Category: Madagascar

Madagascar holds more than a hundred lemur species and every one of them lives here and nowhere else. They range from the indri, the largest at over a metre when its legs are extended, to Madame Berthe's mouse lemur at…

Madagascar has two official languages, Malagasy and French, and English is spoken by guides and at tourist properties but rarely elsewhere. Malagasy belongs to the Austronesian family, related to languages of Borneo rather than to anything in Africa, which is…

Nosy Tanikely is Madagascar's most accessible marine park, an uninhabited island south of Nosy Be where green and hawksbill turtles feed on reef you can reach by wading in from the beach. Visitors come on day trips for snorkelling, a…

Les Trois Baies is a run of three wild beaches east of Diego Suarez, reached by four-wheel drive or on foot, with almost nobody on them. Sakalava Bay is the best kitesurfing spot in Madagascar, Dunes Bay and Pigeon Bay…

Lokobe National Park protects the last surviving lowland rainforest on Nosy Be, reached by dugout canoe and known above all for its black lemurs and panther chameleons. Visits run as half-day guided walks of two to three hours from the…

Madagascar's 5,000 km of coastline holds coral reefs, five species of sea turtle, migrating humpback whales, whale sharks and dugongs. The reefs are least damaged inside long-established marine reserves at Nosy Tanikely, Nosy Hara and the three protected areas off…

Madagascar holds around 12,000 plant species with roughly four in five found nowhere else, including over a thousand orchids, six endemic baobabs and the entire Didiereaceae family that gives the spiny forest its alien appearance. The botany is as distinctive…

Tsimanampetsotsa National Park surrounds a shallow soda lake too saline to hold fish, fringed by flamingos and backed by spiny forest growing straight out of limestone. Visitors walk short circuits to caves holding blind fish, ancient baobabs and ring-tailed lemurs.…

Madagascar has a small number of genuinely good lodges and no equivalent to the safari luxury of Botswana or the resort polish of Mauritius. What money buys here is access rather than opulence: charter flights that replace three days of…

Maroantsetra sits at the inner corner of the Baie d'Antongil and is the gateway to Masoala National Park and Nosy Mangabe. It is reached by air, since there is no practical road, and the bay it faces is the principal…