Île Sainte-Marie / Île aux Nattes, Madagascar

After getting tired of endless taxi-brousse rides, I decided to park myself on an island for at least a week. There are two major beach island destinations in Madagascar. The more famous one is Nosy Be in the north. There’s lots of great diving, there’s more resorts, and crucially, the weather’s consistently great. But then there’s also Île Sainte-Marie in the east. There’s less diving and it’s quite rainy in the winter. But hey, it’s less touristy and their humpback whale migration season starts two months earlier than in Nosy Be! Rainy island it is — how bad can it be, right?

Typically to get to Île Sainte-Marie, it’s a two-day journey from Tana: a 13-hour ride to the port city of Toamasina (still more frequently referred to by its old French name, Tamatave), then an additional 4-7 hour ride to one of several embarkation options, then finally a rough 1-3 hour boat ride depending on the previous choice. It takes eight hours alone just to get from Fianar to Tana, which adds an extra day. With my motive clear, it was a no-brainer to pay up for a flight from Tana to the island instead.

Thank goodness I did that. You know that rain I just mentioned? Well…

Turns out that due to poor weather, the boats didn’t run for an unprecedented 12-day stretch! People were stranded on both sides and planned trips were cancelled. Thankfully, the flights ran and I made it just fine, but locals remarked how this was a lot more rain than most winters. Indeed, over half my weeklong stay ended up with rain, at times quite heavy. I felt for other tourists, both domestic and international, whose stay was shorter than mine and saw only rain.

Since I was staying outside of the main town, it was a gamble each time whether to walk the 35 minutes into town, as the weather frequently changed. The island’s small Independence Day parade was held in pouring rain, and I missed it as a result. On the flipside, fortunately, the weather held out the day before for the afternoon and the evening pre-holiday fireworks. We’re grading on a curve here: the fireworks themselves, not that great. But it was just adorable to see and hear the cheers every 10 seconds when another one launched!

The atmosphere was great too, with tourists staying in the centre joined by Malagasy residents from across the island swarming in for the occasion. Several Malagasy locals saw me, a visibly-Chinese tourist, and roped me in with their friends and colleagues for dinner, speaking Mandarin to me and amongst themselves the entire time! (Turns out they’re all translators by trade. Again, this led to another instance of Africans speaking better Mandarin than me.)

For an island known for its holiday resorts, it’s thus refreshing to instead feel immersed in a vibrant local life. On another day that was mostly clear, I rented a scooter to go up and down the island. Almost every village was just a series of houses and a few shops lining the main road, steps from the water, with kids playing soccer somewhere and groups of people chatting on someone’s porch, watching life go by. Driving through always resulted in at least a friendly wave or nod. Saddled with a lemon of a scooter and needing to make frequent stops as a result (faulty compartment, broken fuel gauge, minor tumble slipping on wet gravel, etc…), I was probably the “event” of the day to the bemused locals, who openly offered their assistance. While most people also maintained a perfect sense of chill, one man in line at the medical clinic even offered to take me an hour down a side road that was impassable for my scooter, which I gently refused since he had clearly more important things to attend to.

This was also the case in neighbouring Île aux Nattes, a tiny, roadless island ringed by resorts, perfect white sand, and a gorgeous turquoise lagoon, but full of local life in its centre: a small village and its few shops, a couple churches, a lighthouse, farms, small vanilla plantations, and even a nightclub. There’s only a couple places to eat if you’re not cooking for yourself, but with the abundance of seafood, every option is uniformly excellent, and the rhum pours generously too. The only way to get around is walking, and anywhere you go people greet you with a “selam” and a smile. Despite only being 2 km wide, the paths twist and wind, and I got very lost, though people were always happy to point me the right way. Did I mention there are black-and-white ruffed lemurs just hanging around? Sounds like paradise, right?

As is the case in Sainte-Marie, there’s a handful of foreigners who’ve moved in, some for over a decade, and have embedded themselves in the community. Evidently, the draw is the same, one visit and it’s easy to fall in love with the place. They see the islands at their best just as us tourists do, but also deal with the worst: the winds and rain and nowhere to hide, the limited electricity rationed each evening if functioning at all, and the isolation: the already-isolated Île Sainte-Marie has the only bank and supermarkets around, and yet from Île aux Nattes that’s a pirogue ride away plus another 15 km down the road. Need the hospital? Try getting to the mainland first, if the weather cooperates.

Despite just a week on both islands, I think I felt the isolation more than the paradise, especially with the rain. Even with sun, I’m definitely not the type who can ever relax and do nothing! As someone whose head constantly spins in a general haze of anxiety, exhausted from constantly making trip decisions every day, this was a blessing and a curse. There were few to no decisions to make, since there weren’t any choices. On the other hand, the idle time frequently made me second-guess the one decision to come to the island.

That is…until the rain stopped for a morning and I was finally able to go one of those famed whale-watching excursions, after an aborted attempt the previous day. (Shoutout to my friend Caitlin, who went shortly after our last meetup on my last trip to Africa, for the recommendation!)

Île Sainte-Marie might be one of the best places in the world to see humpback whales, which migrate in southern winter from Antarctica in search of warmer waters, food, and mates. The end of June is precisely the start of the season (versus August up in Nosy Be), and all of the rain was worth it for even a fraction of what I saw: tails, fins, and endless breaching (jumping out of the water) over the course of three morning hours, the time they’re most active.

At certain points, it wasn’t clear to us passengers where to look: a pair of whales ahead of us, another pair on the starboard side, some behind us in the distance. Breaches — rare enough to look ripped out of a David Attenborough doc — kept happening in pairs, with either mothers teaching their young how to do it, or the young doing it themselves to impress a potential mate. You’d think that they’d just breach once out of the blue — and sometimes they did, just metres from the boat, enough to take your breath away. But to see them practice over and over and over and over again, from kilometres away and even after our boat zoomed over to get a closer look… That’s just mind-blowing. I think back to how wowed I already was just seeing whale blowholes from land kilometres away last year in Queensland. After this, I don’t know how I’ll ever go whale watching again in another location.

(I did try again, in a tiny little pirogue on Île aux Nattes. We didn’t get very far with a weak motor, and being low to the water meant being completely soaked head to toe after two hours. I have no pictures, and we couldn’t reach the whales that we could see from afar…but it was worth it just to go out here again!)

When everything go right, and the sun is shining, boy does this place really feel like paradise. Massages by the sea, the smell of the salty sea on one side and ylang-ylang and hibiscus on the other, watching whales in the distance at breakfast, idle chatter with the friendly locals, morning walks and afternoon dips and evenings in a hammock by the beach bungalow… And then it starts pouring all of a sudden, the already-limited power cuts, the wind chills, and there’s nowhere to go and no one to hang out with. I’m glad I got a taste of the sublime to go with the sour, but I’m happy to be heading home.