With its own rules: this is what the giant island looks like that not many people know

There are goals that can be understood from one picture. Madagascar is not one of them. The fourth largest island in the world covers almost 600,000 square kilometers, much larger than it seems when you look at the map, and within this vast area you pass through rainforests, mountainous areas, mangrove landscapes, thorn forests, jagged rock formations and avenues of baobab trees that look like they were taken from a fairy tale.

“The real reason to come here is not just the view,” explains Alik Shaf, an Ayala Geographic guide. “It is one of the most special and exciting destinations I know of in the world. You come to Madagascar and see flora and fauna that sometimes seem to you like something alive and completely foreign. Many of them are simply unfamiliar to us.”

Sheaf explains that Madagascar was isolated for tens of millions of years, and this isolation created an extraordinary natural world. Thousands of plant species exist only here, alongside lemurs, chameleons, geckos and other animals that live nowhere else. For the traveler, the meaning is not a theoretical lesson in evolution, but an almost daily encounter with creatures that sometimes have to relearn how to look at them.

One of the experiences that Shaf enthusiastically describes takes place in the morning in the forests where the Indri lives, one of the impressive lemurs of Madagascar. “One of the most exciting experiences on a trip through these forests is hearing the Indri in the morning announcing his presence. We arrive at the reserve where he lives, look for him, see him and hear him, and this singing in the morning is such an exciting experience.”

It’s the kind of moment that doesn’t really go in the picture. Walking in a humid forest, the light penetrates through the vegetation, and then the call rises from the trees. Sometimes you first see movement in the branches, sometimes you only hear, and in any case the feeling is of entering a world that runs according to its own rhythm.

Sheaf calls the trip to Madagascar a “roots trip”, not only because of the ancient flora, but also because of the lemurs, the ancient primates that evolved tens of millions of years ago. I call it “a trip to the roots in a very meaningful sense. On the one hand there is a special flora here, and on the other hand there are the lemurs, the ancient primates. It is definitely exciting to follow them, get to know them and see how they live.”

One of the things travelers quickly discover in Madagascar is that the human eye is not always a good enough tool. You can stand half a meter from a tree trunk, look at it for a long time and not realize that right in front of you is an animal. “There are geckos that you stand in front of half a meter away and don’t recognize them. You see bark, lichen or a dry leaf, and then the local guide shows you that there is an animal there. If there wasn’t a local guide with this experience, we wouldn’t have noticed it at all,” says Sheaf.

One of the most impressive examples is a gecko with a leaf-like tail. The body, color and texture blend almost completely into the environment, and sometimes only a shiny eye betrays that it is a living creature. “You look at a bunch of dry leaves and see nothing, then the place is marked for you and suddenly you realize that there is a gecko there. This is one of the special and exciting phenomena in Madagascar.”

The chameleons also provide moments that are difficult to remain indifferent to. Look at the chameleon and you will understand what an amazing animal it is. Each eye moves separately, one eye can look back and the other to the side, and the tail wraps around the branch and serves as another grip point.

Some of the special encounters in Madagascar take place precisely after sunset. “There are species that cannot be seen during the day. All of a sudden you look in the dark for a night owl that has taken its head out of a hollow trunk, and you see its large pupils and understand how it is adapted to activity at night,” says Sheaf.

One of the creatures that Seagull mentions is the tenerak, a mammal whose appearance almost refuses to fit into a familiar category. You see him and he looks like some hybrid of something between a hedgehog, a jackal, a fox or a small dog. Then you look at the snout, the body structure and the adaptation for searching for insects, and realize that this is an animal built very precisely for its environment.

And there is also the pusa, a predator endemic to Madagascar, elusive and difficult to observe. The fossa looks almost like a small puma at first glance, but it does not belong to the cat family. That’s exactly the kind of thing Madagascar does to you, it introduces an animal that looks familiar, and then you find out its story is completely different.

One of the biggest stars of the island is the provision. His body is adapted to life on trees, his legs are very long compared to his hands, and when he moves between branches he looks completely natural. On the ground, the picture changes. When she is satisfied she has to go down to the ground, he dances. He literally jumps in strange movements from side to side, because his body is not built for normal walking on all fours. It’s a funny and lovely movement to watch.

But behind the amusing moment there is also a less easy story. Sometimes the sifka had to go down to the ground because clearings interrupted the succession of its habitat. He would have preferred to stay in the trees. There it is built for life. When the forest is cut off, he has to deal with a reality that doesn’t really fit his body.

In other places you can meet teacher families close to each other on the branches. They have a tooth structure that resembles a comb and they use it to groom each other. Sometimes you see a small baby close to the mother, clinging to her as she goes from tree to tree, and you stand below and they look at you from above. It is a moment that is difficult to remain indifferent to.

One of the visual highlights of the trip is the Morondava region (Morondava) and the boulevard of the baboons. We arrive in the afternoon, hoping for light clouds enough for the last sun to color the landscape. The evening light there can be simply magical.

Six of the world’s eight baobab species exist in Madagascar, and the trees themselves look as if someone deliberately changed the relationship between the trunk and the top. It’s not just that these trees appear in legends and folklore. It looks like someone with a crazy imagination made a caricature of a plant. The trunk is huge, the top looks almost like roots, so one of the nicknames of the baobab is the tree that grows upside down. This is a moment when even travelers who take pictures without stopping tend to stop. The trees stand still, the light descends, the shadows lengthen, and the entire landscape takes on an almost unreal feel.

Madagascar is opposite Africa, but its human roots are surprising. The early settlers came from the region of Indonesia and Borneo, after a sea journey of thousands of kilometers. If you were to come to Madagascar fifteen hundred years ago, the ancient inhabitants came from a great distance from the region of Indonesia and Borneo. They brought with them traditions, rice cultivation and a language of Austronesian origin.

Later, Arab and African influences were added, and the result is a complex culture, with unique customs, beliefs and rituals. It is impossible to understand Madagascar only through teachers and trees. You should also meet the people who live there, see the villages, the rice cultivation, the traditions and life itself.

Despite the wild image, Sheaf emphasizes that the trip to the island is not only for the well-heeled. And for the traveler who is debating between another lens for the camera and observation equipment, the seagull has clear advice: “In my opinion, in Madagascar it is more important to bring binoculars than a camera. There are many birds, animals among the branches and moments where you just have to observe.”

Madagascar is not a destination that only asks to pass through and mark sites, it demands to slow down, look for movement among the leaves, listen to the call that comes from the forest, go out at night with a flashlight, stand in front of a gecko you didn’t see even though it was right in front of you, and wait for the last light between the baobab trees.

“There are animals and plants in Madagascar that you look at and simply say: I didn’t know such a thing existed. For me, this is one of the reasons that it is one of the most special and exciting destinations I know of in the world,” concludes Sheaf.