Madagascar

During the dry season of the southern winter: I travelled the Great Island in July and August, and everything was open. From November to April, by contrast, the rains cut off whole regions: at Bekopaka, the gateway to the tsingy, the ferries stop and the track becomes impassable. The dry season also makes the Tsiribihina river descent possible, two and a half days on a barge with nights on sandbanks. One rule holds all year round: mora mora, the Malagasy art of not counting time. The journey begins in my trip down the Tsiribihina. The last leg runs through my detour through the east.

A forest of limestone blades 200 million years old, visited with full via ferrata gear. Harness, lanyards and karabiners: you move between caves, footbridges and ridges as sharp as razors, and the word tsingy itself translates as “the place where one cannot walk”. These former Jurassic seabeds, uplifted and then carved by rain for five million years, have been a Unesco World Heritage site since 1990. Allow 95 kilometres of track in four hours from Belo-sur-Tsiribihina, plus a ferry across the Manambolo; on site, my guide taught me the fady that forbids pointing with your index finger. The full story is in the stone forest and its giant baobabs. The continent carries on in my African escapades.

Almost everywhere along the route: each park has its own, and 80% of the island’s wildlife exists nowhere else. I met the ring-shaped silhouette of Lemur catta in the Isalo canyons, the Sifaka and the tiny nocturnal Microcebus, barely 30 grams, in the dry forest of the tsingy, the Lemur rufus by a waterfall on the Tsiribihina, and twelve species live in Ranomafana park, including Edward’s Sifaka, a master of tree-to-tree leaps. At night comes an unexpected bonus: sleeping chameleons drop their camouflage and return to their true colours. My sightings are in my encounter with Isalo’s lemurs. The final stop is in my final stop in Ranomafana.

Yes: it is Madagascar’s highest summit reachable by simple hiking, and I topped out in 2.5 hours from camp. Pic Boby, Imarivolanitra in Malagasy, “the mountain that touches the sky”, rises to 2,658 metres, the country’s second highest peak, in the granite Andringitra massif. The day before, you cross the lunar valley at around 2,000 metres and sleep in a tent through a properly cold night; in the morning, a steep staircase of rock leads to the letterbox at the summit. The peak owes its name to a dog, first to arrive up there according to the first climbers’ bet. It is all told in my climb up Pic Boby. The climb had begun across crossing the Horombe plateau.

On the south-west coast around Tuléar: Ifaty to the north, Anakao to the south, behind the world’s second largest coral reef. Only Australia’s is bigger. This is Vezo country, “those who paddle”: their outrigger canoes are carved from a single trunk, their sails sewn from rice sacks and their nets woven from tyre rubber. On the beach, Vezo women wear the masoanjony, a beauty mask of ground wood that shields the skin from the sun and passes from mother to daughter, often decorated with painted flowers. The parade of sails at sunset is worth the trip on its own: it is in my days with the Vezo fishermen.

Because at sunset its giants turn into shadow puppets: the most photogenic moment of my Malagasy journey. Madagascar counts seven baobab species while continental Africa has only one. Along the way, near the RN35, the sacred baobab receives conches, bottles and red-and-black cloth as offerings to the ancestors, and the lovers’ baobab is said to bring luck to couples who stand at its feet. I glimpsed my first baobabs from the barge on the Tsiribihina; the last ones blazed in the low light near Morondava. The sunset is in my evening on the Avenue. The river journey fills the long quiet river.