Madagascar in ten photographs

Madagascar is a long way from everywhere and does not apologize for it. Two flights, then a road that alternates between tarmac and suggestion. It was worth all of it.

The wildlife is the reason people go, and it is genuinely as advertised. Chameleons the color of traffic lights, sitting on branches at eye height. Sifakas, which move like they are considering each step and then commit entirely. And lemurs — ring-tailed, brown, and utterly unbothered by people. Stand still long enough and one will sit on you. Stand still a bit longer and one will sit on your head.

Between the parks it is highlands: rice terraces stacked down every slope near Ambalavao, and villages where the road becomes the main street for a hundred meters and then stops being a road again.

Morondava is where the baobabs are. The Avenue is the photograph everyone takes and it deserves the attention — trees that look drawn rather than grown, in a line, on a dirt road. What the photographs miss is that it is a working road. Twenty minutes after the first shot, an ox cart came through, and that is the one I kept.

In Fianarantsoa a whole school came out to say hello, and then took the photograph themselves. It is the picture I show people first, every time.

The last one is a frog the size of a thumbnail on a leaf at Nosy Be, which is the other half of Madagascar: the enormous things, and then the very small ones nobody would find without being shown.

Every one of these places is still exactly where I left it in 2019. The badge is how the photographs get back out.