“The whole time, there was this cyclone hovering over the Indian Ocean, pouring mega-rain on Madagascar.” As luck had it, there was a single, momentary break in the rain when “the light was just beautiful,” he said. Things kept falling into place: his flight to Mahajanga, near the national park in Ampijoroa, took off despite the cyclone; his driver took an unusual route to the airport that happened to pass just in front of the Baobob restaurant and port that Finnegan writes about in the lead of his piece; the armed guards at the sanctuary were there at a time when they normally wouldn’t have been.“The whole experience was surreal,” Torgovnik said. “To travel to the other side of the world to go and look for this rare tortoise… I’m in Madagascar, having a beer at the end of the day, and these lemurs are jumping overhead. It was just incredible.”