It’s not all postcard scenery, though. After a few days of snorkeling and beach-lolling, the view from our helicopter transfer to the Miavana resort on the island of Nosy Ankao just off Madagascar’s northeast, painted an alarmingly different picture. The scars of deforestation were hard to miss: riverbeds writhed through dry valleys, while surrounding hillsides were lacerated with gullies cut deep by centuries of erosion. Here and there, a plume of smoke rose up from a field; slash-and-burn farming, locally known as tavy, is still practiced here. Due to this, alongside illegal logging and overgrazing, Madagascar lost more than 200.000 hectares of its forest cover in 2024 alone, forcing much of its wildlife to the safety of national parks and protected reserves.

A small-but-budding tourism industry is helping turn the tide. Before Miavana, (which also flies the Time+Tide flag), took over Nosy Ankao in 2013, the island was little more than a struggling seaweed farm, its native greenery strangled by invasive casuarina trees. Today, those invaders have been cleared, and more than 100,000 native saplings have grown into a lush forest cover that’s now home to sunbirds, bulbuls, geckos and chameleons. A troupe of crowned lemurs was relocated from their threatened patch of jungle on the mainland, and has since multiplied in the treetops (or, one morning, on the ridge of our villa’s open-air bathroom). Down at the palm-tufted waterline, staff (made up almost entirely of residents from nearby villages) monitor turtle nests, tend coral nurseries, and count a steadily increasing seabird population.