Day one at Anjajavy le Lodge and Madagascar already has us questioning everything we ever thought we knew before. Such is the magic of island life.

Anything I have ever said about Madagascar before this was just words. Before I boarded a plane and flew over her curves and glimpsed her rugged red hills separated by winding rivers gold with the reflection of sunlight. Before I came to meet her, slipping through her narrow roads, past a world where time seems to have stood still, with its French cars from the 60s and 70s sharing the road with man-drawn and pushed carts, past rice paddies, past man, woman and child all out with somewhere to go or someone to share going nowhere with. I feel foolish for ever thinking I could write or talk about the country in any way before. I hope I remember this the next time I try to write about a place I have never been. The truth of a place, its spirit, is lost on you until you see it in person. All words are hot air.

On my first night at a hotel in the capital of Antananarivo, the Ibis Hotel, owned by the same family who owns Anjajavy le Lodge, I met a fellow South African and we shared dinner in the restaurant – a buffet of zebu salad, fish curry, mixed green vegetables and couscous. Sometime during the meal, he commented, “Surely everything that could be said about Madagascar has already been said? How do you possibly write about the island in any unique way that hasn’t been done before?” My answer was convoluted. But now, as I fly over this country on my journey north to Anjajavy le Lodge, I think that all we can do is write, or talk, in a way that is true to ourselves – that is, in a way that speaks of the place through your own eyes.

We may share opinions of a place, but our experiences of them will never be the same. This is my experience. In a world where travel articles are recycled from magazine to magazine and information is copy and pasted from guide books or web pages, the first-hand account is unique. Madagascar is so unlike anything else that the only way to write about it is from experience, truthfully and fully. From the heart.

You can read these words or those from another who has travelled to this island and maybe they will wind their own way into your psyche, laying an impression for you, but you need to see it for yourself. Otherwise it is only words and Madagascar is so much more than words.

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Getting to Anjajavy le Lodge

Thanks to SA Airlink, we flew from Johannesburg in South Africa directly to Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, where we overnighted at the Ibis Hotel, before flying with MTA on a private charter from Antananarivo airport to Anjajavy’s own airstrip.