The Essence Of Hospitality

The Vanila Hotel will be your flavour of the month after you visit

- Bruce Dennill

After the long stretch over the Mozambique Channel, visitors to Nosy Be are given a preview of their destination as the Airlink plane banks over the island’s west coast and heads across the interior before circling back and skimming over a mangrove swamp and touching down.

Fascene Airport is tiny, but provided you have euros ready to pay for your entry visa, the process of getting through to the area where several locals will offer to illegally take those euros and turn them into ariary, the Malagasy currency (rather do that at your hotel or an official bureau de change – careful with your rand-based maths as you convert via euros), is blissfully short. 

The roads are terrible – as much pothole as they are tar – but the reduced transfer speed that results gives you plenty of time to familiarise yourself with some Nosy Be trademarks. You’ll pass ylang-ylang plantations of weird droopy trees, pruned that way to make it easier for workers to pick the hundreds of kilograms of blossoms needed to make perfume – a major export and the reason for the place’s most widely used nickname, ‘the perfume island’. You’ll also see huge jackfruit hanging at the side of the road, awaiting picking once ripe. This is the largest tree-borne fruit on the planet, with some examples weighing up to 35kg, and is a useful source of food and trade, available at roadside stalls and seen strapped onto the back of scooters. 

Those scooters, confident pedestrians, farting tuk-tuks, taxis, the odd brash hire car and the aforementioned potholes are all reasons to choose to trust a local driver to get you to your accommodation, and to look out of the side window of your ride rather than through the windscreen, where what’s ahead might cause a touch of anxiety among Nosy Be rookies.