Madagascar
The Eighth Continent
Adrift in the Indian Ocean for some 88 million years, Madagascar evolved almost entirely alone — long enough to become a world of its own, the naturalists’ eighth continent. Close to nine in ten of its living things are found nowhere else: more than a hundred species of lemur, chameleons that span a hand or a fingertip, spiny forest and rainforest, baobabs and reef. Off the far northeast coast lies Nosy Ankao, a scatter of islands ringed by white sand and coral, and here Guided Safaris® keeps a single private-island lodge — Miavana by Time + Tide — where the island’s wild inheritance and a rare refinement share one horizon.
“There is nowhere else like it on Earth — an island that broke from the world and became a world of its own, where nine in ten of its living things are found here and here alone”
Endemic primates · 100+ species
The lemurs
Lemurs live on Madagascar and nowhere else on Earth. When the island broke from Africa and drifted out into the Indian Ocean, a handful of primitive primates went with it, and in isolation they radiated into more than a hundred species with no equal anywhere. The largest is the indri, a tail-less lemur the size of a small child whose dawn song carries for more than a mile through the eastern rainforest. The sifakas cross open ground in upright, sideways bounds; the ring-tailed lemur, banner tail held high, is the emblem of the southern spiny forests. On Nosy Ankao it is the crowned lemur that is the story — a small troop was brought across to Miavana in 2017 to shelter it from poaching on the mainland, and now ranges the island’s forest freely. The surrounding mainland forests hold two of the country’s most endangered primates, the golden-crowned and Perrier’s sifakas, which the island’s guides can help you trek to find. A guided nature walk introduces Miavana’s resident lemurs at first light.
“It was Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky come to life, whiffling through its tulgey wood” — Gerald Durrell, on the aye-aye, The Aye-Aye and I, 1992
Nosy Ankao · private island
Miavana
Time + Tide Miavana is our private-island lodge on Nosy Ankao, off the far northeast coast of Madagascar. Reached by a short helicopter flight over turquoise shallows, it holds just fourteen villas along a single sweep of powder-soft sand — each with a private pool, direct beach access and a dedicated butler, built from hand-cut stone, Malagasy timber and textiles dyed the colors of the reef. In Malagasy, miavana means ‘to bring together’, and the island does exactly that: barefoot luxury laid over serious conservation and community, at the head of a five-island archipelago wrapped in a protected marine reserve.
This is blue safari country. Between the villas and the horizon lie coral gardens for diving and snorkeling, flats for fly-fishing, and a whole calendar of the sea. Start a conversation with our Guided Safaris® Chief designers, who have stayed on the island and tested every Signature journey before they send you on it.
“Fourteen villas on a single sweep of sand, an ocean of coral at the door, and a whole island’s wildlife to yourself — this is the barefoot luxury of the ends of the Earth”
Endemic birds · vangas & ground-rollers
The birdlife
Madagascar’s birds are as singular as its lemurs. Isolation produced whole families found nowhere else — the vangas, whose bills range from stout nutcrackers to slender probes in a textbook case of adaptive radiation; the ground-rollers, jewel-colored and secretive on the forest floor; and the couas, long-tailed relatives of the cuckoos that stalk both rainforest and spiny bush. More than a hundred of the island’s birds are endemic, and even a short walk turns up something with no relatives beyond these shores. On Nosy Ankao the cast turns coastal: terns wheel over the reef in their thousands, and the neighboring islet of Nosy Manampaho holds one of the Indian Ocean’s largest tern colonies. Miavana’s guides read the tide lines and the treetops with equal fluency, so the birding rewards patience as much as luck.
“Madagascar, I may announce to naturalists, is their promised land. There nature seems to have retreated into a private sanctuary, to work on models different from any she has used elsewhere; the most bizarre and marvellous forms meet you at every step” — Philibert Commerson, 1771
Nosy Ankao · turtle & whale season
Sea turtles & whales
The beaches of Nosy Ankao are among the rare places in Madagascar where sea turtles still nest in safety. Green and hawksbill turtles — the hawksbill critically endangered — haul out to lay along the island’s sands and those of neighboring Nosy Manampaho, and Miavana’s monitoring team walks the shore each morning logging fresh tracks and, in season, watching hatchlings make their first run to the water. Guests can join them, part of a conservation effort that treats the reef and the beach as one living system.
Come the austral winter, the ocean fills with giants. From roughly July to September, humpback whales that have summered off Antarctica arrive in these warm waters to calve, breaching and tail-slapping within sight of the villas, while spinner dolphins run the bow of the boat. It is the year’s great migration, watched from a private island with almost no one else on the water.
“Good Heavens what insect can suck it” — Charles Darwin, on Madagascar’s foot-long star orchid, in a letter to J. D. Hooker, 1862
The seasons
When to go
Miavana keeps to two seasons, and each opens a different door. From November to mid-May the days are warm and the rains fall mostly at night, leaving the water glass-clear for diving, snorkeling and waterskiing; this is also when green and hawksbill turtles come ashore to nest along Nosy Ankao. As mid-May arrives the air cools and the southeast trade winds return — the season of kitesurfing and windsurfing, and of the whales. From roughly July to September humpbacks pass close to the island on their breeding migration, and between June and October the tern colonies on Nosy Manampaho swell into the tens of thousands. Cyclone risk runs highest in January and February. For the widest program — turtles giving way to whales, warm water to fresh wind — aim for the shoulder weeks of May or October, and let our Guided Safaris® Chief designers match the month to what you most want to see.
L’Ex-Libris — The 1923 Bookplate · Deboss & Foil
Pressed into the paper.
A bookplate pressed into cotton paper, its title stamped in gold leaf. Move your cursor across the plate: the foil catches the light only at the right angle, exactly as a stamped cover does when you tilt it.
Est. 1995
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