Traveling to Madagascar - Reasons / why to visit

bkochar (36)in #photography • 6 years ago (edited)

Traveling to Madagascar was an incredibly beautiful and rewarding experience. It was pretty random how we decided to go. After seriously contemplating Japan, briefly considering China, and almost booking Mexico, I read about Madagascar in this National Geographic article. Suddenly all the pieces seem to fall into place. Good weather, cheap flights, even the plague from last year seemed to be contained - BOOKED! :D

Since then I learnt that very few people know very much about Madagascar, despite its unique flora and fauna, diverse landscapes and welcoming people. Approximately 300K tourists visit this country per year! (To put this number in perspective, about 30M people visit St. Mark's Basilica in Venice every year). So here I am, putting together some information and resources that I learnt before and during our trip. First things first.

Why Madagascar?

Weather: We were looking to travel in May, which as it turns out, is shoulder season in Madagascar. This meant good weather, few tourists, reasonable prices and no reason to book hotels in advance. Madagascar climate varies by region, so while it was very hot in the west, we often needed a light sweater in the evenings in central Madagascar. But here is what you need to know: July to September is peak season (excellent weather, holiday season for Europeans), January to April is rainy season (worse than usual roads, cyclones), May to June and November to December are shoulder season.
Prices: The general price level in Madagascar is low (even more so in low / shoulder season), but also depends on the type of vacation you choose. Our expenses were flights, hotels, transport, food and national parks. Madagascar is a poor country, with most of its population earning less than $2 per capita per day. So your euros and dollars go a long way.
- Flights: We got pretty cheap flights - € 500 p.p. from Munich to Antananarivo via Paris with Air France. It was a total of about 10 hours, but besides the abysmal inflight meals and the uncomfortable soreness in my knees about 5 hours, it was fairly smooth.
- Hotels: We paid somewhere between €10 (budget-level) and €40 (upper/top-level) per night for accommodation.
- Transport: This was our biggest expense, because we decided to self-drive. Self-driving is virtually non-existant amongst tourists in Madagascar as most local agencies do not rent cars without drivers. Will go into detail on this point in a later post about our itinerary. We found a wonderful Dutch guy Coen Oldenhof living in Tana who rented us a Nissan 4x4 for € 75 per day and a Renault 4 for € 35 per day for the two parts of our trip. Prices not including fuel. Other travel options are domestic flights with Air Madagascar (we heard these were €250 per flight, regardless of distance, and also that these flights tended to be unreliable), taxi-brousse (public transport), and car with driver (slightly less expensive than car without driver)

Food: Tripadvisor is not so helpful here, we usually followed advice of the locals and our guidebook, and ate at our hotels or restaurants. Very cheap options for snacks or en-route meals are roadside hotelys.
National parks: We visited Tsingy National Park and Kirindy Reserve. Taking a guide is mandatory - ours was a real sir. Tsingy was fairly expensive, and we did a pirogue ride (2h) and hiked Grand Tsingy (4h) and it cost us over € 50 for a group of 4 people.

Mix of adventure and relaxation: Madagascar has so much to offer - Peace and tranquil white sandy beaches set against turquoise blue water, avenue of giant baobab trees, spectacular forests of towering spiky limestone needles that you have all to yourself, ring-tailed lemurs and flourescent green chameleons. If you are willing to fight through the god-awful roads, general lack of infrastructure, mosquitos and other tropical insects, and linguistic constraints (if you don't speak French or Malagasy), you will be received by kind people who open their hearts to share their beautiful country with you.

Unexplored: This one actually cinched the deal for us. We were looking for someplace that wasn't super commercial, and not everyone had already been to. We were considering Japan or Mexico, and ended up booking Madagascar. Best. call.