I was thinking of Madagascar as part of Africa, like Mali, but I was wrong. Madagascar isn’t like anywhere else in the world. Still, I can only describe it by contrasting and comparing it to places I’ve been.

For example: Before I arrived in Antananarivo ten days ago, I had a hunch that Tana (as the capital is known for short) would be easier to like than dirty, chaotic, challenging Bamako. My first confirmation was at the airport, where I was greeted by friendly staff in a small but clean, attractive, and incredibly orderly airport. I expected as much based on the demographics of my fellow passengers on the Air France flight from Paris: There were a handful of aid workers, but many tourists, and they weren’t the hardy trekkers or cross-country motorcycle types one sees in Mali. These were French retirees and Spanish university girls heading to Nosy Be for a week or two of sunshine and ocean, far from any unpleasantness.

Not that there’s too much unpleasantness in Tana, at least on the surface. Its steep, winding cobblestone streets and cool damp weather remind me strangely of Edinburgh, Scotland. The traditional Merina houses, stacked up high on the hills, are several stories tall, made of stone, with painted wood shutters and corrugated tin roofs. (Merina are the people of the haut plateau, the highlands in the center of Madagascar.)

I am staying in a house like that in the neighborhood of Farovahitra. When we walk home from downtown, we climb three hundred stone steps. The view from the veranda is stunning.

Thursday I took my first trip out of the city and the landscape only grew more beautiful. Our rented tata crawled down from the haut plateau through a countryside that was shockingly shockingly lush and green. It left a jumble of impressions: We could have been on Skyline Drive, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia -- if the Blue Ridge had been deforested, then reforested with eucalyptus trees. Huge red gashes showed where the hills were not reforested in time and the earth washed away. (The Malagasy word for these “holes,” lavaka, is now used internationally to describe this type of erosion.) Unlike the Blue Ridge, rice grew in the valleys and on terraces cut into the hills -- and the Merina houses looked like snug little cottages in the Welsh countryside.

Looking at the people in the towns didn’t help orient me. The majority of Malagasy (as the residents of Madagascar are called) are of distant “Malayo-Polynesian” descent and they look like they could be natives of anywhere from Indonesia to Peru.

We stopped at a reptile park to see crocodiles and chameleons and frogs and insects and bats, but our final destination was the Parc National d’Andasibe-Mantadia, still often referred to by its French name, Perinet. Perinet is full of lemurs. On a night hike we saw tiny mouse lemurs; our guides spotted them by shining flashlights into the trees and looking for their eyes shining back. In the primary forest of Mantadia we glimpsed some dark bamboo lemurs from a distance. Most exciting of all, we rose early one morning, hiked into Perinet, and saw several families of large black-and-white indri. Their wailing klaxon call is impossible to describe. (Photos and audio coming soon.)

When people are very poor, as they are in Madagascar, they are not concerned about wildlife conservation; they are concerned about feeding their families. So many animals in developing countries are hunted to endangerment or extinction because they are valuable in some way -- their meat, or fur, or tusks, can be sold. The indri is luckier than most. It is fady, taboo, for the Malagasy to kill or eat them. Most fady beliefs have to do with the ancestors, who are believed to be, if not exactly living and breathing, very much a part of the land, and this story is no different: A man, Koto, and his son disappeared in the forest long ago. The Malagasy call the indri “Babakoto,” Papa Koto, and as the name implies, see them as relatives, with common ancestors.

The lemurs draw a lot of tourists to Perinet, which was evident in the fine park buildings, nice exhibits, high entrance fee, and expensive souvenirs. It was not at all evident in the poor neighboring village of Andasibe. Most tourists stay at expensive bungalows and never see the town or its residents, who have prospered very little from the lucrative ecotourism so close to their homes. For this very reason we stayed at a simple hotel in the center of town. Every building except the church and the non-functioning train station was built of wood, so Andasibe looked like a rough-and-tumble town in the Wild West -- Carson City populated only by small dirty children, begging for food.