The hard red dirt feels almost like concrete underneath the feet. Despite the hardness, loose dust is kicked up in the air as soon as the hard ground is broken. Apart from a thin, barely visible line of clouds on the horizon, the sky is an open blue expanseless blue. Groups of men, their skin shades of chocolate, their eyes, lost under the shade of every variety of hat and cap, walk in conversation with one another. Herds of long-horned cattle, the famous Zebu of Madagascar grunt and low as they are coralled and herded into tight groups under the gaze of the elder men.

Several years ago, sitting in the dry heat of Namibia sipping a beer, I asked Nick van de Wiel, my partner with Nature's Light, "What about Madagascar?"
I remember him laughing and saying something along the lines of, "Sure! You organize it, we do it”. Not for a second thinking that we would actually manage to put together a photographic trip on the odd land mass floating off the East coast of Africa. That conversation was on the tail end of our now annual Composing The Dunes workshop in Namibia. Typing this, I am sitting on a Airlink Avro plane with the ochre coloured rivers of Madagascar shimmering in the late afternoon sun far below us. Somehow we managed to put it together...