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.
8-Day Madagascar » Hidden Gems & Rainforest is a 8-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 $3190 per person for two travellers down to $2070 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
8-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.
Fly west and drive north into Kirindy, dry deciduous forest and the best place in the country to see the fossa — Madagascar's top predator, a three-foot cat-like animal more closely related to a mongoose, which hunts lemurs through the canopy and which almost nobody sees. Seven lemur species live here, plus the giant jumping rat, which exists in this forest and nowhere else on Earth. The night walk is the point of coming.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
North on rough tracks with a ferry crossing of the Tsiribihina — a slow river day with pirogues, herons and zebu being driven across the water. Bekopaka is the gateway village to the Tsingy, and getting here is a genuine expedition: there is no fast way, no tarmac, and no shortcut, which is exactly why the Tsingy still looks the way it does.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
The Tsingy de Bemaraha is a forest of limestone blades — a plateau eroded by rain into thousands of vertical knife-edged pinnacles, some ninety metres tall and sharp enough to cut through a boot sole. You cross it on ladders, cables and a suspension bridge slung between pinnacles. Lemurs live in the shaded gaps below, in a microclimate of their own. It is a UNESCO site and it looks like nowhere else on the planet. In the afternoon, a pirogue through the Manambolo Gorge.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
The long track south again — the same ferries, the same red dust, the same zebu carts, and a completely different landscape in the other direction and the other light. You stop at the baobabs on the way in, arriving in Morondava in the evening. This is the day that tells you how remote the Tsingy actually is.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
One more visit to the baobabs at first light, when the tour buses are not there and the local people are — women carrying water, zebu carts, children going to school between trees that were standing before Madagascar had a king. Then the flight east across the whole width of the island back to the capital, over the deforested red highlands, which is a sobering view and worth taking the window seat for.
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 across the canopy at dawn in a wail that carries two kilometres and sounds like nothing else in the animal kingdom; it is the most memorable sound in Madagascar. Eleven other lemur species live here, plus chameleons and the improbable giraffe-necked weevil. On the night walk, the mouse lemurs come out.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
A transfer to Antananarivo airport for your flight. End of our services.
