Old-fashioned, hand-operated petrol pumps near the entrance to Isalo.
NIGEL PAVITT / AWL IMAGES
The road south from Antananarivo bucks and weaves along Madagascar’s rocky spine, passing on its island traverse the well-watered hills and scattered settlements of the country’s interior. Antsirabe, Fianarantsoa, Ambalavao — we skirt cities that serve as gateways to wild and forested corners of the country, en route to a different, wilder Madagascar that bears little resemblance to this densely populated corridor, this tamed, emerald-green patchwork of crops. It is a restless land, a place where movement and noise and people hold sway. The forests have gone. There is no sign of wildlife. Green turns to yellow. By the roadside, grasses — drained of colour at midday, golden at sunset — stretch to a horizon of indistinct hills to which, in time, the road draws near. These hills at first stand in silhouette, but later they turn red, their glorious sandstone buttes surrounding broad valleys beneath scudding clouds. Isalo.
Everything in Madagascar seems built on an epic scale — the forests, deep and impenetrable; the extraordinary proliferation of lemurs, big and small; the otherworldly baobabs; and the long and glorious coastline. Arriving at the Parc National de l’Isalo is a little different. Yes, ridgelines rise dramatically from the surrounding plains and there is a sense from the very beginning of grandeur and greatness. But the magic of Isalo also resides elsewhere, in the intimacy of its canyons bursting with greenery and water, in the power of suggestion at large along the paths that snake between the sheer rock walls and into what lies beyond.