About the size of France or Texas, Madagascar is a thousand miles long, so there's room for varied ecosystems, including mountainous rain forests filled with lush vegetation and stark deserts filled with varieties of spiny plants. It has baobab trees — the ones that look like they are planted upside down. It has papyrus reeds that grow gracefully along the rivers. It has all kinds of beautiful tropical flowers, including the vanilla plant.

In Maroantsetra, we visited a vanilla "factory." Although vanilla plants grow wild in the rain forest, here they are grown plantation-style. At this time of year, the long, narrow beans have been harvested and placed on long trays for drying. Workers were sorting and packing them for shipment to processing plants for conversion to vanilla extract as well as around the world. Vanilla is a prime export for a country that has few others.

Madagascar is a poor country. Sadly, the process of eking out a living often comes at a high cost to nature. The island is losing a lot of its virgin rain forest — only about 10 percent remains. And that is becoming an increasing concern to the scientific community and others who care about the potential losses in flora and fauna. The island does have 14 national parks, and the current president had pledged to triple that number. Currently half of all fees tourists pay to visit the preserves goes back to local villages. Conservation groups and advocacy agencies are also stepping in to try to convince the people that preservation has long-term economic benefits.

At the Relais de Masola lodge where we stayed in Maroantsetra, we met an architectural grad student from MIT who was working on designs for a new visitors and education center for nearby Mangabe National Park. They hope to have it built and open by next summer.

Madagascar is posed for a boom in ecotourism. Currently most visitors are researchers or young, adventurous backpackers, Celeste, the manager of Relais de Masola, told us. They get very few groups like ours (seven of us who just wanted to see what the place was like).

But that will change. And while we can't help but be happy for the economic boon it will bring to the island, we were also happy to be there before the Colonel, Mickey D's and the like move in.

The spumoni factor — a blend of flavors is always more interesting than one: The first humans arrived in Madagascar around A.D. 100-500. But they came from Asia, not Africa.