Madagascar Is ‘Like Bali 40 Years Ago’

03.01.2025 - 10:27 / cntraveler.com

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.

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.

“If you love the wild, and exploration, then there is nowhere else like it on earth. Madagascar is its own world”

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.

Franco’s Bar, operated by namesake bartender Franco Desire, at Voaara Madagascar

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