After one and a half year of limited travel, it was about time to get the backpack out of storage and find a new and exciting destination. This time I wasn’t planning on going alone but had made arrangements with René and Gijs, two friends from university. Rather quickly we settled on Madagascar as a destination over Japan (not our favorite season) and New Zealand (too far for 20 days).
Planning proved to be much harder than anything else so far. While I like to travel in a happy-go-lucky way, booking flights and hotels a day in advance, this seemed to be a poor strategy for Madagascar. The country is huge and has many airports but only a few of them are used for regular passenger flights. There are private charter organisations willing to provide a more customized experience but they seem tailored to the happy few in this world and quotes came in very expensive.
We decided to book a few domestic flights and do a large part of the island by car with local driver. I had done this before in Sri Lanka with René and liked the flexibility and the little unexpected stops along the way in small villages and lesser known touristic spots.
Infrastructure quality in Madagascar is patchy and it’s advisable not to expect to cover large distances per day. We decreased our list of destinations from six to three, dropping the north, the Sainte Marie island and almost all of the east. We then settled on the national parks along the national road RN7 from Toliara in the southwest to Antsirabe in the centre, the Tsingy the Bemaraha national park that everyone visits and Nosy Be, a beautiful and touristic island that is for some visitors the only part of Madagascar that they’ll see as it has direct flights from other continents.
Our trip was off to a good start when we we landed in Antananarivo, the capital, and discovered that our luggage was still somewhere in Europe. It is refreshing to realise that while we’ve made our trip as flexible as possible to allow for delays, bad weather and genereal inefficiencies common to Africa, it is actually KLM and Air France messing up to such a large extent that four days later we still have no clue where our luggage is.
There was no time to stay in the capital so we bought some essential clothing and a toothbrush and took our flight to Toliara where our driver would pick us up and where our adventure would truly begin. A bit more basic than expected, in a simple outfit and sharing a single phone charger but with all malaria pills, travel documents and digital cameras accounted for. Makes you realise how little you actually need.