Verreaux's Sifaka, the species of lemur that the people of southern Madagascar's Androy region call "the dancer", has whitish fur and a black face. It looks a bit like a vervet monkey or a Siamese cat, albeit one with the ability to walk on its hind legs. In addition to springing from tree to tree, the animals can stagger upright along the ground with their arms flailing in the air, hence the nickname.
To say that dancing lemurs are funny or, worse, "cute" would be a cliché. Let me pass on, instead, a Malagasy folk tale about their origin. Once, an evil stepmother hit her stepdaughter in the face with a soot-covered ladle. This sent her flying into the trees. There she, and her descendants, stayed with the black mask on their faces, forever above the human fray.
I like the story because it endows the primates, unique to Madagascar and ogled by camera-snapping tourists, with a certain sulky dignity. I also like it because it suggests the lemurs are somehow more evolved than people and opted to live in trees as a rational choice. In fact, the animals forked off from our common simian ancestors on their own evolutionary path after Madagascar split from the hypothetical super-continent of Gondwanaland millions of years ago.
The island's ancient, isolated natural habitats, under serious threat from deforestation, abound in unique flora and fauna, many species of which are limited to a single scrap of woodland.
Although I had heard and read much about Madagascar before going, I wasn't prepared for how thoroughly different it is. Although the island's natural heritage is extraordinary, it was the human culture that most surprised me, a visitor from mainland Africa.
While southern Africa's Bantu language-speaking peoples subsist on cornmeal and are dark-skinned, the Malagasy live on rice and look Asian. Their ancestors arrived from what are now Malaysia and Indonesia about 2,000 years ago. The Malagasy speak a language said to share 80 per cent of its content with south-east Asian tongues. But a Malay-speaker from Singapore resident in Tana, as residents call the polysyllabic capital city Antananarivo, tells me she can barely understand a word.
Surrounded by rice paddies, Tana is made up of antique houses with sharply peaked roofs built on hills, which give it a fairy-tale quality. The city is laced with Parisian-style stone staircases, tunnels and other sturdy public works from the French colonial era. Ducks and geese scrabble around in the dust among the vendors and street urchins, as in a Hogarth engraving. The Queen's Palace, inhabited by Madagascar's last monarchs and damaged in a fire in 1995, overlooks the city. Marc Ravolamanana, the country's businessman-turned-president, inhabits a house perched on another precipice and moves through Tana in a traffic-stopping motorcade of wailing black limousines.
Despite the presidential pomp, Madagascar is as poor as its poorest neighbours in Africa, a consequence of history and climate. Cyclones sweep across the island every year between November and April, wreaking havoc on its already-taxed infrastructure.
Madagascar has weathered several bumpy political transitions since independence in 1958 - most recently in 2002 - and experimented with socialism from 1975 to 1991. The Malagasy joke that they are "the most Asian of the Africans and the most African of the Asians".
I was told the Malagasy pray facing north-east, towards Asia. Reverence for ancestors is central to their culture but, say some, an impediment to development. Foreign aid donors, for example, have struggled to introduce higher-yielding methods of cultivating rice because the people prefer traditional ways practised by their forefathers, and the island remains a net exporter of the staple.
A Malagasy aristocrat can detail his lineage to the 18th century, one expat in Tana told me, but if you ask him about his plans for next year, you may draw a blank. French educational and legal traditions hamper Madagascar's ability to integrate into the world economy, he says. "They can quote Voltaire and Sartre but they can't read a balance sheet. There are no electricians, no plumbers."
I wouldn't claim to understand the roots of Madagascar's underdevelopment but I did experience its symptoms. Unlike wealthier Mauritius, which is styling itself as a 21st-century "cyber-island", Madagascar opted out of the fibre-optic cable laid a few years ago linking South Africa to Asia, so internet and credit-card transactions are unavailable or slow. The roads are as bad as any I've travelled in Angola or Mozambique but, unlike those countries, Madagascar never suffered a post-colonial war. Seeking to avoid them, I travelled on Air Madagascar, which got me around, albeit with reliable delays. I was told its pilots use old-fashioned visual methods when landing at provincial airports, which lack radar, and sensibly turn back if they encounter bad weather.
I spent three nights in the south in and around Fort-Dauphin. This port city, set amid steep hills and patches of rainforest, is reminiscent of the South Pacific, French visitors say. Shipwrecks litter the harbour, romantically named the "Bay of Galleons". I lingered long enough for a bit of business and a beer at the Miramar restaurant, perched on a hillside overlooking the sea. A World Bank-funded commercial port capable of hosting cruise ships is due to begin construction next year but, for now, it feels like the end of the world.
From Fort-Dauphin I headed for an overnight visit to Berenty, a frequent stop for visitors to Madagascar. Eco-purists scoff that the small reserve, with its large lemur population, is more like a zoo than the wild. But that makes it easier to view wildlife up close. The reserve, privately owned by successive generations of a French family, has three kinds of lemurs visible in the day, including les danseurs, and two nocturnal species, as well as indigenous tortoises and bats. Some sensitive visitors, I was told, break into tears at their first lemur sighting.
I did not weep - my instinct was to laugh, as I first did when I heard a treeful of ring-tailed lemurs calling a lost member of their group back to the fold with loud, plaintive wails. (Brown lemurs snort like pigs.) But I did find the animals' strong and sophisticated social cohesion moving. At night a guide from the reserve takes visitors, flashlights in hand, in search of the small, elusive nocturnal lemurs who inhabit the south's distinctive spiny forest. With a good guide, you can spot them in the crooks of trees by day. They sleep with their eyes open, like tiny zombies.
Martin Nicoll, a senior conservation adviser for the World Wildlife Fund based in Madagascar, told me that ecotourism is contributing to the country's economy and, when practised responsibly, giving local communities positive economic incentives to check deforestation and preserve their natural patrimony. Malagasy peasants' felling of trees for charcoal or slash-and-burn agriculture is rational behaviour, he and others point out, in one of the world's poorest countries. "Tourism really has contributed positively in many ways to helping change mentalities," he says.
Madagascar gets barely 300,000 foreign visitors a year, a fraction of the number that visit Kenya or South Africa.
Back in Tana, I got a glimpse of some of the island's other fauna at the city zoo. The place is, predictably, a bit depressing but quite informative, with ÂÂseveral animal and plant species on display, including the fosa, a russet-coloured feline whose diet includes lemurs.
The capital's other attractions include the Queen's Palace and the former Prime Minister's Palace, a grand exhibition space under a dusty glass cupola. You can see royal artefacts there including King Radama I's red velvet throne and a portrait of the fierce-looking Queen Ranavalona I (she of the palace). Tana's premier cultural sight is the Ambohimanga royal hill, about 20km outside the city. The complex was built by King Andrianampoinimerina (1788-1810) who, with his descendants, consolidated hegemony over the island under his Merina tribe.
Apart from sightseeing, I enjoyed just hanging around in Tana. The city is safe to walk, even at night, though if you are a foreigner you will be solicited by the city's many sex workers, whether female, male or transvestite. If paid sex is not on your agenda, there are good souvenirs to buy in Tana - handicrafts, T-shirts, vanilla pods (one of the country's principal exports). There is excellent French food, including foie gras and freshly baked baguettes, as well as Malagasy fare. I sampled a stew of zebu, chicken and greens over a glass of Cave de Fianarantsoa at the Tatao Restaurant in a downtown hotel. La Varangue, the charming French-run hotel where I stayed, has an excellent restaurant and a bar serving home-made rum steeped in cinnamon, lemon or ginger.
The rooms at La Varangue had television with four French and two Malagasy channels but no CNN or BBC. I tried to keep up with Malagasy events, at least, by studying the crime blotter and the baffling political cartoons in L'Express, a local French-language newspaper. Calls and messages on my South African cell phone came in faintly or (I discovered later) did not arrive at all.
After a week in Madagascar, I tried to find words to capture the country's isolation, apartness and general oddity, and came up with the phrase "the Vanilla Curtain," which I thought hada pleasingly mysterious, slightly sinister ring.
On my return, I tried it out on messages to friends: "I just came back from behind the Vanilla Curtain," I said. Or: "Sorry I didn't get your e-mail/ phone message/ SMS - I was travelling (or better, TRAPPED) behind the Vanilla Curtain."
Madagascar is just one hour ahead of South Africa time but, perhaps appropriately, I got jet lag. The Air Madagascar flight to Johannesburg leaves Tana at 5am, so I had to rise at 2:30 to make check-in. I arrived in time for a full work day but was yawning by noon, with the vague feeling that I had imagined the trip.
The author is the FT's southern Africa correspondent
