Southern Africa specialist tour operator Explore Inc creates custom Madagascar itineraries; exploreinc.com CONTACT CENTURION SERVICE FOR BOOKINGS CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 79
