After ten days of non-stop surfing on Madagascar’s southwest coast, I decided to switch things up and explore the nation’s interior. Madagascar is a massive island with ecosystems ranging from rainforest to desert, savanna to mountains. The country is 1.4 times the size of my home state of California. I know as well as anyone that trying to explore all of California in three weeks is a fool’s errand, so trying to do that in Madagascar (as many tourists do) was an even crazier idea. Instead of spending my three weeks in Madagascar hitting as many parks as I could, I strategically chose a few locations that piqued my interest. To me, this is not only the more enjoyable way to travel, but also more affordable.
After chatting with some locals and fellow travelers during my time in the coastal town of Anakao, I homed in on two locations: Isalo National Park and Antananarivo, the nation’s capital. As I mentioned, Madagascar is big, but the poorly maintained roads make the distances from point A to B even more gargantuan. Thus I chose Isalo first because it was the closest national park that looked interesting to me — a large mesa of eroded sandstone that protrudes from a high desert plain and houses three species of lemurs. It was just a 140-mile drive that locals told me could take anywhere from five to nine hours to complete on the rutted roads.
The final destination, Antananarivo, or ‘Tana’ as the locals call it, was a practical choice given that its airport was my only way out of the country. Locals had been telling me to spend as little time there as possible, but something inside was telling me that there had to be something to explore in the largest city of a country with such a unique, diverse culture. I got sold on the idea by chatting with a Kiwi ex-pat in Anakao who has lived in Madagascar for fifteen years. He confidently told me that I should absolutely spend some time in Tana. His opinion was all the confirmation I needed to go ahead with my plan.
As I mentioned, traveling within Madagascar is a challenge. The national flights are sparse, expensive, and tend to sell out. With no national train system, the only remaining option is hitting the road. The problem is the roads are horrendously out of repair. I am talking more potholes than craters on the face of the moon. Traveling by road is a commitment. For those who don’t want to shell out the cash for a private car and driver (people like me), the affordable option is a taxi brousse.
The taxi brousse are long sprinter vans used as long-distance buses. They essentially cram as many people as they can in them, while tying precarious amounts of cargo to the roofs, and take off on incredibly long journeys that sometimes span 24 hours. They are the main transporter of people and goods around Madagascar. While you sit crammed between people in the taxi brousse, you have to go through an endurance challenge of muscle aches and limited bathroom breaks. If it doesn’t sound tough enough, they are also known to be targeted by highway bandits at night in the more remote parts of the country.
But as crazy as it sounds, riding the taxi brousse is a rite of passage in Madagascar. Nearly all of the locals in Tulear have done the 20+ hour gauntlet to Tana. I decided to just dip my feet in the water, taking the taxi brousse from Tulear to the town of Ranohira, a relatively short distance to the gateway to Isalo National Park.
I was warned that the roads were bad, but I really underestimated how bad they were when I got to experience the spine-jarring, crater-sized potholes for myself. The ride to Ranohira wasn’t horrible though. My ass was sore and I couldn’t feel my feet given that I was unable to adjust my position crammed between a window and a stocky man, but we made good time and after five hours the suffering was over.
I arrived in the small village of Ranohira situated on a flat plain adjacent to the park. The village essentially exists because of the national park, providing hotels for guests and obligatory guiding services for hikers. Knowing that the village has no bank or ATM, I budgeted the cash that I thought I would need for four days, but was a bit taken aback when I saw the prices that these obligatory guides were charging. Park entry and a guide were about USD $52, which for Madagascar prices is wildly expensive. The money I brought was meant to cover the $15/night hotel, meals that go for $2-5, and a $10 ride home. I didn’t have enough money for the guiding, but luckily I had some spare USD that one guide hesitantly accepted.
I really enjoy the solitude of hiking and the freedom to adapt your route on the fly, so I wasn’t ecstatic to be forced to tag along with a guide for a full-day itinerary of hiking. I decided to frame it as an eight-hour French conversation course, given that my guide didn’t speak English, in which case it was a great value.
While we did have to stick to a predetermined route that many other tourists were also doing, I ended up enjoying the value of a guide. He pointed out some things I wouldn’t have noticed, like a stick bug camouflaged in a bush, and a giant spider up in a tree. He also taught me the interesting burial practices of the local Bara tribe, who bury their dead within the sandstone cliffs, exhume the bodies after some years, clean the bones, and put them in a new permanent tomb, also within the sandstone cliffs. Thus as you are walking around the park, there are dozens of tombs visible on the sides of the escarpments.
Another interesting fact Freddy told me is the importance of the zebu (humped cattle), not just in the Bara culture, but all of Madagascar. He explained that the more zebu a Bara man owned, the more wives he could have. The value of these animals causes people to spend their life savings on them and attracts the attention of criminal groups that steal zebu.
Aside from the hiking, the other highlight of Ranohira was the daily jam sessions every night at the hotel. The son of the hotel’s owner, Antoine, was an excellent bassist, and the server, Joe, could sing and play guitar. They would wait for me each evening to play some music, covering songs in all the languages we collectively spoke — English, French, Malagache, and Spanish.
My taxi brousse back to Tulear did not go as smoothly as the one on the way there. My second ride was a bit rough because of constant stops and cramming more people than we had seats into the vehicle. The trip took eight hours, as opposed to the five hours on my first journey.
Regardless, I made it back Tulear and caught my flight up to the capital, where I would spend my final four days in Madagascar.
Tana does not have any spectacular tourist attractions that are worthy of postcards. The joy of Tana is found in walking around the markets, trying the local cuisine, and getting a feel for the life of the Malagasy people. With this in mind, I found a local host on couchsurfing.com (a platform that connects travelers with local hosts) to get the true Tana experience.
My host, Faso, met me at the airport and we caught a cab back to his place in the heart of the city. We arrived at his home late at night, pulling into a muddy driveway with modest, dated apartment buildings on either side. I would come to understand that the four-story building at the end of the driveway belonged to Faso’s entire extended family. There were 23 family members, and now me, inhabiting the four floors and added rooms on the roof, where I shared a room with Faso.
Fatigued from travel, I was beginning to wonder if I would regret forgoing my right to privacy in exchange for a truly local experience. I am the type of person who needs alone time to recharge, something that is a rare commodity when you have 23 roommates. But Faso has hosted so many foreigners at his house that no one batted an eye when they spotted me for the first time roaming their halls.
However, after three days of Faso acting as my tour guide of Tana, I knew that my initial intuition to stay with a local was the right call. Tana is the type of city where a local guide is particularly crucial. It would have been easy to aimlessly roam the unremarkable streets and miss out on a lot of the cool local spots that a guide like Faso would know about.
Upon exploring Tana, one of the most interesting things to me is the diversity of the people. One might assume that Madagascar was populated by continental African tribes long ago and that is that. But the history of the country’s immigration is so much more complex, and it’s as clear as day when you look around at the people.
Madagascar was an uninhabited island until roughly around the time of Christ, when Austronesian people, believed to be from the island of Borneo, arrived on boats and brought with them Javanese and Malay laborers and slaves. The language spoken across the island, Malagache, comes from a branch of languages from Austronesia, not Africa. Over the millennia, more groups arrived on the island from southeast Africa, India, the Middle East, and Melanesia, among others. And of course, in the age of colonization, European empires arrived, too. The result is a fascinatingly diverse group of people who all call themselves Malagasy.
In present-day Madagascar, the people divide themselves up into 18 ‘tribes’ or ethnic groups. In the central highlands, where Tana is located, the Merina tribe, the largest in Madagascar, is more Asian / Austronesian influenced. If you didn’t know better you would not think you were in Africa.
I enjoyed observing this immensely diverse group of people all conversing in the same language and coexisting on this island.
After three weeks exploring three different, and unique, corners of Madagascar, I hopped in a taxi bound for the airport. My initial impulse to visit Madagascar did not let me down. The country is full of so much energy and life. It would take years to see everything. On the other hand, Madagascar is not for everyone. It’s admittedly a challenging place to travel. There are few flights into and out of the country, there are no efficient options for inter-island traveling, and unless you have deep pockets, you will have to adapt to the no-frills nature of affordable accommodation. For a country that is supposed to be cheap for a foreigner, due to the reasons I listed, you might be slightly surprised at how much money a trip to Madagascar costs. But that said, it’s the ideal destination for the adventurer. I wouldn’t think twice about returning should the opportunity present itself.
Leave a Reply