Daniel Austin - Author of The Bradt Guide to Madagascar

Over the years that I have been involved in eco-tourism to Madagascar, it has been a pleasure to watch MadagasCaT Charters and Travel grow. Their first-hand knowledge of the island is second to none and you would be hard pushed to find any operator with a more genuine dedication not only to their travelling clients but, most importantly of all, to this special country and its people.

I’ve been fascinated by Madagascar since my mid-teens and it would be fair to say that I continue to live and breathe Madagascar more than 25 years on. My passion became my career almost by accident and I’m lucky to be able to spend time exploring the island on a regular basis. I’ve been writing the new editions of the Bradt Madagascar travel guide for over a decade, as well as two other books for travellers: Madagascar Wildlife: A Visitor’s Guide and Madagascar Highlights.

In between writing, I lead group wildlife tours and accompany expedition cruises of the western Indian Ocean as a specialist naturalist lecturer. Back home in the UK, I’m Secretary of the Anglo-Malagasy Society (which has been fostering British-Malagasy relations for over sixty years) and curator of the Madagascar Library, an important collection of some 7,000 books and other documents concerning this extraordinary country.

It was undoubtedly the island’s unique flora and fauna that first caught my interest, but what has kept me going back since is far deeper than that. I found the Malagasy people more welcoming than I could ever have hoped: at once charming, humble, relaxed, and ingenious in their approach to the challenges of life in one of the world’s poorest countries. Their endlessly photogenic faces run the full spectrum from African to Asian, betraying an astonishing history of human migration across the Indian Ocean almost two millennia ago. This is the meeting point of two great continents – a cultural melting pot where rice is grown in terraced paddies by highland tribes as nomadic herdsmen tend their humped zebu cattle on the grassy plains below.

You can learn more about Daniel and his incredible photography here.