Into The Unknown

Go to a small island, then take a speedboat to a smaller island: Tsarabanjina

From the harbour of Hell-Ville (named after French admiral Anne-Chrétien Louis de Hell, who was governor of La Reunion from 1838 to 1841), with the older but still more common name of Andoany, the main town of Nosy Be, it’s a 90-minute speedboat ride to the Mitsio (‘unknown’) Islands, an archipelago and marine reserve.

That transfer was like a journey to the edge of the world. One of the Italian passengers had a shirt that said ‘Follow Your Dream’, while another had a tattoo saying something about love. Perhaps this was a sign that everything would be okay. Indeed, after the 60km trip into the middle of nowhere, we realised that things would be better than we ever imagined. 

That’s because we could finally see signs of life, slowly growing larger as we approached. On the beach, there was a line of people waving their arms above their heads. These weren’t the frantic waves of people glad to be rescued; they were the calm but enthusiastic waves of people welcoming us to their home. This was Nosy Tsarabanjina, which rightly translates as ‘the island that is beautiful to see’.

Isolation and incorporation

In 1990, a South African adventurer ‘discovered’ the island, fell in love with it, and decided to create a hotel there. The plan was to build in such a way that the property was integrated into the natural environment (less plastic, more wood) and highlighted the features of Malagasy culture. Despite the challenge of construction in such an isolated place, he opened Tsarabanjina L’Hotel in 1998.