Deseret News | Off the beaten path in Madagascar

Off the beaten path in Madagascar

By Carma Wadley
Deseret Morning News

Published: Sunday, Nov. 25, 2007 12:14 a.m. MST

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MADAGASCAR — A friend once told me that when she was little, if she didn't behave, her mother threatened to send her to Madagascar. It was the farthest, strangest place her mother knew.

Whenever my family plays the board game Risk, my brother-in-law's favorite strategy is to amass his armies in Madagascar and rise up from there to rule the world. He usually does.

Madagascar vanilla is prized among cooks.

And then there was the recent movie, filled with cutesy zoo critters that accidentally get shipwrecked and meet the exotic creatures that live on the island.

Before I went there, those were about the only associations I had with Madagascar. I knew it was off the coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, but I couldn't have told you the name of its capital, its currency or what language the people speak.

Now I've been there.

Is Madagascar the home of wayward children?

No. Nor is it a place of conquest. It is a place of exotic flavors and famous for critters cute enough that they don't need cartooning to make them more appealing. Its capital is Antananarivo (often called Tana by the locals), its currency is the ariary, and the people speak French and Malagasy and a variety of other local dialects.

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In a weeklong stay on the island, of course, I didn't get much more than an introduction to Madagascar. But I did learn lots more about this unusual place. And when everything was factored in, it was enough for me to fall — if not in love, at least in really, really like — with it:

The Garbo factor — being alone has its own rewards: The place now known as Madagascar had its beginnings some 160 million years ago, when it split off of the megacontinent that then contained what is now Australia, Africa, India and Antarctica.

It floated off to a place along the African coast, and about 100 million years ago put down anchor. It was far enough away that no easy exchange of flora and fauna could take place, so Madagascar developed its own evolutionary laboratory and thus its own biological environment.

If Madagascar just looks different — and it does — that's why. The numbers we learned are mind-boggling. Madagascar has some 250,000 different species of plants and animals, and 70 percent of them are found nowhere else in the world.

It is most famous for its lemurs and chameleons, but it also has 1,000 varieties of orchids. It is home of the rosy periwinkle, whose flower is used in the treatment for pediatric leukemia and Hodgkin's disease. There are 209 species of birds; 51 percent are endemic to the island.

About the size of France or Texas, Madagascar is a thousand miles long, so there's room for varied ecosystems, including mountainous rain forests filled with lush vegetation and stark deserts filled with varieties of spiny plants. It has baobab trees — the ones that look like they are planted upside down. It has papyrus reeds that grow gracefully along the rivers. It has all kinds of beautiful tropical flowers, including the vanilla plant.