Day 1 – Hello Madagascar!

By Paul S Bryers, July 17, 2026

My BA55 – an A380, the big double-decker – left Heathrow roughly on time, which after Wednesday felt like a personal favour. Jo’burg by 7am.

Hugh Laurie was in my cabin. The Night Manager, Dr House, that Hugh Laurie. I gave him the courtesy of not staring, which cost me something, and left him to his flight.

Transfer at Johannesburg is a two-tier system. Boarding pass and no hold luggage, and you’re through in minutes. Anything else, and may your God bless you and good luck.

Then a small Airlink Embraer 190 to Antananarivo. Neat little jet. Especially next to our A380. Tasty snack. I have low needs at altitude.

And then the first sight of the Madagascar! Verdant with rolling brown mountains.

And through them a river runs; well no actually, many rivers run – mighty, serpentine, brown with the land they’re carrying, looping across the country like they’re in no hurry to leave. You look down and understand, before you’ve landed, that this is a place where things grow and that grows things. 

Tana itself arrives gradually. Antananarivo sits four thousand feet up, and the city doesn’t announce itself so much as accumulate — a scatter of houses on the hilltops, then more, then more, until you understand the hills are the city. Three million people, stacked up the slopes. Then the ground comes up and resolves into detail. Soil red and brown. Settlements gathered around rice paddies, and mud bricks laid out drying in the sun. Cattle – zebu, humped and unbothered – wandering where they please. And closer in, the buildings crowd together up the hillsides, corrugated iron and painted walls, vivid once and now weathered to something softer.

Here’s the thing about those bricks. They’re there because of a man from Perthshire, Scotland.

James Cameron, born Little Dunkeld, 1800, carpenter by trade, missionary by posting. He fetched up in Antananarivo in 1826 and introduced brick-making to Madagascar – and it took so thoroughly that it became the basis of an entire Highland building style. He trained six hundred young Malagasy. He ran the first printing press and printed the Bible in Malagasy. He built the waterworks at the lake in the middle of the city. He made the gunpowder for the Queen. One Scot, most of an industrial revolution.

So the mud bricks drying by the paddies, the thing I was idly looking at traveling from the airport to the hotel – that’s his. I’d flown eleven thousand miles and found a Perthshire man had got there first, in 1826, and left his fingerprints on the ground. 

More on him later. He isn’t finished with this story.

The Radisson Blu Waterfront is a modern tower of little character. Safe, clean, tall. It is not why I came, and that’s fine.

Arrived at hotel at 2:50pm. The tour introduction began at 3 pm. After everything British Airways had done to prevent it, I made my first appointment in Madagascar with ten minutes to spare. I took a quiet moment with that.

Then up – another six hundred feet from the hotel, into the historic Upper Town, our transport zigzagging through streets barely wide enough for it. And on a Friday night the whole of Tana was out in them. Music and dancing. Kids everywhere. Street barbecues going full tilt, spectacular ones, smoke and fire and the smell of it coming through the vehicle windows. A city that had finished the working week and was celebrating it properly, in the road, together.

Which, given what this country has been through in the past year, felt like something more than a Friday night. But that’s for another day’s writing.

Our climb ended at the Lokanga Hotel, up in the Upper Town. A sunset was arranging itself as we arrived  – and it finished the job somewhere around the main course, going down brilliant red and then the Moon and Venus rose over millions of lights coming on across the hills. A delicious local dinner, and the whole glimmering city laid out below us.

Then the music. Seven of them – musicians, singers, dancers – and truly excellent, which I say with feeling, because I’ve sat through enough cruise-port “local artists” to know the difference. This was the real thing, and it didn’t stay polite for long. We were all up and dancing at some point. I will not be circulating footage.

Splendid, is the word. Then back down the mountain to the hotel, and a very well earned bed.