Madagascar: Dust Roads, Red Earth, and the Quiet Between Worlds
You don’t visit Madagascar the way you visit other places. It’s not a destination—it’s a long, strange conversation between landscapes, languages, and time. And most of it happens on the road.
For three weeks, I moved slowly—from the dry south where the earth burns red, up into the green folds of the highlands, then east toward the coast where the rainforest breathes heavily and lemurs call out at dusk. Madagascar doesn’t move quickly, and it doesn’t let you, either. The roads twist, crumble, and stall. It took us days to cover distances that would take hours anywhere else. And that was the point.
Because what Madagascar gives you isn’t always the place—it’s the passing through.
The south: Ifaty to Ranohira – Thorns and stone
I started on the coast near Ifaty, just north of Tuléar, where the spiny forest brushes up against the sea. There’s a stillness here—hot, saline, dreamlike. I stayed in a bungalow at Bamboo Club, a simple beach lodge where fishermen passed by at dawn, their sails catching the wind like the first word of a sentence.
Leaving the coast, we pointed the car inland—north on the RN7, that backbone of a road that holds the country together. The spiny forest faded, replaced by dryness and stone. By the time we reached Isalo National Park, the landscape looked Martian—canyons and plateaus in ochre and ash. Isalo doesn’t just look ancient—it feels tired, like a place that has seen too much sun.
I stayed two nights in Ranohira, just outside the park. Days were spent hiking through slot canyons, swimming in cold natural pools, and watching sifakas leap across rock like dancers who never learned to land hard. Nights were quiet. The stars were loud.
The climb: From Isalo to Fianarantsoa – Highlands and haze
The road to Fianarantsoa climbs slowly. The vegetation softens. Rice paddies appear like green terraces against the hills, and villages hug the curves of the road with red brick homes and smoke rising from wood stoves.
We stopped in Ambalavao, one of those small towns that doesn’t make the postcards but ends up becoming part of your favorite stories. I spent an afternoon walking its quiet streets, visiting a paper-making co-op and drinking sweet local wine with a man who proudly told me he’d never left the region. “Why would I?” he asked. “Everything is here.”
Just outside town is Anja Reserve, a community-run forest crawling with ring-tailed lemurs, chameleons, and granite boulders. You walk with a local guide who knows every path, every animal. You leave covered in sweat and dust and joy.
The cultural center: Fianarantsoa to Antsirabe – Smoke, bricks, and stories
Fianarantsoa is a city that feels carved from red clay—hills stacked with homes, market noise, and a colonial past that clings to the edges. I stayed at Tsara Guest House, a restored colonial building with creaky floors and the smell of wood polish and coffee.
From there, it was another long drive north to Antsirabe, the highland spa town built by Norwegians, oddly enough. Here the air is crisp, the roads are cleaner, and everyone rides pousse-pousse—those bright hand-pulled carts that seem frozen in time. There’s an old-world elegance here, like a town that once dreamed of Europe but forgot the reasons why.
We stayed at Green Park Hotel, a modest place with hot showers, avocado trees in the garden, and some of the best zebu steak I’ve ever tasted.
The descent: From Antsirabe to Andasibe – Forest reclaiming the road
Leaving the highlands, we turned east toward the coast, and the road fell into rain.
The RN2 is narrow, often broken, and hugged by rainforest. Trucks creep around blind corners. Water pours down the hills like it’s chasing you. But as we neared Andasibe, something shifted. The light turned green. The noise of birds replaced the hum of engines.
Andasibe is the kind of place where the forest is never silent. I stayed at Vakona Forest Lodge, where wooden bungalows sit tucked between trees, and lemurs sometimes visit your porch uninvited.
At night, I joined a night walk just outside the park. Flashlights caught the glint of geckos, tree frogs, the flicker of nocturnal eyes. But it was the next morning that really stayed with me—when I heard the indri lemurs call for the first time. It’s a sound that rises from deep in the chest and lifts into something almost human—mournful, wild, untranslatable.
What Madagascar taught me
Madagascar didn’t give me the trip I expected.
It gave me hours of slow driving through silence and smoke. It gave me children waving from brick courtyards, women pounding cassava by the roadside, and drivers who knew every pothole like a song.
It gave me animals that exist nowhere else on Earth—and people who somehow feel more grounded than anyone I’ve met. It gave me patience, and distance, and a strange, sweet kind of loneliness that made everything feel sharper and more alive.
There were power cuts. There were delays. There were roads so bad we laughed just to keep from despairing. But nothing here is perfect. That’s the beauty of it.
Madagascar doesn’t come to you clean or ready. You earn it. One dusty mile at a time.
And if you let it, it stays with you. Long after you’ve left the road behind.