“Can you see it?” My son and I were sat crouched under a tree in the sticky jungle of northern Madagascar’s Lokobe National Park, scrutinizing a patch of dirt and fallen leaves. His nose was almost pressed to the ground when Juliano, our barefoot guide, lifted his hand. Perched on his palm, a chameleon no bigger than a clipped toenail jerked forward on pin-thin legs. One blink, and it was gone again, just another fleck in the mulch.
Madagascar is full of these wild surprises. Torn off from the Indian subcontinent some 88 million years ago, it’s a Petri dish of endemic evolution: the Texas-sized island is home to half of the world’s chameleon species (including this tiny number, the minute leaf chameleon), more than 300 types of Crayola-colored frogs, and ape-like lemurs you won’t find elsewhere. We spotted black lemurs dozing in the canopy, the trees’ trunks adorned with wild orchids and coiled vanilla vines. Some species, like the Nosy Be mouse lemur Juliano found asleep in a curled-up banana leaf, are so endemic, they can only be seen in this very forest.
“Madagascar isn’t your classic African safari,” says Will Bolsover, founder of Madagascar specialist Natural World Safaris, who first led trips here nearly two decades ago. “You swap the 4x4 for explorations on foot, and deeply immerse yourself in these forests teeming with animals you’ll see nowhere else on Earth. It still feels truly wild.” For Bolsover, it’s not just the thrill of discovery that makes the country stand out, but the fact that tourism here is a lifeline for communities that are among Africa’s poorest. “From a socio-economic and conservation point of view, Madagascar still feels very undersold and misrepresented. It needs time in the limelight and responsible visitors to support these people and help protect these ecosystems.”
Admittedly, it wasn’t just the wildlife that drew me here. Madagascar’s beaches, according to Bolsover, remain one of Africa’s best-kept secrets. I found one such stretch of pretty sand on Nosy Komba, a jungle-dripping island about an hour from Nosy Be airport in Madagascar’s north, where the South Africa-based Time+Tide group has recently taken over a hillside lodge on its southern coast. Tsara Komba, as it’s called, delivered the full tropical fantasy: swaying coconut palms, a honey-hued beach, and thatch-roofed, fan-cooled bungalows perched in gardens frothy with ylang-ylang and pink bougainvillea. At the breezy restaurant, from where—if you’re lucky between July and November—you can spot humpback whales pass through the channel out front, a blackboard menu lists the French-tinged menu of the day, mostly dictated by the catch Nosy Komba’s fishermen bring to the beach every morning.
It’s not all postcard scenery, though. After a few days of snorkeling and beach-lolling, the view from our helicopter transfer to the Miavana resort on the island of Nosy Ankao just off Madagascar’s northeast, painted an alarmingly different picture. The scars of deforestation were hard to miss: riverbeds writhed through dry valleys, while surrounding hillsides were lacerated with gullies cut deep by centuries of erosion. Here and there, a plume of smoke rose up from a field; slash-and-burn farming, locally known as tavy, is still practiced here. Due to this, alongside illegal logging and overgrazing, Madagascar lost more than 200.000 hectares of its forest cover in 2024 alone, forcing much of its wildlife to the safety of national parks and protected reserves.
A small-but-budding tourism industry is helping turn the tide. Before Miavana, (which also flies the Time+Tide flag), took over Nosy Ankao in 2013, the island was little more than a struggling seaweed farm, its native greenery strangled by invasive casuarina trees. Today, those invaders have been cleared, and more than 100,000 native saplings have grown into a lush forest cover that’s now home to sunbirds, bulbuls, geckos and chameleons. A troupe of crowned lemurs was relocated from their threatened patch of jungle on the mainland, and has since multiplied in the treetops (or, one morning, on the ridge of our villa’s open-air bathroom). Down at the palm-tufted waterline, staff (made up almost entirely of residents from nearby villages) monitor turtle nests, tend coral nurseries, and count a steadily increasing seabird population.
The next morning we followed Jonhson Ratsimanadino, Miavana’s activities manager and resident naturalist, into the island’s jungled heart to see the fruits of all that labour. Every few steps, he pointed out creatures we’d have easily missed with our layman eyes: a patch of sand, he explained, was riddled with the burrows of hibernating land crabs. Nearby, a fist-sized hermit crab shuffled along, lugging around its borrowed home. We spotted a curious lesser vasa parrot, endemic to Madagascar, and heard the whoop-whoop-whooping of a Malagasy coucal reverberating through the trees. On another stretch of forest floor, a tiny mabuya skink darted after the red beam of Ratsimanadino laser pointer. Higher up, spiders had hoisted shells into the branches, dangling them from silken threads like miniature wind chimes.
Miavana might be remote enough to require a helicopter transfer, but its 14 villas, perched along nearly three miles of powdery beach, are as polished (if not more) as the ones you’d find in Bora Bora or the Maldives. Each one is a small compound in itself: built from local limestone and Malagasy wood, they open to a wall-to-wall deck with a plunge pool and multiple seating nooks just steps away from the shore. They have fully kitted-out kitchens, breezy bathrooms with indoor and outdoor showers, and a throw-the-doors-open living room furnished with a beachy-chic mix of linen-covered sofas, sculptural wicker chairs, and nautical decor from reclaimed sails and glass floats. Each one has a butler on speed dial, who is on hand to deliver breakfasts of fruit-topped smoothie bowls and pancakes with Malagasy vanilla, or arrange snorkeling trips at the drop of a hat.
The resort’s remoteness meant that mainland safaris to baobab forests and lemur sanctuaries required a (pricy) helicopter hop, but there was enough to keep us busy on Nosy Ankao and its neighboring islets. My son was up at dawn building sandcastles on our private stretch of beach, and later joined our butler for an island-wide treasure hunt and a tour of the resort’s Cabinet des Curiosities, where he gaped at the skeleton of a long-extinct elephant bird and its baseball-sized egg. We spent leisurely afternoons in the central pool, part of the tropi-modernist, Le Corbusier–looking piazza that also houses the bar and restaurant. Evenings ended with sundowners by the bonfire pit. One morning, we took a speedboat to a neighboring island where thousands of sooty terns blackened the sky, before sitting down to a toes-in-the-sand lunch at Miavana’s new Crab Shack, a beanbag-strewn beach bar pitched up along the crystalline shallows of Nosy Ankao’s Andrangana Bay.
The contrast between our high-gloss hideaway and the ramshackle villages we’d seen that week wasn’t lost on my son, which was part of the reason I brought him along. Jarring, somewhat—but while resorts like Miavana might be playgrounds for well-heeled castaways, the funds they funnel into conservation and community support reach far beyond their manicured beaches.