Island of dreams

I’m always excited to visit new places, but this was especially exciting as I was due to visit Masoala Peninsula in the north east of the island. Largely protected as a national park and marine reserve, it’s home to the island’s last remaining lowland forest and to Masoala Forest Lodge, which was founded and is run by the wonderful Pierre and Maria Bester, a passion project that has doubled up as their family home, and which is now supported by the always excellent ground operator Wild Expeditions Africa. Given Wild Expeditions’s reputation for setting up and running impactful lodges across Africa, including very close to where I live in Botswana, I was as certain as I could be that I was going to be beautifully looked after, gently pushed out of my comfort zone, and have the time of my life.

When talking to people about travelling to and around Madagascar, you will undoubtedly hear lots about its size and how difficult it is to sometimes get from A to B. This is all true but it’s also what makes the island so different, so real, and so under-visited: you really are out there, with very few others, experiencing a world possibly quite unlike anything you’ve ever come across. This is extra true of Masoala Forest Lodge: a chartered flight, a 30-minute drive, and a two-hour boat trip is just the right kind of effort and pace to take you out of yourself and into somewhere miles from nowhere.

I’ll save you a blow-by-blow account of the experience, though I have to say that if the following reads like some Robinson Crusoe idyll, then that’s because the lodge and its surrounds is a Robinson Crusoe idyll. I loved the fact that my room and the Sea Deck (the main shared area) ran onto the most golden of beaches and into the sparklingly blue sea, and that just behind the lodge was the most wonderful of nature’s adventure playground: a truly magical rainforest. Whether enjoying a guided forest walk (night or day), seeking out iconic species (such as the red ruffed lemur, its white-fronted cousin, or the blue helmet vanga) or visiting the nearby Betsimisaraka tribe, this is the ultimate in getting away from it all.

Four highlights. The forest behind the lodge is a secondary one, which means it has regenerated and is in the process of regenerating itself, having over millennia been at one time affected by human activity. Rudimentary paths and relatively clear sight lines make it eminently accessible. One morning, I took myself off barefoot (the humidity makes for extremely soft ground) into the forest, the sound of the ocean gradually overtaken by that of birdsong, animal calls, and the chirrup of crickets. I haven’t the words to describe what it is like to be in the depths of a fully mature rainforest, alone for three hours, with nature your only company. This is where you are returned to a more primal sense of self.

Contrast this with highlight number two, a long and tough hike into the national park, the reward for scrambling over boulders and pushing our way through undergrowth the flash of a lemur in the forest canopy, mushrooms as I’ve never seen them before, and waterfalls pouring down the side of moss-covered rocks. Then there’s the opportunity (highlight number three) to kayak into the mouth of a river that discharges into the ocean near the lodge, where the profound quiet of the forest is intermittently broken by lemurs leaping above your boat. Finally (last highlight), there’s the ocean, which I loved swimming and snorkelling just yards from my room, visiting its coves by kayak, and which I know at certain times of the year plays host to breeding pods of humpback whale.

In all this, it would be remiss of me to without mentioning what my being there does for more than me. Despite its historic loss of tree cover, Madagascar remains an exceptionally green destination, and the ongoing protection of the Masoala Peninsula is one the primary reasons why it continues to be so. Delighted, therefore, that the lodge, its activities and its ethos, attract and facilitate the right kind of tourism, which supports Masoala National Park’s operational costs, helps create a buffer zone of coastal rainforest through reforestation efforts, and learns from and supports local community initiatives in numerous ways.

So, to finish: I’m fortunate to have grown up in and spent most of my life in the wild. However, there are many different kinds of wild, and Masoala’s isolated forest-and-beach wilderness is not the savanna, salt pan, and delta habitats of my childhood. It’s different and just as fascinating, and the lodge – its position, that beach, its ocean, the forest, my hosts – gave me exactly what I was looking for: the perfect base to explore a world that in many respects was totally new to me. I can’t wait to go back.

If you would like to learn more about Kim’s trip to Masoala Peninsular and wider Madagascar, please get in touch.