The forest of rock in the heart of Madagascar

When the supercontinent of Gondwana broke up around 180 million years ago, Madagascar drifted away from mainland Africa, and its flora and fauna evolved in isolation.

Some biologists call it "the eighth continent", said Mike Carter in the Financial Times, as 90% of these plants and animals are found nowhere else, and many are highly distinctive. However, since humans arrived roughly 1,500 years ago, nearly all the forest that once covered the island has been lost to slash-and-burn agriculture.

Madagascar is one of the world's poorest countries, and since gaining independence from France in 1960, its population has grown roughly sixfold to 30 million, accelerating the destruction. Even so, pockets of "pristine" wilderness remain – and last year, new lodges opened in two of them.

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One of these is the "surprisingly luxurious" Namoroka Tsingy Camp, on the edge of the Tsingy de Namoroka National Park. To get there, I flew from the capital, Antananarivo, to Soalala on the northwest coast, and then travelled 50km in a 4WD along a "hideously rutted" road. The 220sq km park is known for its endless ranks of pale, spiky limestone towers and ridges, a karst landscape known as tsingy (meaning "where you cannot walk barefoot"), and it also has several types of forest and a cave system believed to be the largest in Africa.

The camp's owner, Edward Tucker-Brown, told me that the area sees very few foreign visitors – and yet it is a truly "otherworldly" place. The wildlife sightings on guided walks were marvellous, from Malagasy giant chameleons up to 60cm long, to Madagascan sunset moths like "flying kaleidoscopes" and rare lemurs like "creamy teddy bears".

No less beautiful is Nosy Boraha, a 50km-long island "dense with rainforest" and fringed with "deserted" white-sand beaches. There, I stayed in a thatched cottage at the new Voaara hotel, eating wonderful food, snorkelling on the reef and resolving to come back in the summer, when 7,000 humpback whales gather offshore.