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.
6-Day Madagascar » Wonders of the Island is a 6-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 $2180 per person for two travellers down to $1420 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
6-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 by 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 a lot of the rest.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
Up to the Rova, the palace of the Merina queens on the highest hill — it burned in 1995 and has been slowly rebuilt, and the view from it takes in the whole of Tana. Then the old upper town, the steep stairways, and Analakely market below: vanilla, cloves, zebu meat, and a great deal of noise. Malagasy Christianity here is layered over ancestor worship, and the two coexist openly.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
Met at Antananarivo — 'Tana' to everyone who lives there — and driven east into the rainforest at Andasibe. Madagascar broke away from Africa 160 million years ago and has been evolving on its own ever since: about 90% of everything alive here exists nowhere else on Earth. Nothing you see in the next few days has a close relative anywhere.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
Andasibe is where you meet the indri — the largest lemur alive, black-and-white, tailless, and the only one that sings. Family groups call to each other across the canopy at dawn in a wail that carries two kilometres and sounds like nothing else in the animal kingdom; it is the single most memorable sound in Madagascar. There are eleven other lemur species here, plus chameleons and the improbable giraffe-necked weevil. The night walk is when the mouse lemurs come out.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
The road back west through the eastern escarpment: rice terraces, brickworks, roadside markets selling whatever grows locally, and a landscape that has been comprehensively deforested — a big part of the Madagascar story, and worth talking to your guide about.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
A transfer to Antananarivo airport for your flight. End of our services.
