One evening, while moored at Russian Bay, one of the guests expressed a desire for rum au coco. Ali was off in a flash, paddling to shore. He came back with five coconuts and a bucketful of crabs he had bought from one of the villages on the island. That night we had rum au coco for sundowners, crab au coco for main course and sucked on coconut slivers for dessert. There is also a local take-out and delivery service to the yachts.
Tourism is now Madagascar's second-biggest foreign exchange earner.
The answer is not to attract thousands of backpackers with a bourgeois adventure mentality. Sustainable development is a buzzword in South Africa, and it' s also taking off in Madagascar. As Africans, we could learn much by shifting our gaze to the forgotten parts of our own continent.