From the glass bubble of the helicopter, Madagascar’s Emerald Sea looks like a giant oyster shell. Where the water is shallow, the pale sand has the cast of mother-of-pearl, but where the lagoon tips over an underwater lip, the electric blue darkens to a fathomless black. Kite-surfers like the winds here, but otherwise boats are rare, the matchstick outriggers with delicate sails oddly reminiscent of the egrets that pass on the wing.

We fly lower over the mangroves and I notice the back of a turtle in the water. On another beach, as long as any I’ve seen, five locals are dipping their toes into the surf. I start to find my context. This swath of Madagascar’s north-east coast hasn’t the green fecundity of the Seychelles, nor the resort developments of Mauritius, which stud the land with swimming pools. But it has enthralling variety, which comes to life in this 30-minute helicopter journey hugging the shoreline as we travel south from Antsiranana, where there’s an international airport. I’m heading for the Nosy Ankao archipelago, which at its closest point lies 3.5km off the mainland, to get the measure of Miavana — one of the most eagerly anticipated hotel openings of 2017.

“A fisherman goes as deep as he can into a remote area, and casts as far as he can because he believes there are fish out there in the honeypot,” says Miavana’s developer Thierry Dalais, 58, who is piloting the helicopter. “I’m not a very good fisherman, but that’s the point of this place. Madagascar is the honeypot at the edge of the world.”