Madagascar

Although I had heard and read much about Madagascar before going, I wasn't prepared for how thoroughly different it is. Although the island's natural heritage is extraordinary, it was the human culture that most surprised me, a visitor from mainland Africa.

While southern Africa's Bantu language-speaking peoples subsist on cornmeal and are dark-skinned, the Malagasy live on rice and look Asian. Their ancestors arrived from what are now Malaysia and Indonesia about 2,000 years ago. The Malagasy speak a language said to share 80 per cent of its content with south-east Asian tongues. But a Malay-speaker from Singapore ­resident in Tana, as residents call the polysyllabic capital city Antananarivo, tells me she can barely understand a word.

Surrounded by rice paddies, Tana is made up of antique houses with sharply peaked roofs built on hills, which give it a fairy-tale quality. The city is laced with Parisian-style stone staircases, tunnels and other sturdy public works from the French colonial era. Ducks and geese scrabble around in the dust among the vendors and street urchins, as in a Hogarth engraving. The Queen's Palace, inhabited by Madagascar's last monarchs and damaged in a fire in 1995, overlooks the city. Marc Ravolamanana, the country's businessman-turned-president, inhabits a house perched on another precipice and moves through Tana in a traffic-stopping motorcade of wailing black limousines.

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