Consider the lemur. A cute furry creature with Marty Feldman eyes and a friendly disposition. They are relatives of ours, you know. Crawl back along the knotted, twisted branch of human ancestry and make your way down towards the trunk and there they are, all bug eyed and unevolved. Now consider seeing them in the wild. Hanging to with Lemurs, as it were, as if having a beer with an old friend you haven’t seen in 25 million years. That would be cool, right?
Well the only place you can do this, that is the only place these cute semi-primates live is the island of Madagascar off Africa. And that is where the author of this article went on vacation. Trekking around Andasibe-Mantadia National Park, one of the island’s few remaining primary forests, she encounters “luminous birds and fluorescent frogs”, exploding blossoms. The piece has its activist side, but it’s pretty good. Good enough, anyway, to make me consider Madagascgar as a potential destination.