Category: Madagascar

The Central Highlands are where most trips to Madagascar begin and where nearly all of them pass through, a plateau of terraced rice fields and red-earth villages running from Antananarivo south through Antsirabe and Fianarantsoa. This is the country's cultural…

Getting around Madagascar means choosing between a private vehicle with driver, taxi-brousse minibuses and domestic flights, and the choice shapes an itinerary more than anything else. Roads are slow, distances deceive and flights run at limited frequency. Most visitors combine…

A 10-day Madagascar itinerary covers one circuit properly rather than three badly, and for most first-time visitors that means the RN7 south from Antananarivo to Toliara. The route takes in highland towns, two rainforest parks, ring-tailed lemurs and the canyons…

Ankarana Special Reserve sits above the longest known cave system in Madagascar, with more than 100 km of mapped passages and underground rivers running beneath a plateau of razor-edged limestone. Guided walks combine tsingy viewpoints, bat caves and canyon forest,…

Madagascar holds roughly half the world's chameleon species, from Parson's chameleon at the length of a forearm to Brookesia leaf chameleons small enough to sit on a fingernail. The island is where the family is thought to have originated, and…

Walking is how you see Madagascar. There are no game drives here, so every park visit means a guided walk, and the range runs from ninety-minute circuits at Anja to four-day treks to the silky sifaka at Marojejy and the…

A 14-day Madagascar itinerary is the most popular length of trip and the first that lets you combine a full circuit with something else. Two weeks covers the RN7 south with a proper coastal finish, or the RN7 plus the…

Antananarivo is Madagascar's capital and the gateway to everywhere else on the island, a highland city built across twelve hills at around 1,280 metres. Most visitors pass through for a night at either end of a trip, though a full…

Madagascar has lost most of its original forest cover, and the species that make it worth visiting are among the most threatened on earth. Park fees and guide charges are the practical counterweight, since they give communities an economic reason…

Madagascar was among the last major landmasses on earth to be settled by people, reached from Borneo across the Indian Ocean rather than from Africa 400 km away. The Merina kingdom unified much of the island in the nineteenth century…