My name is Tsilavina, I am from Madagascar. Not really the Madagascar with Alex the lion, Melman the giraffe or Gloria the hippopotamus but Madagascar the country. In 2011, I had the chance to travel in France to do an internship within an IT company based in Paris. It was the first time I took the plane and cross the boarder of my beloved country. Traveling oversea is quite special for a person who used to live his whole life on an island. When I arrived in France I met a lot of people and often times they asked me where I am from, and every time I replied Madagascar, they asked me “Oh Madagascar, the movie?” or “Madagascar with King Julian?” or other references to the famous animated movie.That was fun, but only the first time. Six years after that, I travelled in the United States and still I got the same kind of answer. When I asked people about what they know about Madagascar, it turns out that they knew little to nothing about the country, they even struggled to locate Madagascar on the map, others were surprised that Madagascar was a country at all. A lot of my Malagasy friends who live abroad experienced that same fact as well. It became a little bit disheartening because Madagascar is so rich in terms of nature, people and culture and shouldn’t be hidden behind a movie that say so little about what it is in reality, but I loved that movie anyway. Actually there’s no lion, giraffe, hippopotamus nor penguins in Madagascar. However Madagascar is the home of a huge amount of wildlife. 90 percent of the 12.000 or so vegetal species and 80 percent of animal species identified on the island cannot be found anywhere else. The unique ecology of the country has even led some ecologists to refer to Madagascar as the “eighth continent”.
In 2016, I had the chance to visit the Andringitra National Park with some friends of mine. Andringitra National Park is one of the most beautiful national park in Madagascar. I was stroke by the beauty of that place and the kindness of local people. I knew that there’s a lot of extraordinary places in the country but discovering this park confirmed that there’s still more to see in Madagascar and even native people can always be surprised. Since then I became passionate about sharing about Madagascar’s wonderful places.
My motivation was strengthen by fact that in Madagascar a lot of ecological places and national parks are threatened by human activities. People living in those places tend to destroy their environment due to poverty. For instance, deforestation is one of the biggest issues faced in Madagascar because of charcoal business. I am aware that those people could definitely leverage tourism as an opportunity to develop their communities and in consequence stop the environmental destruction. All of those reasons encouraged me to promote Madagascar even more as a destination for tourism. That’s why I am proud to be a local guide and so thankful to have google maps as a tool to share all the nice places that worth to be visited on this beautiful island.
