Madagascar Travelogue: Forests, Wildlife, Whales, and a Whale Shark!

Madagascar’s enormous size is only the most obvious of several reasons, including its exceptional diversity of habitats and species, why some observers believe the island could justly be called the world’s eighth continent.

---Peter Tyson, Madagascar, The Eighth Continent

Crowned leumr at Ankarana National Park, Madagascar.

In late September, Rishi and I visited Madagascar, an island nation located in the Indian Ocean, separated from Africa by the Mozambique Channel. With an area of 587,713 km2, Madagscar is the world’s fourth largest island after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo. It split off from Africa about 160 million years ago, during the breakup of Gondwanaland. It's long-term isolation led to a high rate of endemic species, around 90% across animals and plants combined. (This entry focuses on geography and wildlife. Read my blog about Madagascar’s history, peoples and economy here.)

One could easily spend a month or more traveling around Madagascar and just skim the surface, but we had only two weeks. Working with a travel agent, we assembled an itinerary that took us to view some of the island's unique wildlife and ecosystems, mostly in the northern part of the country, followed by beach time on the island of Nosy Sakatia.  

The travel agent who arranged our trip warned us that traveling in Madagascar would be more challenging than what we were used to in the Southern African region, that the roads are poor, and the accommodations are relatively modest. Madagascar is not the kind of place where you can casually pick up a rental car at the airport and easily jump on the highway for your destination. Also, most of the national parks require that you use a guide. So during our travels, except for the beach, we would be accompanied by a driver and guide.

We began our trip in the capital, Antananarivo. About 3 million people live in greater Tana, as the city is called for short. En route from the airport to our hotel, the narrow, traffic-clogged streets were lined with stalls where people were selling everything imaginable: clothing, household goods, produce, meat, fish (unrefrigerated!), you name it. Even in this highly urbanized area, wherever there is a bit of open flat land, it's in use for rice paddies or for grazing cattle. 

View of Antananarivo, Madagascar's capital, from our hotel. With more than 3 million residents, it's a big, crowded, smoggy city.

I’m not a city fan to begin with, so Tana, with its crowds and traffic, was my least favorite part of the trip. Unfortunately, because of how flights are scheduled, compounded with Air Madagascar's notorious unreliability, our itinerary required a second overnight in Tana in the middle of the trip and a third stay on the trip's last night.

Early on our second day, our guide and driver picked us up for the trip to Saha Forest Camp, about 100 km northeast of Tana, where we would spend two days visiting a primary mid-altitude rainforest reserve at Anjozorobe. The two and a half-hour drive was our first introduction to the winding and pot-hole rich Madagascar roads.  

After arriving at the Saha camp parking lot, we walked about ten minutes to the lodge on a path beside rice paddies, where villagers were hard at work planting new rice seedlings.

Because this is primary rain forest, it was really dense and very beautiful, but spotting the wildlife through the thick forest canopy was challenging. Nonetheless, we saw two species of lemurs: the indri, which is the largest lemur, and the diademed sifaka. Both of these species make huge leaps from tree to tree, in an upright position, which is something to see. I didn’t get any good photos of the indri and how they move, but you can check it out here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyj2jxAtCH8, where you can also hear the strange calls that the indris make.

Diademed sifaka lemur at Anjozorobe Reserve.

The comet moth, with a wingspan of about 20 cm, is indigenous to the Madagascar rain forests. Its cocoon, at left, has holes to prevent the pupa from drowning in the heavy rainfalls. The adult cannot feed and lives less than a week. Ah, beauty is fleeting.  

For the next phase of our trip, we returned to Tana overnight before catching a flight the next morning to Antisranana, also known as Diego Suarez, at the far northern end of the country. Our next stop was Joffreville, where we would take in the wildlife and plants at Montagne d'Ambre National Park. 

A well camouflaged leaf tail gecko. Can you spot it?

Bird's nest fern at Montagne d'Ambre National Park.

The locally endemic Amber Mountain Rock Thrush. 

While in Joffreville, we spent two nights at the beautiful Litchi
Tree guest house. It's owner has converted the dilapidated
remains of a French colonial officer's mountain retreat into
 a lovely six room hotel, with very good food as well.

After Joffreville, we continued to Ankarana National Park via National Highway 6, which was paved in 1992 but hasn't seen any maintenance since. The road surface is so disintegrated that driving about 100 km took 3.5 hours, translating to just under 30 km/hr (17 mph) on the region's major road. It's not even hilly or winding. Fortunately, this road is currently being rebuilt, with funding from the EU and World Bank. 

Crowned lemurs in Ankarana National Park. The grey one at left with the reddish crown is a female, while the male is brown with an orange and black crown.  

Sanford's brown lemur, in a notch in a tree.

Besides the wildlife, the main attraction in the Ankarana area is the dramatic spikey limestone karst formations called tsingy. This is one of two tsingy areas in Madagascar, the other one being the larger Tsingy de Bemaraha.

Madagascar may be underdeveloped, but cell phones are still omnipresent.
Here, our guide Clement is taking a call while walking on top of the limestone tsingy plateau. 

In the Malagasy language, tsingy means to tiptoe, because
one has to walk very carefully in the sharp, friable limestone formations. 

Erosion, which created the tsingy spires, has also formed sinkholes and caves.

View of moonrise over the tsingy massif from Iharaha Bush Camp, where we stayed for two nights.  It's worth staying there just to take in this view. 

Boa constrictors (second one is at far left at the edge of photo), ~2 meters long each, relaxing under a rock overhang. Our guide spotted these beauties while we were walking in the tsingy. 

The rooms at Iharana, built using construction similar to that used in local homes, are
mostly open to the air, which given the very hot weather, was great during the breezy
evenings. The piece of wood at the doorway doesn't completely fill the opening.
There's a sheet you can adjust to control how much air flows into the room. 

Our final destination was the Sakatia Lodge, on the very small Sakatia Island, just next to the larger Nosy Be island, off Madagascar's north western coast. We spent four heavenly days here, enjoying the beach, the scenery, and the ambiance of this wonderful lodge. It’s a family-run operation and all of the staff were just fabulous, very efficient, friendly, and helpful. The food was great, which my readers know is always a key consideration for Rishi and me. 

Sakatia Lodge: view from our room, the beach, and Rishi enjoying a coconut in the lodge. 

On one of our days at Nosy Sakatia, One day we took a ride around the island on a local pirogue ( a dugout canoe, but with a motor) followed by lunch on the beach. Yes, the water is really that blue! 

Humpback whale slapping its tail.

On our last day there, we went on a boat ride to spot humpback whales. On the way back to the island, our guide on the boat spotted a whale shark, the largest fish in the world, in the water in front of the boat. We had our snorkeling gear along for just this possibility and I was quickly off the boat and into the water with this behemoth. The average adult is about 30 ft long, through I estimate this one was smaller, maybe 25 ft. I was one of the lucky few who got to swim alongside before it sensed the entrance into the water of a boat load full of snorkelers and chose to dive into deeper water. I don’t have a waterproof camera, so didn’t get any pictures. You can see what this amazing creature looks like, though, by visiting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUMUSFLyZpU . Seeing this amazing animal, albeit briefly, was definitely a high point of the trip.

Would I recommend a trip to Madagascar? First, I emphasize that Madagascar is a very poor, underdeveloped nation that has suffered from decades of unstable and corrupt governments. It’s difficult in many ways to travel in such a poor place. For one, infrastructure, such as roads, is severely lacking. The standard of accommodation is definitely less luxurious than many other Africa travel destinations. Flights don’t leave on time, or Air Madagascar changes the schedule a few hours before the flight. You have to go with the expectation that it's adventure travel, and part of the adventure is just getting from point to point. But more significantly, it tears at the heart to see people living in poverty, without access to clean water or sanitation. However, people appeared healthy, especially in the rural areas, and malnourishment doesn’t seem to be a problem, as most people are engaged in agriculture and the land is fertile.

Also, so much of the country has been deforested, beginning with the first human occupants, who arrived from Indonesia starting around 350 BC. These people began cutting down and burning forests to enable rice cultivation. Subsequent inhabitants, coming from Africa around 1000 AD and bringing with them maize and domesticated oxen called zebu, also contributed to deforestation through slash and burn agricultural methods that are still in practice today. The problem was exacerbated starting in the French colonial period, when Madagascar’s forests were cut for their beautiful hardwoods. Wood is also used as a fuel, either directly or in charcoal production. The remaining forests, rich with diverse flora and fauna, are well worth seeing and efforts are underway to preserve them in a system of national parks. But you have to travel through a lot of deforested areas, on terrible roads, before you get there.

This truck carries bags full of charcoal in rural Madagascar.

Would we visit again? Rishi says no, as the poverty level and lack of infrastructure are a deal breaker for him. For my part, I think I would go again, if I had the opportunity, though on a return trip, I’d try to visit the southern section of the island to see some different rainforest parks, the Allée des Baobabs, and the spiny desert.