It is called the Great Island. In fact, it is almost a mini-continent: 1,580 km long, the size of France and Benelux together, and hardly about 12 million inhabitants. Madagascar is an old land: millions of years ago, it was attached to the "Gondwana continent" which comprised the south of India and even Australia and from which madagascar was separated with the phenomenon of 'continental drift'. Since then, like in the neighbouring isles, volcanoes have appeared on this island, but they have long died out. Yet erosion has pursued its intense work, transforming certain regions of Madagascar, like the Isalo massif for instance, into spectacular sceneries. The geography of the island is apparently simple. From north to south, the inner part is made of what is called the Highlands which are constrituted in fact of a series of basins surrounded and separated by rather high mountains rising to about 3000m at Tsaratanana in the north. The average altitude of these highlands is 1300m. There, lakes and large areas irrigated into rice-fields can be seen. There is also situated the historic capital of the island, Antananarivo, translated by the French into Tananarive. The eastern and western coasts are very different. On one side, the eastern coast is relatively narrow squeezed between the border of the highlands falling sharply into a range of moutains ~ often called 'The Escarpment'), and the Indian Ocean itself hemmed by a kind of long lagoon run through by a canal. On the other side, in the western and southern parts, the highlands more gradually decline onto what becomes a large plain often cut by not so high mountains or by limestone plateaux and large rivers, such as the Betsiboka, find a difficult way among them, flowing to the coast and into the sea through marshy deltas. All around this 'almost-a-continent', some tiny islands and two bigger ones, the two most famous ones: Saint Marie island, on the east, fairly elongated in shape, and Nosy-Be, up in the north-west, mountainous, very tropical and particularly renowned for its beaches.