Madagascar Travels

Christina Dodwell explores Madagascar's least accessible corners and makes friends with its people. Her four-month journey began in the highlands where, travelling by horse-drawn stagecoach, she encounters a healer, a village poet and families who perform bone-turning rites for their ancestors. Taboos, fetishes and astrology weave through her travels among wood-carvers and lead to a royal meeting. Christina paddles her canoe on the south-east coastal rivers and makes plans to enter the capital's Grand Prix horse race. In the remote west of the island she threads her way between amazing limestone pinnacles in an area normally reserved for scientists, navigating canyons and river tunnels where crocodiles live on blind white fish. Her fascination with Madagascar, however, has taken her one step further, and in 1995 she launched the Dodwell Trust, a registered UK charity, to help the people of Madagascar.