Vivy Travel · Chronicles
The Chronicles
Long before Madagascar became a destination, it was an island of kingdoms, seafarers, sacred forests, and extraordinary wildlife. The Chronicles bring these stories together, preserving the history, legends, and heritage that continue to shape the island today.
The Only Primate That Lives in Reeds
The Alaotran gentle lemur survives only in the reed beds of Lake Alaotra, Madagascar's largest lake, which has lost two-thirds of its surface to silt. The story of an animal and a lake in trouble together.
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Known From Five Jars
For over a century the hairy-eared dwarf lemur existed to science as five museum specimens and nothing else. In 1989, a researcher found it alive near Mananara, decades after it was presumed extinct.
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The Lake That Measures the Drought
Lake Ihotry, one of Madagascar's five major lakes, has no river flowing out of it, only in. What it holds instead is salt, a rare flamingo, and a surface area that tracks the region's droughts almost exactly.
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Where Two Waters Meet
A sacred limestone cave near Toliara holds water fed by both the tide and an underground river, and a peninsula around it where ring-tailed lemurs do something the species is not known to do anywhere else.
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Thirty-Two Names on a List
In 1983 the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust listed thirty-two Malagasy species for captive breeding. In 1990, Gerald Durrell flew to Mananara to collect the first three, starting with the aye-aye.
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The Chronicles of the River Palm
Ravenea musicalis is the only palm on Earth known to grow underwater, its trunk anchored to a Madagascar riverbed, and a species now down to roughly 450 individuals along a single stretch of river.
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The Dignity of Man
In December 1996, a night guard fled his post outside Andasibe, alone with the dark and the howling of indri. His firing triggered Madagascar's first conservation workers' strike, a story kept out of every official report.
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A Cape Spun From a Million Spiders
No mechanical spinner has ever been able to farm spiders the way silkworms are farmed. So when a weaver set out to make cloth from Madagascar's golden orb spiders, the only method left was catching each one by hand.
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Sixteen Years, and a Message Lost on a Leaf
A fifteen-year-old boy was shipwrecked off southern Madagascar in 1701 and did not see England again for sixteen years. His account has been debated for three centuries, partly because of who scholars suspect actually wrote it down.
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The Fish That Fixed Bicycle Tires
Science believed the coelacanth had gone extinct alongside the dinosaurs. Fishermen near Madagascar and the Comoros had been hauling it up for generations, using its scales to patch bicycle inner tubes.
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