Into the South: Rain Forests, Desert Gorges, and Swimming Holes Nobody Put in a Guidebook
Desy turned out to be exactly the driver you want in Madagascar: calm, resourceful, and apparently immune to road conditions that would make a rally driver nervous. He couldn’t do much about Ranomafana National Park’s weather, though. We arrived to rain hammering an aluminum gutter outside our window and woke up to more of the same. Our mandatory park guide, JeanCris, led us through a citrus-smelling plant (orange — I failed), a spicy one (pepper — failed), something medicinal (eucalyptus — failed again), and eventually to our first lemur sighting: a golden bamboo lemur in the canopy, just a silhouette against grey sky, but the face through Pat’s binoculars — those enormous eyes, the fluffy tail beading up the water — made the whole soaking morning worth it. We saw red-necked, red-bellied, and broad-nosed lemurs before the day was done, though the viewing areas were crowded enough to feel like a slightly damp zoo field trip. The mandatory guide system here runs 100,000 Ariary ($50 USD) for six hours of walking in circles. Make of that what you will.
Andringitra was something else entirely. The road in required a Land Rover — Desy’s Peugeot wisely stayed in town — and the 130,000 Ar ($65 USD) round-trip transport plus two nights accommodation at the lodge we found in Pat’s guidebook cost less than the first operator’s one-way quote. The lodge was empty. We were the only guests. A hitchhiking park guide named Simon spoke good English and had shown up at exactly the right moment. Dinner that night was pastry-wrapped fried peppers stuffed with ground zebu, then pork sausage with gravy and rice, then a fruit cocktail of mango, banana, and pineapple so fresh it almost seemed rude. We ate it by lamplight with Ray Charles on the speaker and THB beers going cold in our hands.
The hike the next morning covered maybe 12 kilometers but the numbers that mattered were the 600 meters of elevation gain in the first two kilometers and the fact that there was a swimming hole — fed by snowmelt, apparently — sitting right at the top of that climb. I jumped in. The temperature achieved things that cold water achieves. After recovering my composure on a sunny rock eating rice noodles and zebu on a fresh baguette, I took a 25-minute nap listening to wind and water and seriously considered never moving again. The plateau above was barren granite, almost lunar, and then the descent came — all 600 meters back down in the last kilometer and a half. My left knee, which I’d hurt in a car accident before the trip, had opinions about this. We made it back to camp, took turns with a bucket of scalding water and a bucket of ice-cold stream water for a shower, and called it a magnificent day.
Isalo was desert after all that rain forest and highland — sandstone spires in every shade of brown and tan and red, with green lichen thrown in for color. We hiked the Piscane Naturelle, Namazza, Crested Ridge, and Black and Blue Pool trails in a single long hot day. Four swimming holes. The Piscane glowed an almost electric blue under the overhanging cliff. The Black Pool was cold enough that I understood why people use the phrase “outside of Lake Superior” as a reference point, because I did the same thing standing waist-deep in it. At one of the lunch stops, ring-tailed lemurs wandered directly up to our table and just watched us eat, apparently well aware that humans leave food lying around. No viewing platform, no elbow-jostling for angles — just lemurs, eyeballing your sandwich, at arm’s length.
That evening, back in Ranohira, the power went out across the whole town. Every human-made light, gone. The sky didn’t gradually appear — it jumped out at us all at once, the faint stars suddenly as sharp as anything, the Milky Way doing what the Milky Way does when there’s no competition. We were on a rooftop with local-priced beers and the whole city below us in the dark. Some moments you don’t try to photograph.
Ifaty: Where the Plan Slows Down and Gets Better
Ifaty was the reward for all the hard driving. Getting there from Toliara involved a stretch of road that was less a road than a sand track — six to ten inches of loose stuff, no four-wheel drive, Desy threading the Peugeot between zebu and pedestrians and chickens at 45 mph while the back end swapped around in a way that suggested physics were more of a suggestion than a law. Then we crested a dune gap and there was the Mangily Hotel: thatched bungalows up on the sand, massive waves detonating on the reef in the distance, the Indian Ocean doing what it does.
Jean Pierre, the dive shop owner, arrived to inform me that the swell had killed visibility outside the reef and the only diving available was in three to eight meters over a reef that had died from a bacterial infection five months earlier. “But,” he said, with the cheerful resignation of a man who has learned to work with what he has, “buku poisson.” Many fish. I dove it anyway. The fish population was genuinely impressive even over the dead coral, and I can now say I’ve put a tank on my back in Madagascar, which was the point.
Stephan, my divemaster, tipped us to a lunch spot down the beach. Pat and I walked over after dropping gear at the room and ended up spending an hour and a half eating two lobsters, drinking three glasses of wine, and finishing with a shot of local lemon rum. Total cost: $12 USD. I’ve paid more than that for airport coffee.
That afternoon we ran into Jans (German) and Regula (Swiss), whom we’d crossed paths with in Isalo, now staying at the Dunes Hotel down the beach. Jans had arranged a snorkeling trip for the next morning — dugout outrigger canoe, homemade canvas sail lashed together with vine and rope, fresh fish lunch on the beach — for $15 a head. I negotiated one THB beer per person into the deal. The canoe looked like it had been built during a different century, which it probably had, and it moved through the water without any apparent concern for our skepticism.
“I tried to sell them Pat but they said I’d have to pay them to take him.”
The fish lunch that followed the snorkel was the kind of meal that resets your standards. We watched them carry live fish up from the water. Thirty minutes later there were six grilled fish on the table, a pot of fish stew with rice and vegetables, and banana. Seven dollars for three people. The afternoon after that was four hours in a beach chair doing absolutely nothing of note, which was exactly correct. The shelf vendors working the beach tried to sell us carvings and boats and beads and I let them try.
I twisted the same ankle leaving the beach that I’d first twisted in Nairobi two weeks earlier. The beer helped.
The Tsingy de Bemaraha came last, and earning it was part of the deal. The road from Morondava was so comprehensively destroyed that drivers had carved a parallel track in the ditch to avoid the pavement entirely. Then came a leaking jerry can of diesel in the rear compartment that nearly gassed Pat and me and two chickens into unconsciousness — we stopped twice to deal with it, eventually strapping the can to the roof and breathing freely again for the final stretch. We crossed the last river on a ferry that looked held together primarily by optimism, rolling on just as the last vehicle slot filled. Timing, as I kept learning in Madagascar, is everything.
The Grand Tsingy themselves are worth every kilometer of that road. They’re limestone spires — a landscape that looks like someone stuck ten thousand knives point-up into the earth and let the jungle grow in between. UNESCO listed, for good reason. Our guide handed out climbing harnesses (three small ones for two guys over six feet, which required some creative adjustment) and led us down into slot canyons full of bats, up cable-anchored routes along the ridge, through naturally air-conditioned grottos, and out onto a summit with views that go on longer than you can track. Our driver’s ten-year-old son Andrai had come along for the hike on a school holiday, and he spent the whole day grinning so hard it was contagious. Some people you meet for four hours and they stay with you.
That evening we discovered ginger and cinnamon rum mixed with fresh lemonade, which became the unofficial drink of the Tsingy and rivals anything I’ve had anywhere. Villagers danced outside the dinner location to music played at a volume that suggested the speakers were being punished for something, and none of it mattered because the THBs were cold and Hidde and Fianne from Holland were good company and the stars over the river were doing their thing again.
The last morning we drove out past the Avenue of the Baobabs in the late afternoon light — those ancient, enormous trees standing in the rice paddies like they’re waiting for something, the kind of trees that make you feel correctly sized. We stopped and stood there for a while without saying much, which is usually the right call.
Here’s what Madagascar actually is, past the parks and the park fees and the roads that will rearrange your spine: it’s a place that has been left alone enough to stay itself. The people — every single Malagasy I met in five weeks — had a patience and warmth that didn’t feel performed. The country is genuinely poor and dealing with real consequences of deforestation and infrastructure collapse, and none of that is invisible when you’re driving through it. But the dignity with which people live — the carved wooden doors, the terraced rice paddies cut by hand into every hillside, the brick-making in every village from clay dug out of their own fields — that’s not for tourists. That’s just how things are done here. You’re lucky to get to see it.
Got questions about routing Madagascar south to north, sorting a driver through GAM Travel, or what it actually costs to move around this island for two weeks without a package tour? Drop them to the Ask WildWilliam AI — it’s got the specifics from the road and will give you a straight answer.
