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Half-naked men, women and children sprawled in the mud. Their faces, hair, and skin were all dyed the same milkshake-brown, slick with water, as they pushed handfuls of mud through crude round sieves. In the tall gum trees overhanging the riverbed, lemurs with bright round eyes watched the activity below.
The villagers were panning for gold, tiny flecks of unrefined ore, which they would sell to businessmen who made the long road journey to the Darain Forest in the north-eastern corner of Madagascar. Although it was only 30km from the town of Vohémar, it took five hours of driving along heavily potholed roads to reach the village – a collection of palm-thatched huts which is home to about forty people. Along the way I saw other small settlements where women and children sat sorting and drying cloves and peppers on rush mats in the sun. At one bad patch in the road we met an enormous lorry with a broken axle blocking the traffic in both directions as a group of men tried to repair it with rope and pieces of metal. I asked one of them how long it would take to fix. “Two days,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe three.” The women and children travelling in the truck were already setting up a makeshift camp in the long grass nearby, unable to do anything except wait for the vehicle to be repaired.
Eight or nine other lorries, too big to squeeze past the obstruction, queued patiently in the mud. My driver enlisted the men from one of the lorries to cut a path through the bush for our Land Rover to pass, and after half an hour we were able to drive on. I had come to see Darain’s lemurs – a small population of rare golden-crowned sifakas. Like most of Madagascar’s fauna, the lemurs and their kin are endemic species, remnants of ancient times when the great island was attached to the ‘super continent’ of Gondwanaland. Ancient or not, the villagers protect the sifakas, believing them to be sacred spirits whose existence must be guaranteed if gold is to be found in the river.
“God gave us this river,” one of the villagers explained to me, “and the lemurs have always lived here with us. We are so lucky to have this place, and we must keep others away so that they do not cut down the forest.” He pointed out a mother lemur with a tiny baby clinging to her back and made a clicking noise with his tongue. The lemur froze and then cautiously edged backwards down the tree trunk until she was just within arm’s length of the man’s head. He held out a small banana, which she grasped with delicate fingers and then held in her teeth as she scampered upwards to a high branch to feast in peace. As we watched, the villager produced a small cloth bag tied at the neck with string. Inside he showed me a few grams of dark gold dust, which had taken weeks to sift from the river.
No one knows how much gold is produced in Madagascar, or exactly how many
carats of emeralds, citrines and amethysts come from the island’s rich red earth. It is still a wild place, a country of fifteen million people where the infrastructure just about holds together and where every visit becomes an adventure. I love Madagascar. It is like nowhere on earth, and yet it is just one of the islands in the Indian Ocean which draw me back time and again, each visit producing a new memory and another glimpse of a world outside the normality of most holiday destinations.
The Indian Ocean islands first cast their spell on me more than fifteen years ago, and I have made return visits to them all more times than I can now remember. Madagascar, with its mix of poverty and spirituality, sometimes offers a dark view of life at the very edge of the developed world. Nearby Comoros, a fragmented sultanate, has been virtually forgotten by modern tourism industry, whereas the Seychelles, Mauritius and the Maldives continue to develop and reinvent themselves as upmarket slivers of paradise. In the middle of it all there is Réunion, a remote French province with its motorways and bistros, yet possessed of a magical mysterious interior where tiny villages maintain their Créole culture.
Shortly after my recent visit to Madagascar I found myself back in the Seychelles, where I once lived. The contrast with the immense untamed bulk of Madagascar couldn’t be greater. On tiny Frégate Island I scuba-dived in dark blue water with reef sharks for company and, on land, stayed in one of the most luxurious private resorts in the world. | 
