Lisa Grainger embarks on the ultimate island escape to see how new openings are changing Madagascar's landscape and planning to support local communities.
Photo: Time and Tide
By Bernelee Vollmer
Edward Tucker-Brown lived all over the world as a child, exploring wadis in the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia with Bedouin herders and driving through the deserts and jungles of Africa. But when he got to Madagascar in 2007, he finally found a ruggedness he didn’t want to leave. “Its wildness blows everything out of the water,” he says of his adopted home, where he’s just built his third Madagascar Classic Collection safari camp, Namoroka Tsingy.
Tsara Komba sits on a tiny islet known as Lemur Island. Photo: Time and Tide
The new seven-tent camp sits just outside a national park, the Tsingy de Namoroka, in the island’s northwest. And the area is mind-blowing: 85 square miles of wilderness; six ecosystems, from incredible tsingy—that unreal landscape of limestone towers sometimes referred to as “stone forest”—to wetlands; and all sorts of creatures, including 10 species of lemurs. “There are also 21 species of bats, and the fossils of goodness knows what,” says Tucker-Brown. “If you love the wild, and exploration, then there is nowhere else like it on earth. Madagascar is its own world.”
This lodge owner’s description isn’t hyperbole. Madagascar, literally, is. It’s the only African country with lemurs, but without the rest of the continent’s dangerous wildlife. There are deserts to the south and wet tropical forests to the north. It also has some of the whitest beaches and palest blue Indian Ocean seas, which prompted another adventurer, Philippe Kjellgren, to come to the “eighth continent”—and stay.
Madagascar is the only African country with lemurs, and is home to 10 species of the primate. Photo: Andrew Macdonald
On first appearances, Kjellgren doesn’t seem like the type to settle down amid subsistence farmers and fishermen. The 57-year-old Swede is known for founding online travel agency Kiwi Collection and travel club PK’s List, for which he reviews the world’s finest hotels. But as a teenager he spent four years in Madagascar and it was, he remembered, “one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. I swam in waterfalls, fished from dugouts and explored on my little motorbike.” So in 2020 he went back, hunted down a beautiful beach on the tiny islet of Sainte-Marie off the northeastern coast, and bought a hotel and 100 acres alongside it.
Last September the first guests arrived at Voaara Madagascar, Kjellgren’s vision of the ultimate barefoot destination. The property is certainly dreamy. On a long white beach, amid thick endemic forest, he and his wife, Vi, have built seven one and two-bedroom cottages and a three-bedroom pool villa that’s “a bit Tulum, a bit Ibiza, a bit Africa”. Shaded by woven palm roofs, the interiors are pared back “so you just focus on nature”. Baths are outdoors, meaning guests can watch the stars. The down-topped Naturalmat mattresses are dressed in stone-washed Polish linen sheets (“The very best you can get,” says Vi). Most of the furniture is made by Malagasy artisan carpenters.
Voaara feels organic and natural. Water bubbles up from a fresh-water spring and is warmed by solar energy. Soaps are rich with coconut oil: “When you’ve been to hundreds of hotels, like we have,” says Kjellgren, “you know what the best ones feel like.”
Starry Spanish chef Aleixandre Sarrion has trained the local chefs to concoct the unexpected in the middle of nowhere. For lunch there might be a prawn, mango and avocado salad with an Asian-inspired dressing. Dinner could be on the beach, in a giant woven “bird’s nest”, or at the thatched bar-restaurant – I loved the ceviche, rare beef with green peppercorn sauce, and coconut flan. The bartender, Franco Desire, after whom the bar is named, can concoct about 60 cocktails—or open a bottle of Tintoretto. As Kjellgren says, “If I’m in paradise, I want the best wine.” Once the building is complete there will be 15 private villas, 20 bungalows, a Discovery Center, water sports area, spa and tennis court. Then this will be one of the loveliest beach hotels on the island. The couple are channelling a portion of the profits back into the community. “We don’t have kids, so this is our legacy,” says Kjellgren. “We love Madagascar, and it’s very poor. So if we can help with a clinic, chef school or nature centre, that would be fantastic.”
On another tiny islet, aptly named Lemur Island, or Nosy Komba, lies another iteration of a tropical idyll: Tsara Komba. Set on the side of an extinct volcano, off the less rainy northwestern coast of Madagascar, this little eight-room ecolodge was built by a Frenchman two decades ago and has recently been taken over by the sea-and-safari specialist Time + Tide, which also owns the smart retreat Miavana on the northeastern tip of the island. The lush terraced gardens, full of glossy, iridescent sunbirds darting amid exotic flowers, are the best place to admire the white sails of a traditional dugout dhow turning tangerine in the setting sun.
It’s a place so beloved of Madagascar aficionados that many of the guests sunning themselves under the shaggy beach umbrellas or on the palm-fringed ocean deck return year after year to its wood and thatch villas. Key members of the 40-strong multitalented staff include Tina Hary, a Malagasy chef known for his ginger-tinged ceviches and rich octopus salads, and the adored lodge manager, Nava Rabe, who sprinkles joy as she moves calmly between guests. Part of the warmth and community feel can be explained by the fact that Tsara Komba built a village next door and has hugely improved the residents’ lives. Villagers work at the hotel and catch the (strictly monitored, deep-sea) fish served there. The eco-lodge brings in much-needed cash to fund national parks including the Lokobe forest reserve, full of energetic lemurs, camouflaging geckos and nail-sized chameleons. Tourist money also aids the Ambohibe Turtle Reserve, where I swam with the reptiles, and the island of Tanikely, where I snorkeled amid clouds of rainbow-hued fish (and, sadly, the badly bleached coral now common along the East African coast). Lodges such as these, where the rate per night tops the Madagascar GDP per capita, are lifelines for local communities.
I leave here glowing effortlessly from the overabundant but nutritious food, tropical air and sea – and long nights of rest untroubled by tech. When, hopefully in 2025, more private air charters take to the skies, linking remote spots such as these, Madagascar will be the hottest beach spot on the continent for smart travelers. “It’s like Bali 40 years ago,” proclaims Kjellgren. And having visited 150 countries, and more than 2,000 hotels, he would know.
Read the original article on Condé Nast Traveler.
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