The Wonders of Madagascar

Warner Brother's new movie Madagascar , set to be released on May 27th, is about a group of escaped New York zoo animals looking for a home outside the city. Naturally, the best home for a zebra, giraffe, and hippo is in Africa-so a group of humans decide to help the animals flee to the Madagascar.

Most people will probably blink and say, Madagascar? No mental picture is likely to appear when you hear the name of this country. Africa might conjure up images of the lush rainforests, or endless savannas and deserts-but Madagascar draws a blank. The best most of us could do is say that it's a big island. I certainly couldn't have done any better a year ago. But after spending a few months there, visiting a friend, I have finally learned a little about this strange, magical country.

The first thing is that there are no zebras, giraffes, and hippos on the island. So the New Yorkers are likely to be rather lonely, if they ever reach. In fact, very few of the animals on mainland Africa exist in Madagascar, even though the island is just 250 miles off the eastern coast. This is because the land that became Madagascar split off from other landmasses about 160 million years ago, which means the plants and animals on the island were left alone to do their own thing for a long time.

This has led to an incredible diversity of creatures that are found no where else in the world. Much as in Australia, after the island split off, the life that existed there went off on its own evolutionary track. After 160 million years, visiting such a place is truly like visiting another world. Even in my brief visit, I saw all sorts of animals that might as well have been aliens: lemurs-which look a little like moneys with sharp, dog-like snouts; strange chameleons, some half the size of my finger and others bigger than my arm; and thousands of incredible insects, reptiles, and birds that I could never have imagined were actually alive on our planet.

It was a strange feeling to walk around my friend's neighborhood and realize that a lot of the animals flying around, or crawling on the ground-things I was used to ignoring-couldn't be found anywhere else in the world. Almost half of Madagascar's bird species are endemic, a word describing life that can only be found in one region. Nine-tenths of the island's reptiles only live there.

Many of the species, in fact, live not just in Madagascar but only in small parts of the island! The country is divided into hundreds of areas that are completely different ecosystems. It is almost like a microcosm of Africa: in the little I saw of the island, I came across rainforest, dry plains, gorges that looked like the Grand Canyon, and a coral reef system on the coast. Each time I left a place, it was strange to think that I was also saying goodbye to hundreds of plants and animals that I would never see anywhere else.

The people are no less diverse. In the highlands around the capitol of Antananarivo, where I stayed, are the Merina. Their origins are still unclear. They have dark, Asiatic features, and an analysis of the Malagasy language has led many to hypothesize that came from somewhere around Indonesia, in boats. Away from the capitol, towards the coasts, one sees the Betsileo and other tribes, who have more traditionally African features. The conquests of the Merina, however, mean that everyone speaks Malagasy, with most people in the cities speaking at least some French, since the island was a French colony until 1958. Also present throughout the island is a small Muslim population that landed on the island about a thousand years ago-their arrival and early life is equally mysterious.

The only thing, in fact, that people are fairly certain of is that humans only came to Madagascar about two thousand years ago. The combination of vast, untouched spaces seething with natural life, and human beings just beginning to carve out a stable existence in them, gives a traveler a strange sense of a place that is both ancient and very young. As I took walks in the countryside, among fields of different crops planted by a lazy, winding river, I felt a similarity between this land and pictures I had seen of the middle of America as it was being settled by Europeans-that same combination of the new and the primordial.

Unfortunately, the presence of humans is also eating away at the island's environment. Slash and burn farming techniques, and a rapidly growing population, have halved Madagascar's forest area in the last forty years. Fortunately, the government has started take steps to curb this destruction, while protecting the livelihoods of the local people. One thing all lovers of nature can do to help is visit this wonderful, largely unknown country-money from tourism is central to the government's plan of protecting more and more of the country's natural areas.

So even though those animals from New York are unlikely to find a home in Madagascar, humans willing to buy a plane ticket are more than welcome. Everywhere I went, people were smiling and happy to help, even with my bad French and nonexistent Malagasy. I found reasonable accommodations all over the island, if I just looked a little, and came away from every excursion having seen something I had never seen before, and could probably never see anywhere else. As I was about to board my plane, and waved goodbye to my friend, it was sad to think that I was also leaving behind all the wonders I had found. Still, it was nice to know that if we humans do our part, they will always be there waiting for us.