With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we’ve launched a new series, The World Through a Lens, in which photojournalists help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet’s most beautiful and intriguing places. This week, Marcus Westberg shares a collection of photographs from Madagascar. (His last essay explored wildlife in Zambia.)
Situated some 250 miles off the coast of southeast Africa, Madagascar — the fourth largest island on Earth — is a world of its own.
Sometimes referred to as the eighth continent, Madagascar split from the Indian subcontinent 88 million years ago and the African mainland some 47 million years before that, so it is perhaps not surprising that about 90 percent of its fauna and flora is found nowhere else on earth.
Much of the island’s megafauna (including nearly 10-foot-tall elephant birds and lemurs the size of gorillas) has been driven to extinction. And some 90 percent of the original forest habitat here has been lost since humans first arrived some 2,000 years ago — first from the Malay Archipelago and, much later, from mainland Africa, Arabia, India and Europe.
But Madagascar still boasts a panoply of unique plants and animals, from numerous species of baobab trees and endemic orchids to chameleons, giraffe-necked weevils and the bizarre-looking aye-aye.
My monthlong trip to Madagascar — half of which was dedicated to exploring on my own, and half to somehow guiding 14 other visitors — didn’t get off to the best start. On the very first day (and for the first and only time in my life) one of my cameras was stolen.
Nevertheless, excited to be somewhere completely new, I left the hustle and bustle of Antananarivo, the capital, and soon found myself completely mesmerized by the country and its cultures.
I spent several days slowly traveling by boat down the Tsiribihina River. I learned about razana (ancestor spirits) and fady (taboos, hundreds of which dictate much of local life) from the crew around the campfire in the evenings. We slept under the stars and finally arrived at the spectacular limestone mazes of Tsingy de Bemaraha — which aptly means “where one cannot walk barefoot.”
Madagascar’s west coast is hot and dry, characterized by dusty roads, rocky outcrops and giant baobab trees, which I spent much of my time either gawking at or photographing.
At one point we drove through a horizon-to-horizon swarm of locusts.
Making my way inland again by road, I spent the next part of my trip exploring the rain forests in the central and eastern parts of the island, looking for lemurs — there are over a hundred different species, so there’s plenty to see — and chameleons, along with anything else the unfailingly brilliant local guides were able to find for me.
The highlight, undoubtedly, was seeing an aye-aye, the world’s largest nocturnal primate: a delightfully odd creature which, unfortunately, tends to be viewed as a harbinger of evil. (This hasn’t helped its chances of survival.)
Madagascar is expansive, and travel is slow, so in the month I spent there in 2015, I only saw and experienced a tiny fraction of what the island and its people have to offer.
Whether or not I make it back in the future, however, my time on the eighth continent created memories that will last me a lifetime.
