Days 13 – 14 – Relaxation

Paul S Bryers, August 1, 2026

Long lies in bed, and then the deserted pool and beach, with the odd plunge now and again to cool the Scottish blood.

A couple of humpbacks breaching in the far distance, still at it. A wave from a fin.

The occasional wee boat going by. Mibbies fishing, mibbies not. Mibbies running drugs, mibbies not. Who cares.

Cocktails at night with the lovely Mejdi group.

It is a strange, beautiful and rare thing, to spend fourteen days with twelve people I have either met only once before or who are strangers and come out the other side liking every one of them. That doesn’t always happen. This time it did.

There was mention of a harem. I couldn’t possibly comment.

And now I’m sitting at Heathrow, waiting on the final hop to Glasgow — my last trip outside the UK until December, when I go south to reacquaint myself with certain penguins who still owe me tea.

Madagascar, you were majesty. Every one of your fourteen days.

Day 12 – In which we met Humpback Whales

Paul S Bryers, July 28 2026

What a wonderful day. I’ve seen them in Antarctica and now I’ve seen them here, in Madagascar.

They come here on purpose. Every southern winter, humpback whales leave the cold, food-rich waters off Antarctica and swim the length of the Indian Ocean – thousands of kilometres, without stopping to feed – to breed and give birth in the warm shallows around Madagascar. They spend the summer eating and the winter fasting on what they saved, living off their own blubber for months. The ones we met had come a very long way, and not for us.

And there were many of them.

The sonic sounder marked whale after whale in the water beneath and around us, more sound than we could keep up with.

In the distance, full breaches.  a forty-tonne animal throwing almost its whole body clear of the sea and coming down in an explosion of white. Nobody is entirely sure why they do it. To shed parasites, to signal across distance, to show off, to play, or simply because when you are that size and that powerful, launching yourself out of the ocean may be its own reward. The leading theory is communication – a breach is a percussion note you can hear underwater for miles – but I prefer to think at least some of it is joy.

Closer to us, partial breaches..

Then, close to us, one whale settled into something the guides said was unusual: not the full launch but a partial breach, the head and long pectoral fins heaving up and slapping down, over and over, for a quarter of an hour. Whatever it was saying, it said it many times, and with feeling.

And then the thing that stopped the boat going quiet: a mother with her calf. She had crossed an ocean to give birth in this channel, and the calf beside her – tiny, by humpback standards – will make the return journey south drinking hundreds of litres of her milk a day until it is strong enough for the cold. She fasts the whole time. There is a whole essay in that, about what mothers spend, but I’ll leave it where it lay on the water and not labour it.

We watched the tails rise and descend.

We watched until it was time to go.

One of our whales waved goodbye…

Some days you are simply in the right place at the right time – and in the right ocean.

Days 6 (cont) – 11: In which we bonded with villagers, were visited by spirits, overwhelmed by baobabs, charmed by lemurs and made chocolate

Paul S Bryers, July 28 2026

Day 6 (cont) – A village that had never met a tourist

We continued Day 6 with a visit to Ankadiefajoro, a village of around 400 in the commune of Nandihizana in Manjakandriana district, twenty kilometres east of the capital. It sits immediately north of the RN2, the trunk road from Antananarivo to the port of Toamasina, which carries most of the country’s freight on its back.

The village had never received tourists before. We were the first.

I am not sure I have the words for what happened next, but I’ll try. The whole village turned out – including something like 170 children – and greeted us with singing and dancing and a wall of smiling faces.

There were formal welcomes from the chief/mayor…..

………from an elder woman who looked magnificent in red…….

….and from an elder man who was so delighted that I too was called Paul that he shouted my name at me at intervals for the rest of the afternoon.

Then a tour of a house. Simple, though I suspect one of the grander ones – it still slept ten people and had no toilet. The animals occupied the lower floor. The upper, living area, consisted of a basic kitchen with blackened ceilings from burning charcoal for cooking and heat, a living area with bed, a hallway bedroom and a main bedroom. Toilets are communal. The owners were very proud to show us around, as they should be.

Lunch was a proper occasion, with the mayor and select elders and youth.

We fell into a wonderful exchange with the young people about Céline Dion, Michael Jackson, and what they wanted for themselves and for the village. The food was excellent – especially a rice dessert that takes four days to make and was worth every one of them. Then rum tasting. This village, which has next to nothing, had pushed the boat right out for us.

And then more dancing, until it was no longer clear who was entertaining whom.

Something passed between us and them that afternoon. A bond, for want of a less sentimental word. And it has left me thinking hard about the children. There is no primary school in the village, and the nearest schools are a two-to-three-kilometre walk away, across that busy highway and, they tell us, a river that floods dangerously in the wet season.

And there was this. Two young women from the village had recently passed their university entrance exams. Their families could not find the few hundred dollars a year it would cost to send them. So they will most likely stay in the village, they told us, and marry. Passed the exam. Can’t afford the door.

It seems to me there may be a way for us to help – with the primary, the secondary, and those university places. More on that in due course. It has rather got under my skin.

That evening, a complete change of register: a meeting with Aurelie Kouman, journalist at France 24 Afrique, on Madagascar’s relationship with France, the long shadow of the colonial period, and the growing weight of Russia and China.

From a village that had never seen a tourist to a conversation about great-power competition, in a single day. This country does that to you.

A morning flight, MD703, carried us back from Morondava to Antananarivo, and the west coast gave way once more to the highlands.

Day 7 – Visited by spirits

After breakfast, a visit to a local place of worship for a demonstration of traditional spiritual practice, and a meeting with the community leader.

I found it unsettling, and I could not talk myself out of the feeling that I was watching theatre.

The spirits, we were told, were those of naughty young men and prostitutes, come to possess the villagers in front of us. There was contorting of bodies. There was the simulated stabbing of oneself with knives. There was the drinking of beer. It was vivid and committed and, to my Presbyterian-adjacent Scottish eye, deeply peculiar.

Now – I want to be careful here. These are people’s genuine beliefs, held sincerely, in a tradition far older than my discomfort with it, and it is not my place to sit in a Malagasy village and rule on the authenticity of someone else’s spirits. Ancestor reverence runs deep in Madagascar and deserves more respect than a visitor’s raised eyebrow.

But, I couldn’t shake the sense of performance. Whether that says more about the ceremony or about the sceptical Scot watching it, I genuinely can’t tell you. Possibly the spirits took one look at me and decided I wasn’t worth the effort.

We then flew from Tana to Morondava.

Later, something entirely more terrestrial: a meeting with FANAMBY, a conservation association working on the sustainable management of Madagascar’s natural resources and the protection of its extraordinary biodiversity. They showed us how conservation and local livelihoods have to be made to work together here, because neither survives without the other.

Then a sunset cocktail on the beach. The fishing boats were out, lateen sails leaning into the light -not fishing at this hour, but working as water taxis across the bay. Lovely. And a shark passed by, slung over a shoulder, on its final journey.

Then on to the Palissandre Côte Ouest at Morondava – a genuinely beautiful hotel, and after that day, a welcome one.

Day 8 – Overwhelmed by baobabs

I have been waiting twelve days to write this sentence: In a greenhouse at Kew, barely two weeks ago, I stood beside a baby baobab that had hit the glass ceiling. Today I stood beneath ones that never will.

Giants. Up to a thousand years old and twenty-five metres tall. These are Grandidier’s baobabs, the grandest of them all, and the Avenue is a straight red-sand road running perhaps a kilometre between two rows of them Kings and Queens, with dead-straight, branchless trunks rising into a cobalt sky.

In the dry season they are crowned not with leaves or fruit but with egrets, and the odd pied crow keeping an eye on things.

Three kinds of baobab grow hereabouts, near enough identical but for a darker bark – or bibibibs, as I have decided to call them, because a tree this magnificent can afford a silly name.

Life went on beneath them. Locals cycling, pousse-pousses running, people walking with their whole shop balanced on their heads. And as we left the Avenue for a wee village, we were chased – briefly and without malice – by a zebu-powered cart. Don’t know what horse-power that equates to….

Next up was lemurs. But first, two owls.

They were roosting up in the daylight, unbothered, doing that thing owls do where they pretend not to see you while very much seeing you – most likely white-browed owls, one of Madagascar’s endemic hunters, which spends the day sitting very still being judged by smaller birds and the night doing the judging itself. Beside them, a chameleon, fast asleep, or doing an excellent impression of a leaf that had given up. And then the lemurs.

Red-fronted brown lemur Eulemur rufifrons

Grey-bodied, with a warm rufous cap and pale eyebrow-spots that give it a look of permanent mild surprise. Fruit, leaves, flowers, the odd insect -an easygoing generalist that lives in loose, sociable troops and takes the dry western forest as it comes.

Verreaux’s sifaka Propithecus verreauxi

The famous “dancing sifaka” of the west, and the one you’ll have seen on the television: white as a bar of soap, with a chocolate-brown cap and a black face. It leaps upright between trunks, and on open ground it cannot walk, so it bounds sideways on two legs with its arms thrown up for balance – half ballet, half toddler, entirely wonderful.

One of ours carried a tiny baby clamped to her fur, hitching a ride through the canopy. Delightful is not too strong a word.

Grey mouse lemur Microcebus murinus

One of the smallest primates alive, a palmful of soft grey fur and two enormous eyes. This one peered in and out of its tree-hole and, now and then, came right out to see what the fuss was about – took one look at a crowd of North Americans and a Scotsman, and, I like to think, concluded we were harmless.

On the way back, We caught sone baobabs in the failing light.

Some folks some stayed to catch the baobabs at sunset – I’ve included one of their photos here….

The rest of us made for the hotel pool and its own sunset, which was glorious. We discovered the Golden Parachute, and old acquaintances were strengthened.

Day 9 – Ring-tailed lemur, plants and fishermen

Day 9 began at the Zazamalala Botanical Garden, where ring-tailed lemurs were spotted, before we took to canoes to visit fishing villages along the coast.

The canoe launching was an event in itself: sliding down through the mud to meet the river, dignity optional.

Kingfishers and herons watched us go.

The waterway was busy – boats everywhere, ferrying people across the channels, a whole commuter network with not a road in sight.

At the fishing village the children were all out, hands held up, walking us to the spot where they’d perform their dance. I suspect there was some hope of a dollar or two; when none came, they didn’t seem to mind in the slightest.

The dancing was a joy, with at least one guest and both our guides joining in -Anatolin, it turns out, is quite the mover.

Then a coconut-climbing demonstration, which I attempted, and did not replicate.

Back down at the river, the fishermen had come in laden with sardines. I helped untangle one small fish from a net and had fish-hands for the remainder of the day.

On dry land we took pousse-pousses, and Aziz and Marie made the decision to challenge Anatolin and me to a race. We lost. We also very nearly came a cropper, which felt like losing twice.

Then the market – hats, spices, salted fish, fresh meat, and chillies hot enough to be classed as a weapon.

Day 10 – Home to the Malagasy highlands, and a farewell

We were welcomed with a Hiragasy performance.

Hira gasy -literally “Malagasy song” -is the great folk spectacle of the highlands, and much more than a concert. A troupe in matching, vaguely nineteenth-century dress performs a whole day’s worth of formal oratory, singing, dancing and gentle moral instruction, the speech-making (kabary) as prized as the music. It grew up under the old Merina monarchy, when a good speaker could hold a crowd for hours, and it survives as a living art form – competitive, communal and full of wit.

And the day – and the main tour of the big island – closed with a farewell dinner at La Varangue in the capital. This is a beautiful French- Malagasy restaurant in the world’s foodie maps.

Day 11 – Chocolate, and onwards to Sainte Marie Island and Whales

We started with a chocolate-making workshop with a local cacao cooperative. Madagascar grows some of the finest cocoa on earth, and it turns out I am no chocolatier — but I gave it everything.

It was great fun.

Then to the airport, and onward: to the island of Sainte Marie, where, after a zebu cart ride, we checked into the Princess Bora Lodge for the next 3 nights. The resort is very beautiful, set over several acres and on the West Coast of the Island.

Days 3–6: Trekking the Rain Forest with Beasties and Lemurs

Paul S Bryers: July 22, 2026

Leaving Tana behind us

On Day 3 we headed out from Tana in our jeeps, via Moramanga and Mandraka Park, bound for Andasibe-Mantadia National Park. Four to five hours on mostly sealed roads with slightly more potholes than a typical Glasgow road. Do not attempt in a car, or in a pretend, trendy SUV. Speaking of Glasgow – it’s clear the Tartan Army were here overnight. Couple of traffic cones about the place.

The outskirts of Tana were simple clay brick houses with the occasional larger one among them, and paddy fields of young rice coming up yellow-green, watercress, taro.

Along the way, folk were doing their washing in wee rivers and laying the clothes out on the rocks to dry –  a colourful sight. Some looked especially pleased with their fresh gear.

Terracing became more evident as we left the city behind. And then, finally, the first glimpse of the rain forest.

Mandraka Park

We stopped for a wee hike. Chameleons – a couple of them, doing that slow deliberate rocking walk they do, as though checking the branch is still there before committing to it.

Wasp.

Butterfly.

Some flowers, including, surprisingly, hydrangeas.

Cool ferns.

Giant bamboo.

After the stroll, a bit of swinging was in order. Lynne and I were quite happy together. Her husband smiled. At least I think that’s what he was doing.

Planting trees with GERP

Then tree planting with GERP, in beautiful hilly surroundings.

Team Mejdi got roughly 150 trees in the ground in about an hour, and we were very pleased with ourselves. The new trees seemed pleased too. Mibbies they’ll write to us with their progress.

Andasibe-Mantadia National Park

Then on to the National Park and our accommodation. The road turned to earth and mud, tortuous twists and turns, some serious holes. Great fun.

Eventually, Vakona Forest Lodge — home for the next three nights.

Not luxurious, but more than adequate: an airy common area and individual basic cottages with bathrooms. Lovely sounds all night of croaking frogs (probably deadly) and buzzing insects (definitely deadly).

Into the rain forest and lemurs!

Over the next two days we set off to find lemurs in the rain forest. We were very successful, thanks to our excellent guides.

Leaving the lodge on the first morning, a small bird was working the flowers beside the path – hovering, wings a blur, drinking, sometimes, on the wing. Moved so fast it was difficult to see, never mind capture. I did my best.

Hah, you clever folks are thinking hummingbird! It looked exactly like a hummingbird. It is not a hummingbird. There are no hummingbirds in Madagascar, nor anywhere in the Old World. That was a souimanga sunbird, separated from the hummingbirds of the Americas by tens of millions of years and related to them not at all. Same problem – how do you drink from a flower without landing on it – and the same answer arrived at twice, independently, on opposite sides of the planet.

Madagascar does this constantly. It’s one of the things I’ve come for.

We met our guides Thierry and his sons at the trailhead and set off.

Conditions were dry – it is the dry season, after all – and the “paths” ranged from easy to quite steep and slippy, the flora getting very dense at times.

As we neared the lemurs, the paths were left behind altogether and we pushed through plants that seemed determined to trip us up, decapitate us, or draw blood.

We were brave.

Then the calls went up. Indri lemurs! They had spotted us long before we spotted them. Quite a spooky sound.

Note: I think I have the species right. If not, who cares — they are all fabulous.

> Indri lemur

Indri indri

The largest lemur alive, and it looks it. The size of a small child, black and white in a pattern no two wear quite the same, round fab fuzzy ears, and almost no tail at all – a stub, where every other lemur has a length of it. Eats leaves, mostly, which is a low-energy way to live and explains the sitting about.

Then it sings. A wailing, sliding, air-raid siren of a call that a family group builds together and holds, and which carries two miles through the forest. It is the loudest thing in Madagascar and one of the strangest sounds any animal makes.

The Malagasy call it babakoto. No indri has ever survived long in a zoo, anywhere, ever. They will not be kept. You want to hear one, you come here.

> Black-and-white ruffed lemur

Varecia variegata

The show-off. Panda-marked, with a great ruff of white fur round the face like a Tudor collar, and a scream that goes through the forest like a car alarm. A screaming queen really…

Mostly fruit, and it is one of the great pollinators –  it shoves its snout into the flower bracts of the traveller’s palm, which nothing else is strong enough to prise open, and walks off dusted in pollen to do it again. The palm relies on it entirely.

Also this: it builds a nest, has twins or triplets, then parks them in it and goes off foraging. Almost no other primate on earth does that. Everyone else carries the baby. This one leaves it in a basket. Seems very sensible to me. 

Delightful and very cute, as I said at the time. Also loud enough to be heard from the next valley.

> Red-bellied lemur

Eulemur rubriventer

Chestnut-brown and dense-furred, with a bare patch of white skin under each eye that looks exactly like a permanent teardrop. Fruit, flowers, leaves, the occasional insect.

Males and females look different, which is unusual enough – but the interesting part is the arrangement. They pair up and stay paired, and the male does a serious share of carrying the infant about. Monogamous, involved, and weeping slightly. A model of modern fatherhood. This would have been me had things been different, although I do do the weeping. 

> Common brown lemur

Eulemur fulvus

The one you’d draw if asked to draw a lemur. Grey-brown, dark face, pale eyebrow patches, sexes almost identical, which is rare in this family.

Fruit and leaves and whatever’s going. And a genuinely odd trick: it’s cathemeral, meaning active in the day and the night, drifting between the two as the season and the moonlight suit. Not diurnal, not nocturnal. Very few primates on earth do this.

No fixed hours. Just gets up when it fancies it. Aye, fine, that suits me. 

> Eastern grey bamboo lemur

Hapalemur griseus

Small, compact, grey, short-faced, with a serious expression – usually found clamped to a bamboo stem looking mildly put upon.

Bamboo. That’s it, essentially. Shoots, pith, leaves. A food almost nothing else can be bothered with, because it’s tough, low in nutrition and laced with cyanide. This family has specialised so hard into it that one relative eats a daily dose that would flatten a man several times over.

How they survive it is, remarkably, still not settled. There’s a liver enzyme that converts cyanide into something less lethal, and possibly a gut microbiome helping out, and they do supplement by eating soil – though that seems to be for minerals rather than any antidote. Beyond that, the honest scientific position is a shrug.

They have been eating poison every day for millions of years and have not yet explained themselves. It’s about time to come clean my furry friends! 

> Diademed sifaka

Propithecus diadema

The acrobat, and one of the largest and most spectacular of all the lemurs – silver-grey, with orange-gold limbs and a dark face ringed by a pale crown, which is where the diadem comes in. Long-limbed, silky, built entirely for the vertical: it clings to a trunk, launches, and crosses thirty feet of air between trees without appearing to hurry.

Leaves, seeds, flowers. Named for the alarm call – shi-fak – which is exactly what it sounds like.

And on the ground it cannot walk. The legs are wrong for it. So it stands up and bounds sideways on two feet, arms out for balance, in a series of hops that looks like nothing else in nature and has been described, generously, as dancing. I include a photo from the net. 

> Other flora and critters

We also encountered a lovely Parsons chameleon (young male) ……

……and a mossy leaf tailed gheko. How the guide found the chameleon-like gheko is beyond me – I can’t even see it in the photo. 

During the trek we came across a lot of interestingly shaped trees and vines…..

….some fungi….

…..fig fruits……

…..and a wee pill millipede…

As the sun lowered we headed back to the Lodge for our third night. What a fantastic couple of days.

The night trek

That evening there was a night walk. I could not attend due to – well, let’s say I had to stay near a loo. I have included some team and internet photos of lemurs observed.

> Goodman’s mouse lemur

Microcebus lehilahytsara

Fits in your palm. Fifty grams of russet fur and two enormous eyes, out only at night, moving through the branches like something spilled. Fruit, insects, nectar, gum. Fattens its tail as a larder for the lean months.

Only described as its own species in 2005, and named for the biologist Steve Goodman — lehilahytsara is Malagasy for “good man.” Somebody got a species named after them and a pun in the same stroke.

> Eastern woolly lemur

Avahi laniger

Nocturnal, woolly, and shaped like a soft toy that’s been left out in the rain. Big amber eyes, small ears buried in fur, permanently startled expression. Leaves – a hard living at night, when it’s cold and leaves are all there is.

Pairs for life, and sleeps through the day out in the open, the two of them clinging to the same branch pressed together, entirely visible to anything that looks up. Its whole survival strategy is to be extremely still and hope.

It works more often than it should.

> Night time Party Chameleon

> Night frog

Summary

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

The indri will not live in a zoo – not anywhere, not ever, no matter who has tried. The bird at the flower was never a hummingbird. The bamboo lemur eats a poison nobody has fully explained. Every one of these animals has arrived at its own answer, alone, on an island that broke away from everywhere else 88 million years ago and was left to work things out for itself.

Which means there is no borrowing them. No lending them out, no seeing them somewhere more convenient. If you want to hear an indri sing, you come to this forest, in this country, and you stand still under these particular trees and wait.

We stood still. It sang. We listened.

Definitely worth the potholes.

Photo credits: My DSLR camera zoom broke, so all my videos and photos are from my iPhone 16 Pro Max. Four of the photos are from team members with proper cameras and 3 are off the internet. A big thank you to them.

Day 2 – Exploring Antananarivo (Tana)

By Paul S Bryers, July 18, 2026

We started the day at 8 am with a presentation by national TV anchor Sibella Randriamazava, followed by a Q&A.

Ms Randriamazava was quite up front about the political instability of her country since the September 2025 uprising by its Gen Z population.

Still, she held out hope that the September 2027 presidential elections will go ahead, and that the country’s desperate need for stable water and electricity – and for a more democratic government – will win through.

We then set off in our trusty wee bus for the top of the ridge about the city….

…..and then onto Ambohipotsy Memorial Church. It stands on the spot where Rasalama, the first Malagasy Christian martyr, was speared to death in 1837, and was built by the London Missionary Society’s architect James Sibree – an Englishman, as it happens – opening in 1868.

The church looks much like a Scottish Protestant kirk – neither the cold white of a Free Presbyterian church nor the gauche, unseemly richness of a Catholic one. Just good stone and wood, plain windows, hard pews and a sensible organ.

Our guide mentioned a striking survival of older belief alongside the Christian faith: famadihana, the “turning of the bones.” Some Malagasy families – Christians among them – exhume their dead after a year or so, wrap them in fresh shrouds, keep them at home for a few days, and then return them to the tomb.

Standing in a kirk raised over a martyr’s grave, it was a good reminder of how thoroughly the old and the new are interleaved here.

We moved on to the Queen’s Palace (Manjakamiadana), high on the same ridge. The original was a wooden palace (beautiful mahogany), built for Queen Ranavalona I around 1839 by the Frenchman Jean Laborde; it was James Cameron – the Scotsman who introduced the mud brick to Madagascar – who encased it in stone in 1869 for Ranavalona II.

The whole Rova was gutted by fire in 1995, leaving only Cameron’s stone shell; the restoration was completed only at the end of 2025, when the palace reopened, newly renamed Rovan’i Madagasikara – so what we walked through is very nearly brand new.

It offers magnificent views over the city some 600 feet below:

• Lake Anosy, dug by Cameron in the shape of a heart, with a memorial on its central island – the “Black Angel,” a French monument of 1927 to the Malagasy who died in the First World War;

• National football stadium.

Before leaving the palace we took a group photo – what a handsome bunch!

Then the Fiangonana — the royal chapel within the Rova (fiangonana is simply the Malagasy word for “church”).

For lunch I had lobster with vanilla flambé – a spectacular production….and spectacular flavours.

We had a quick meander through the National Photography museum – it was OK.

Surprisingly, we spotted a Madagascar blue pigeon – unusual to see these in the city. The plumage of this species is dominated by shades of blue, as the name suggests; the neck and throat are silvery blue-grey and the plumes are filamentous, the upper parts are silvery-grey, and the breast blue-grey going to deep blue on the belly. The tail is deep red, and the head is blue with a large red patch of bare skin around the yellow eye. The feet are red and the small bill is greenish with a yellow tip.

After this excitement, we trotted off to Tana market – huge, endless stuff, very, very busy.

One more custom our guide described, which I’ll set down for the record: in the traditional circumcision rite (famorana, or didim-poitra), the removed foreskin is ceremonially swallowed by the maternal grandfather or uncle, typically wrapped in or taken with a piece of banana. I’ll just leave that there.

We had cocktails in the Radisson Roof Bar and then dinner in their restaurant. Dinner was nothing special but OK.

We head out to pick up our jeeps and to head to the Rain Forest at 7.30 am tomorrow.

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.

Day 0 Addendum — In which I go to Madagascar via Chiswick

By Paul S Bryers, July 17, 2026

I didn’t mention it yesterday, and I should have…..

You cannot walk round Kew without him. Not officially – there’s no plaque, no statue at the gate. He’s just there, in the way the place is arranged and the way you find yourself looking at it, because he taught most of us how to look at anything green or that moves in the first place.

Davidius attenboroughii

Endemic to the United Kingdom.

Range: global.

Last week became the oldest person ever nominated for an Emmy – twice, in the same year, at a hundred.

Long lived.

Well preserved.

Turned one hundred in May 2026.

Voice of the natural world for seven decades and counting.

More species named after him than most of us have friends. A spider. A dinosaur. A ghost shark. An echidna. A pitcher plant somewhere quietly digesting a rat in his honour.

But Kew is where he stops being a voice and starts being a man who turns up.

In 2018 he reopened the Temperate House, restored. In 2023 he handed over thirty-one seeds of the toromiro, a tree from Rapa Nui that no longer exists in the wild – gone from its own island, alive only in cultivation, some of it now growing under that same glass.

And in 1985, while they were still building the Princess of Wales Conservatory, he climbed down into the foundations in a hard hat and buried a time capsule. Seeds. Basic food crops. Endangered species. Things he thought we might need later.

It is to be opened in 2085. I’d say we will definitely need them. He was fifty-nine at the time. He did the arithmetic. He buried it anyway.

I stood on top of it yesterday, looking for a baobab, and had no idea.

Darwin looked at a flower and described a moth he would never live to see. A hundred and thirty years later, a man knelt in a hole at Kew and buried seeds he will never see planted.

That’s the job, I think. For all of us. You describe a thing or a place properly and you hand it on. Whether you’re there for the ending is not the point.

Aye, fine. Attenborough is my hero. I’m not embarrassed about it.

https://mejditours.com/home-mejdi/

Day 0 — In which I go to Madagascar via Chiswick

By Paul S Bryers, July 16, 2026

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The Island of Madagascar.

Is it all naughty penguins? Skipper, Kowalski, Rico and Private, plotting away.

Not one of them Malagasy. The penguins are from Antarctica — they wandered into someone else’s film (Madagascar) entirely, and the actual locals were the lemurs, King Julien and Maurice and Mort. I’ll be meeting all three species in person next week.

The penguins I’ll catch up with in December, on my third trip to that continent. We’ll reacquaint. I’ll put it to them, again, that they owe me tea at the Willow Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street. Mackintosh chairs. Proper china. Cake stand. They’ve never once turned up.

I digress.

Madagascar is a gem of an Isle and has attracted me for years. Tantalising me with tales of funky flora and fauna.

British Airways was going to whisk me there last night, enveloped in Club World.

Err. Well. I’m sure they will. Just today rather than yesterday.

“We regret to announce that Flight BAXXXX is delayed… is delayed… is cancelled.”

So I spent the night at the Sofitel LHR Terminal 5, and a rather fab dinner, courtesy of BA. As is my wont, I turned 24 hours of delay into an opportunity — Kew Gardens!

Which is how I came to meet Madagascar for the first time in a greenhouse in London, four miles from a house Chris and I used to live in on Clarence Road.

So, went to Richmond via Chiswick to get to Antananarivo. Makes sense to somebody.

Three things Malagasy in the Princess of Wales Conservatory, Kew Botanical Gardens:

No, not Diana, as everyone assumes. Princess Augusta, who founded the place in 1759. Diana only opened the building in 1987 and got the credit anyway, which is very Diana.

This relatively recently built glasshouse is beautifully designed, with a substantial part actually being below ground level. It has arid, tropical, etc rooms…

The Madagascar plant bed: In the arid zone. Spiky, succulent, hostile things from the southwestern spiny forests — the sort of plants that look like they’d rather you didn’t. In eight days I’ll be somewhere that grows these for free.

Darwin’s orchid, unique to Madagascar: Angraecum sesquipedale, sitting in the Conservatory with a nectar spur a foot long. Can’t show you a photo as it flowers for Christmas — clearly a Christian plant. Darwin looked at it and said: there must be a moth with a foot-long tongue. There is no such moth, said everyone. There was such a moth. They found it forty-one years later, and twenty-one years after Darwin died. He never saw it. He just knew. Totally spooky.

The famous baobab tree: Not unique to Madagascar, but near enough — of the world’s nine baobab species, six live only there. I found the Kew one. Err, or so I’ve decided. Kew grows one indoors and it grows so enthusiastically they have to prune it to stop it going through the roof. Mine had already got there. There was no label I could get to, and no one around to ask. So I have decided it’s a baobab. It has the right leaves, it’s in the right bed, and it has clearly hit the ceiling, which is the main thing. It’s a young one…..

…..wait till it grows into Daddy and takes over London….

In a week I’ll see one that doesn’t need my permission.

Kew also offered various other delights such as the giant water lilies and carp and a very large frog within the Conservatory….

…other world cacti….

Palm House and Temperate House made me feel a bit like a nap…..

Henry Moore is on show too — tortured bodies, lots of elbows and knees, lying about on the grass. In a garden where everything is straining upward for the light, the sculpture is the only thing not trying to get out.

And so now it’s Thursday evening. I’m sitting in the BA Lounge awaiting my 7pm departure to Jo’burg. “We regret to announce that Flight BAXXXX is delayed… is…”

Just joking. I hope. Come back tomorrow to see what happened.

Days 4–7: The Rain Goddess, The Land of Temptation, and The Great Cunard Chase

By Paul Bryers, June 18, 2026

The final few days on Coll were, I am obliged to report, unremarkable.

Damn you, Mariamman!

For the uninitiated: Mariamman is the South Indian goddess of rain, among other responsibilities. How she came to take up residence over a small Hebridean island in early summer I cannot say – but take it up she did, and she settled in with the contentment of a guest who has located the good whisky and intends to stay for it.

The rain came down for two days. Heavy. Proper heavy, no mibbies – the variety that arrives horizontally and requests no permission.

We laughed.

What else is one to do?

This is the Highlands and Islands. One does not come here for the meteorological dependability. One comes for the scenery, the family, and – it transpires – the rain.

And still: best of the Highlands and Islands and all that. We enjoyed ourselves regardless, this being both the family tradition and, frankly, the only option on the table.

We tried out the new restaurant – The Urchin – excellent fresh see food, meat pies and a variety of freshly foraged seaweeds. The chef has come from his successful restaurant on Isle of Canna.

Between downpours, I looked at a couple of land plots. Both spectacular. One with planning permission in principle…..

the other without – as yet….

I am considering them. I am, however, equally conscious that two years of Law School are bearing down upon me at speed, and that the acquisition of a Hebridean building plot may not be the ideal accompaniment to first-year property law.

So I am thinking. And waiting.

I shall allow that sentence to sit unaccompanied for a moment, because those who know me will recognise its rarity. Thinking. And waiting. An unusual situation for me, and one I am observing in myself with a degree of scientific interest.

When the time finally came to leave, the weather – with the exquisite comic timing for which Scotland is justly celebrated – turned hot and sunny.

We laughed.

We shared the boat home with a wedding party. Some sixty guests, very posh, drawn from Edinburgh and England, turned out to a standard rarely witnessed on a CalMac sailing. And among the guests were – gloriously, unmistakably – one Glasgow couple – red hair, smiling, impossible to understand. I am fairly confident they were having the most fun of anyone aboard.

The sail back to Oban was beautiful. Genuinely so. Calm water, the islands sliding past, the whole company in good spirits.

And then: drama!

At one point we were pursued across the water by none other than Cunard’s Queen Anne – twelve decks, 3000 guests, 1501 crew -bearing down with intent. I am pleased to report that we were not caught. We lost her. She is a naughty one, that Anne.

And so concludes another annual pilgrimage to Coll.

We arrived five, became three; losing two of the three to The Disaster before the first afternoon was out.

At the hotel, we endured dry venison and staff who had clearly left their personalities on the mainland.

At the Urchin we had a excellent fair.

We weathered two days of a borrowed Hindu rain goddess.

We were tempted by land we have wisely – for now – declined to buy.

And we outran a Cunard liner on the way home.

A good week, by any honest reckoning.
Would I return?

Reader, we have already booked next year; and, Reader, I am conscious of those land plots. Draw your own conclusions.

By Paul Bryers, June 10, 2026

Days 1–3: The Annual Pilgrimage, The Attrition, The Disaster and The Recovery

The annual family pilgrimage to the Isle of Coll is upon us. A little earlier in the season than usual. That’s fine. Coll will be Coll regardless of date: windswept, beautiful, and entirely indifferent to our scheduling preferences.

Pre-booking, we were looking at approximately eight participants. Not a bad turnout for a family of 18.75 people. (I acknowledge the 0.75. There is context. There is always context. We shall leave it there.)

18.75 became 8 fairly on; Humphhhhh….

Eight became five as departure approached, family duties having intervened in the way they do – silently, inevitably, and with impeccable timing.

Five felt manageable. Five is a solid number for Coll. Five can occupy a beach, navigate a ferry, and reach consensus on dinner.

Then came Day One.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sunday evening was spent in Oban, which is to say it was spent correctly. Oban in the evening is a particular pleasure – the bay, the distillery, the McCaig’s Folly brooding on the hill like a Roman emperor who took a wrong turn somewhere north of Stirling. We were refreshed and optimistic. We had no idea what was coming.

Monday. Six o’clock. The alarm. The ferry departs at 7:15 am, and CalMac waits for no one – not even a family reduced from 18.75 to 5 who have been awake since the middle of the night rehearsing their packing.

We arrived at Coll at ~ 9:55 am, as scheduled, as civilised, as calm as five people can be after a ferry crossing.

Straight to Arrol House, where we stayed last year, and which remains a genuinely lovely place to be – beautiful setting, comfortable rooms, and a proprietorial warmth that the island seems to breed.

We headed to Wall Beach at noon.

And here we must pause.

Here we must observe a moment of quiet respect for the remainder of the group, because what happened next – what happened at Wall Beach on a sunny Monday lunchtime on the Isle of Coll – changed the arithmetic of the holiday irrevocably.

One of our party fell.

Several loud cracks were heard.

Not good cracks. Not the crack of, say, a twiglet, it indeed a twig underfoot, or a sharp breeze off the Atlantic, or the particular percussion of a windbreak being erected.

Oh no.

A crack of the variety that causes everyone present to look at each other with an expression that means: that sounded expensive.

The next boat back to Oban. X-rays. Inverness. The full procedure. A boy is now on and recovery has started.

And so, then there were three.

Mum, Paul, and Niall — the survivors, the remnant, the hardened core of a once-mighty expedition of 18.75 / regarded one another across the sands of Wall Beach and silently agreed: we carry on. We are Scottish and we carry on until the end! Freedom!

We stayed for another three hours at Wall Beach. Lunch was produced. It was windy, not the lunch, but the weather.

Coll windy, which is a category of its own – and the windbreaks went up with the practised speed of people who have done this before and know better than to argue with the elements.

The sky was bright; the air was cool; and then, with the inevitability of all Hebridean afternoons, came the drip.

Then drop. Then drip.

We retreated under the rock face and stood there like a small, resolute geological feature ourselves, watching the rain, eating our sandwiches, and declining to be defeated.

Eventually we returned to Arrol House.

Pre-drinks were taken. A lasagne of genuine distinction appeared, as if by consolatory magic. We retired to the lounge, found the whisky, and reminisced. The evening, against all odds, was excellent.

Tuesday was a late start, which was the very least Tuesday owed us.

Feall Bay.

A long, sweeping stretch of Atlantic beach at the west end of the island – the kind of beach that makes you understand why people become obsessed with the Hebrides and start googling building plots.

Oops, awwwww….

We walked it end to end, which is the only right way to walk it, and lounged for a while in that restorative manner only available to people who have recently survived personal catastrophe and are owed a sit-down.

Lunch was had.

Then a further walk along the three-quarter mile beach, exposed to the elements in every meaningful sense.

The stingers were out. Dead.

The shells were remarkable.

Niall and Mum looked quite yachty on the beach…

The small ground flowers that push up through the machair – technically sea rocket and bird’s-foot trefoil, but I prefer to think of them simply as the island’s way of showing off — were enchanting.

I love them. I cannot explain this. I simply love them.

Then there were some magic mushrooms in a cow pat – nope!

In the evening we went to the Isle of Coll Hotel.

The Isle of Coll Hotel is, under normal circumstances, a place of good cheer, reliable food, and the kind of atmosphere that makes you forgive the weather.

These were not normal circumstances.

The venison was dry. The venison was chewy. The venison had, at some earlier point in its existence, presumably been quite good, but whatever had happened to it in the intervening period was a matter between the kitchen and its conscience.

The staff, it must be noted, had left their personalities elsewhere. Perhaps in storage. Perhaps lending them to another establishment.

We ate, we paid, we left, and we resolved — with a unanimity that required no discussion — that Saturday’s dinner at The Urchin, the new restaurant we had heard encouraging things about, would be better. It could not be worse.

Wednesday brought Struan Beach and a return to form.

The beach was magnificent, the weather was bright in that bracing Hebridean way that puts colour in your cheeks and sand in places you won’t discover until Thursday, and the mood was restored.

We lounged. We walked. We were peaceful.

On the way back to Arrol House, we noticed a building plot for sale.

Investigations are ongoing.

I am saying nothing further at this time.