Sarah Tucker travels to Madagascar where lemurs are losing out to an ugly new industrial revolution...
David Attenborough wept when he visited here one year ago. The rainforest, scorched and burnt, might yet have charmed him if he hadn’t known its previous, luxuriant incarnation. As it was, the modern Madagascar – a mirror image of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the trees cut down, the red soil rich with minerals used for houses for the Malagasy people – brought only gloom. Where the forest once flourished, rice terraces stretched to the horizon, yielding enough rice to keep the whole of China in full and bounteous supply.
In this tortured landscape, the Malagasy multitudes are hard at work, fashioning bricks from mud. A 15-day tour can scarcely do justice to this magical, embattled island off Africa’s East Coast, but it is more than enough to underline the central fact: Madagascar is going through an industrial revolution to have Sir David crying a river.
“Please tell the truth about this place,” pleads Claude, our guide with Explore, the tour company charged with taking 12 of us a thousand miles across the country by coach, from the cold, wet eastern highlands to the beaches and hot, arid desert of the west. I promise him that I will.
It has taken less than a decade for the natural devastation to kick in. The pockets of rainforest that remain are under constant threat from locals insouciant of the value of lemurs, chameleons and geckos – not to mention the tourists who pay money to see them. If you can feed your family on rice and get money for mined sapphires, what good is a lemur? The wide-eyed, all-singing, all-dancing animal may have been a fixture of their youth, but today the people have to be paid not to kill it – or threatened with 25 years in jail.
Educational initiatives exist – Centre ValBio is one project aimed at persuading the locals to protect what is left of their rainforest – but the lack of understanding shows through in the quality of guiding. Of the parks we visited, at only one – Lemurs’ Park, near Tana – were we told not to approach the creatures. No smoking, no loud voices, no feeding. At the others – more than 15 – there was a total lack of direction. Those lemurs that ventured down from the trees looked curious, while their companions just looked scared.
With reason. On the edge of ‘Sapphire Town’, a village that sprang up overnight following the discovery of precious stones sits the rainforested island of Zombitse National Park: a natural zoo with tours lasting an hour and a half. A place of pilgrimage by day, but desecration by night. With the sun safely set, we are told, the locals from Sapphire move in to kill the lemurs, hoping that without them this area too could be annexed by the empire of mines.
In Ranomafana National Park we encountered the golden bamboo species, only discovered in 1986. Chaos erupted as five separate tour groups jockeyed for position, leaving the lemurs unamused. In all, I must have seen around 18 different species, though there are estimated to be over 80 – a figure that could easily rise if the clocks were to be stopped and the destruction of the rainforest checked.
The support acts played their part: chameleons – including the smallest and largest in the world – geckos and insects. But it was the lemurs that stole the show: singing to each other, dancing between trees and huddling together for warmth. Pure enchantment.
Quite unlike Sapphire Town, where our party was forbidden to stop: a wild enclave, we were told, of drug dealers, prostitutes and fat mafia types guarding gem palaces from behind sinister shades. Elsewhere, however, the people were welcoming, friendly and curious. We stopped off at Fianarantsoa, Madagascar’s fifth largest city, on market day. Here, when it is cool enough, men and women wear coloured scarves around their bodies while carrying ‘sporting chickens’ – long-legged types that run fast – and baskets of wild spinach.
And then it was time to go west. Here, in dry heat far removed from the damp of the eastern highlands, the sun holds powerful sway. The ‘eye of the day’, they call it, or – more pertinently – the ‘blanket of the poor people’. It is in this parched desert landscape that the baobab tree survives, a giant carrot sticking fat fingers up into the air.
Claude tells us that the Chinese give Malagasy people jobs in the east, although other guides blame the Chinese for stripping the land. In the west, insists Claude, the Indians treat the indigenous people “like dogs”. Everyone, however, is squarely against the government.
“Since the political uprising, they just want to get as much out of the country as they can while they are in power,” says Claude. “They don’t think about the good of the people or the long term – only how to line their own pockets. But then, are your governments any better?”
Our last few days were spent on a beach, just down the coast from Toliara, staying in a hut with no running hot and cold water. We went snorkelling on Nosy Ve, a sacred island with albino birds, where we found Dory and Nemo and the octopus in the Indian Ocean, not to mention a whole host of whales.
So forget the sapphires, the selfishness and the savage denuding of the forest. Go and see the lemurs, the beaches and the birds. Nature always finds a way: there is hope yet for Madagascar. And if you see Sir David, tell him.
The 15-day Lost Continent (Madagascar) trip costs from £2,970pp in 2019. The price includes return flights, internal transfers, 14 nights’ accommodation, breakfast, some lunches and dinners and an Explore leader. Departure dates throughout the year. Visit: explore.co.uk; tel: 01252 882 594
