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.
9-Day Madagascar Adventure » Exotic Beauty is a 9-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 $2720 per person for two travellers down to $1770 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
9-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.
North-east into the Anjozorobe-Angavo corridor, one of the last stands of humid montane forest on the central highlands — a fragment that survived because a local community decided it should, and now runs it. Almost no tour groups come here.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
A full day in the forest with local guides: indri calling in the canopy, diademed sifaka — arguably the most beautiful lemur alive, orange, grey and white — and a birdlist that includes species you will see nowhere else. The community runs the reserve, and the walk finishes in the village.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
South-east across the highlands to Andasibe, with an afternoon at Vakona: an island of rescued lemurs in a river bend, where brown lemurs and diademed sifaka will land on your shoulder uninvited. It is not wild and it does not pretend to be; it is also the only place you will get that close.
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.
Fly north to Nosy Be, the island off the north-west coast — volcanic, hot, covered in ylang-ylang plantations, which is why the whole island smells faintly of perfume. This is where Madagascar goes to the beach.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
By boat to Nosy Komba, where black lemurs come down to hand height, and on to Nosy Tanikely, a marine reserve where you snorkel over turtles, rays and reef fish in very clear water. Lunch is grilled on the beach.
Overnight: 3-star hotel / lodge.
The flight back to Tana and your onward connection. End of our services.
