Let’s go surfing now … in Madagascar, newest member of global surf association

 

The island nation in the Indian Ocean has become the 86th member of the International Surfing Association as part of a drive to promote the sport in Africa, the California-based association said. Madagascar offers more than 4,800 kilometres (3,000 miles) of coastline that have been largely unexplored by the global surfing community, it said.

“It’s world class,” Blair Rogers, a surfing tour operator in southwest Madagascar, said Tuesday. He described the “perfect, uncrowded” waves as comparable to those in Indonesia and other top surfing destinations.

Madagascar’s tourism industry has suffered because of political tension in the impoverished country, which has more than 20 million people. A new president was inaugurated in January amid hope that the country would recover from instability following a 2009 coup.

In October, a mob killed two Europeans and a local man on Nosy Be, a major tourist island near the northwest coast of Madagascar. The mob reportedly suspected the ...more