Madagascar – The Gardens of Mars

I arrived in Madagascar not really knowing what to expect. I’d read all the stories about coups and corruption and environmental degradation and then seen stunning photography that showcased the beauty of the country that seemed at odds with the doom and gloom I had been reading about. As with most things, the truth lies rather messily in the middle.

Madagascar is an unusual place and the bare facts alone I find compelling:

• Fully 5% of the world’s biodiversity is found on Madagascar
• 80% of the plant and animals species are endemic to the island, in other words, found nowhere else on earth
• 50-80% of the world’s vanilla (depending on the year)
• For reasons that I have yet to figure out, they distill a really rather pleasant local tequila.

I could go on but perhaps you’re getting the idea…

By comparison with other African countries, Madagascar is comparatively new to human settlement. The first settlers to arrive were not in fact from the African continent but rather from the Indian subcontinent. Continual human presence seems to have started less than 4000 years ago. As a result the predominant Malagasy culture is a mix of indo-Asian farming and Bantu cattle raising influences.

Madagascar’s history in the period between first settlement and now is colourful and storied and too dense to go into here. It reads like an epic work of fantasy, with mad monarchs, royal feuds, magic, shipwrecks, war and even human sacrifice, with some general colonial mayhem and folly thrown in for good measure. I’ll give a digest but for a wonderful narrative history and travelogue, The Gardens of Mars by John Gimlette is a great place to start.

Various European powers have tried to claim Madagascar over the years and while they all spent masses of blood and treasure trying to conquer the place, the French had the most ‘success’ . While they had notional control, to say they conquered the entire country would be to have the word conquer stretch do more work than it’s capable of, ‘The Europeans simply couldn’t cope with the heat and the spears’ (from The Gardens of Mars). Even today, parts of the interior of the country are so absurdly remote that control by the central government is more notional than actual and there are areas that even in 2026 haven’t been fully surveyed.

Independence from France was granted in June of 1960, as part of a post-war global trend towards colonial independence. Though one gets the sense that the French were completely exhausted by the time they left, happy to abandon the island rather than being forced to grant self-government. That said, French influence remains, and most people you meet speak mainly Malagasy and French.

Post independence has been anything but smooth sailing and is one of the main reasons that Madagascar is not as prosperous and developed as it could be given it’s formidable wealth of natural resources and human potential – it remains one of the poorest countries on earth.  To put things in some perspective, since 1960 there have been five separate coup d’état’s, a sprinkling of presidential impeachments and assassinations, and several interim military governments. The latest occurred in 2025 when the long serving president Andry Rajoelina was deposed and fled to France after the military changed sides and supported the popular youth uprising against his government and its truly eye watering corruption (ask me about the defunct gondola system in the capital). While free and fair elections are due in 2027, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Madagascar is a place that naturalists, photographers and sunseeking Europeans have been coming to for decades. As a place for higher end and less specialized travel, it’s still very much finding it’s feet.

The reason Madagascar has been so behind this curve is that it’s historically been a challenging place to travel. Poor roads and communications infrastructure, an almost comically unreliable local airline and the kind of capricious and ineffective bureaucracy that former French colonies seem to both specialize and delight in, means that unless you were a backpacker or visiting on a photographic trip and were born with a near saint-like level of tolerance for delay, Madagascar ended up being just too inconvenient to bother with. Happily, that’s been steadily changing over the past few years. Decent phone service and internet access have proliferated, and charter flights now move you between regions in hours rather than days, which is the single biggest change to what a trip here can achieve. At the very top there are two properties, both at the beach: Voaara, on Île Sainte-Marie off the east coast, and the truly spectacular Miavana, on Nosy Ankao in the north-east. In the interior things are a little less luxurious, but there’s now a decent array of very comfortable places that will give you access to some of Madagascar’s more iconic landscapes.

Getting there is easier too: direct flights from France and Italy, good connections via Ethiopia, and enough links to the African mainland that Madagascar works as a beach stop on the end of a more traditional safari in eastern or southern Africa. The northern shores have been well known to kitesurfers for ages, and the island has acted like the Caribbean for European’s looking for relief from the doldrums of winter.

With that said, to restrict your focus to its wind, waves and sand is to miss one of the world’s truly extraordinary places. While I arrived not quite knowing what to expect, by the time I left I was both utterly charmed and eager to return.