It's a well-kept secret and, to be honest, I would rather it stayed that way. But I have to make a living; and so do the travel operator, the lodge and those it employs.
So here's the deal. I will tell you how in my quest to find the smallest chameleon in the world, I found a shaving of paradise. A mere finger of land on the north-east coast of Madagascar, mostly covered by primal rain forests and humming with a life force so unfamiliar your facial expressions are locked in a state of permanent awe.
Primordial forests sweep down to white powdery beaches, which are caressed by a cobalt sea that laps sleepily back and forth. The ocean serves up an underworld that makes the marine biologist in our party conclude after his snorkelling forays, he needs to redefine the word "pristine".
But I am not going to sugar the pill; you will have to put some work into finding this land of dreams.
From Europe it's a chore. The flight from the UK takes me and two friends via Paris and the discomfort of Air France to the capital, Antananarivo, a name too difficult to pronounce after the 11-hour flight on which the service amounts to little more than dispensing trays of grisly cuisine; so it's easier to settle for the common name of Tana. By comparison, it's a breeze from Joburg.
Due to awkward time tables, the connecting flight to the northern town of Maroantsetra, where we are to pick up the boat that will take us down the Masoala peninsula, must wait a day. This hiatus necessitates a stay at the IC hotel a stone's throw from the airport, which is 40 minutes from the city.
It is surprising to find the hotel adequate while the sand road that leads to it is lined with rickety market stalls and pitted with gaping pot-holes capable of swallowing our taxi.
From the moment you arrive in Madagascar, you witness the contradictions of a country suspended between First World modernity and an old-world charm that finds itself in a state of extreme, reduced circumstances. Life for the majority of Malagasies, who are charming and gentle, is a hand-to-mouth existence, of rice.
The next day, scarcely refreshed, we clamber into the 70-seater turboprop for the one-and-a-half hour flight to Maroantsetra where we will meet the boat. As we swoop dexterously through the hinterland of the island, it is clear much of it has been deforested and cudgelled into agricultural land. Only a tenth of Madagascar remains unscathed.
We are met at the airport by our hostess, Sandra Schönb228chler, of the Masoala Forest Lodge, and Fraser Gear, our guide for the next 10 days.
Gear, arguably one of South Africa's finest guides, is the man I am relying on to find me the chameleon I have spent years worrying about. Having met him on two previous guiding occasions in South Africa, I note he has become somewhat more feral as he pads about the airport arrivals, tangle-haired and barefooted, grinning wildly at his new lot of charges.
We spend a night at the Coco Beach Hotel, an establishment that confirms that a good tent is better than a shabby hotel room, which is just as well as for the next 10 days we will be camping and kayaking 100km down the coast.
After a rather good meal that evening, Gear lopes off into the darkness with a torch, with all of us in pursuit, to find the elusive lowland streaked tenrec (Hemicentetes semispinosus), a stripy shrew-like mammal specific to Madagascar, but then everything is. We find it, which fills me with hope that Gear has not lost his guiding prowess and that we will find the smallest chameleon in the world.
By now, 48 hours of travelling is beginning to take its toll, but there are the obligatory Malagasy hats and mats to buy in the local market and wait for it, a "slack line".
It is time to get to know my fellow expeditioners, other than the two friends I have brought with me from the UK - a wiry New Zealander and his English rose wife, the German marine biologist, and six South Africans, with varying professions from IT, finance, landscaping and healthcare.
Then there is the mountaineer-come-rigger fresh from working on the football stadiums for the World Cup. This explains the "slack line" - a tight rope that is suspended between trees at every rest stop that will test all of us for the whole trip.
Joining us is Richard Anderson of Anderson Expeditions, who has organised the trip. I cannot help but notice the common dominator is youth, fitness and kayaking experience, all of which are sorely lacking in my case.
Finally we are on the last leg, a four-hour journey on an 11m wooden boat named the MS Masoala and captained by Paxet, who steers us safely out of the estuary and into the open sea, avoiding fishermen in their elegantly carved piroques. We are heading for Masoala National Park, 230 000ha of rain forest and the backdrop to the Masoala Forest Lodge.
The sun beats down with persistent ferocity and just when one stops caring about Madagascar we pull into a natural harbour, a beach surrounded by magnificent rocks that rise sentinel-like from a sapphire sea.
We drop fully clothed and exhausted from the boat into the balmy water and float on our backs. We have finally arrived at the Masoala Forest Lodge.
Our magnificent tents are hidden in the foot of the forest, a stone's throw from the beach, but there is no time to waste. Within hours we are paddling in double kayaks along the coast where we land on a beach and meet a BBC crew filming a series on Madagascar.
Their quest is to find a nesting Helmet Vanga, (Euryceros prevostii) an extraordinary bird with russet and black feathers and an enormous arched blue bill. I mention this because they fail in their mission; yet, on one of our forest walks some days later, a Helmet Vanga swoops above our head and plops into a nest.
Each walk in this biodiverse ecosystem turns up another surprise. The undergrowth is a mass of clutching, sucking, twisting plant life that attaches itself to more clutching, sucking, twisting plant life. Everything grows on something else.
The epiphytes, orchids, lichen, mosses and ferns dazzle in colour; lianas, woody vines strong enough to swing a man, twist skyward into the 30m canopy above, while stranglers send their roots downward into the spongy leaf litter that carpets the forest floor. And you sweat.
Weird shapes you think are creatures turn out to be tricksters of the natural world and those you swear are inanimate are very much alive. Hideous, leaf-tailed geckos flatten themselves against tree trunks mimicking the mottled surface of the bark. Leaf insects need even closer inspection and the giraffe-necked weevil, with its vertical neck that then makes a right-angle turn and extends horizontally ending in a tiny head, is a tease.
Jewel beetles are spun in gold, iridescent green and orange and look good enough to eat, well, lick, which Gear does, testing its hallucinogenic properties.
The red ruffed lemurs (Varencia variegata rubra) whoop eerily in the canopy, watching you indifferently while rubbing their scent on the branches; a pair of white-fronted brown lemurs (Eulemur albifrons) with orange orb eyes and ridiculous ruffs, follow our paths above our heads.
We see a panther chameleon (Furcifer pardalis) on the night walk, motionless, its choice of colour for the night a ghostly pale, its prehensile tail coiled and its toes clasping the branch in perfect symmetry.
A flat body enables movement through tangled branches and, like some cartoon creature, it can puff itself up when threatened or throw itself to the ground, cushioning the fall with its inflated body.
It swivels its eyes independently, and its tongue is a missile with a trajectory longer than its own body, seldom missing its target. This is nature at its exquisite best. But it's not what I am looking for.
We paddle our kayaks down the coast on a five-day camping foray, with the MS Masoala forging ahead, carrying all our gear, food, water and, most importantly, our delightful cooks and helpers.
Each stop on the deserted beaches is better than the one before. Some days are spent snorkelling, swimming and lazing, watching sunbirds dance in the branches - or we try to improve our slack line walking. Miraculously, cold beers are on tap.
Our return to the lodge is tinged with sadness as our expedition is coming to an end and I must bid farewell to my only chance of finding my pygmy chameleon.
We make one last journey into the rain forest and some hours later, tired of saying, "look at this, check this out" I notice Marko, one of the Malagasy hangers on, barefoot and in torn shorts, pick his way through the undergrowth, flicking dead leaves over with his stick.
He picks up a leaf and brings it up to his nose. On it is one of the world's smallest chameleons. It is the stump tail or leaf chameleon (Brookesia peyrierasi), no bigger than a thumbnail. Gear grins from ear to ear. The group cluster round excitedly.
I stare at it dumfounded. It's brown, its tail doesn't curl and, if I am honest, it looks rather ordinary. It looks just like a dead leaf. Then it does something fantastic: bashful about all the attention, it rolls over and pretends to be dead.
I have done what I came to do, discovered a whole lot more and learnt that what you see is not necessarily what you get - also, how you get it can be the biggest surprise of all.
