Madagascar split from Africa 160 million years ago and evolved alone — nine out of ten species here exist nowhere else on Earth. Lemurs leap through the rainforest at Andasibe, baobabs line a dirt road at Morondava like cathedral columns at sunset, and the limestone blades of the Tsingy cut a stone forest you cross on suspension bridges. Roads are slow and the country is huge; that is part of the deal.
10-Day Madagascar » Grand Discovery is a 10-day private tour of Madagascar, run on your own dates with a private guide and driver. You stay in the best available lodges beside the parks, on half board, travelling by private 4×4 with a driver who knows the road conditions.
Prices are per person and drop as your group grows — from $2960 per person for two travellers down to $1930 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
10-day Madagascar itinerary
Met at Antananarivo, a capital built across twelve hills, with the old royal palace on the highest one and rice paddies still worked inside the city limits. The Malagasy are not African in origin: their ancestors sailed here from Borneo, five thousand miles across open ocean, roughly 1,200 years ago, and the language is still recognisably Austronesian. It is the strangest fact about the country and it explains much of the rest.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
South on the RN7 to Ambatolampy, where aluminium cooking pots are cast in sand moulds from melted-down engine blocks — a workshop visit that is far more interesting than it sounds. Then Antsirabe, a spa town the Norwegians built at 1,500 metres, full of thermal water, colonial villas and several thousand brightly painted rickshaws.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
Through Ambositra, the woodcarving capital, where Zafimaniry craftsmen do geometric marquetry that is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list. Then east into the Ranomafana rainforest — a park that exists because a new lemur species, the golden bamboo lemur, was discovered here in 1986 and the forest was protected in order to save it.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
Steep, wet, dense montane rainforest, and twelve lemur species in it including the golden bamboo lemur — which eats bamboo shoots containing enough cyanide to kill a person every day, and nobody yet knows how it survives. Also the greater bamboo lemur, one of the rarest primates on Earth. The night walk turns up mouse lemurs, chameleons and a very large number of frogs.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
Through Fianarantsoa, the highland wine town, to Ambalavao, where Antaimoro paper is still made by hand with flowers pressed into it. Anja is a community reserve at the foot of a granite massif and it is full of ring-tailed lemurs — the ones everybody pictures — sunbathing on the rocks with their arms held out. The village runs it and the money stays there.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
Isalo is sandstone — canyons, gorges, natural swimming pools and eroded rock in a landscape much more Utah than Africa. You walk into the Canyon des Makis, swim in a black pool under a waterfall, and finish at sunset at the 'Isalo window', a rock arch that frames the sun as it goes down.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
Through Ilakaka, a hamlet of forty people until sapphires were found in 1998 and it became a boom town of a hundred thousand almost overnight — it is worth seeing and it is not pretty. Then the Antsokay Arboretum outside Tuléar, which protects the spiny forest: octopus trees, thorn scrub, and plants found only in this corner of the island. Down to the beach at Ifaty.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
The spiny forest at Reniala in the morning — baobabs and didiereaceae, a plant family that exists nowhere else, growing in what is effectively a desert on the edge of the sea. In the afternoon, out to the reef with the Vezo, who are semi-nomadic fishing people and who still sail pirogues with the same outrigger hull their Austronesian ancestors arrived in a thousand years ago.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
A last morning on the Mozambique Channel, then up the coast to Tuléar. The flight north follows the spine of the island — spiny forest, then the red deforested highlands, then Tana on its hills — and it is the best possible summary of everything you have just driven through. A final evening in the capital.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
A transfer to Antananarivo airport for your flight. End of our services.
