I am on my last full day in Madagascar, sitting at breakfast in my beachfront hotel in Morondava, on the west coast, facing the Mozambique Channel.
I won't write a full trip report, but if you would like details, please let me know. I blog about my travels and can share photos, but it's all still in progress, as this has been a very full itinerary, and there hasn't been a lot of time to write or organize the zillions of photos I've taken.
I did Madagascar: The Lost Continent, a 15-day tour with Explore! (https://www.explore.co.uk/holidays/madagascar-wildlife-tour). There were just three of us on the tour, all solo male travelers: another American and a Dane. About a month beforehand I got a call from Explore! to ask if I wanted to change to another date with more people, but they assured me it was a guaranteed departure, so I (and the other two gents) stuck with the date, and I'm glad I did. It was great to travel in such a small group. That tour started and ended in Antananarivo (colloquially referred to as "Tana"), the capital city.
At the end I did a private tour that I booked through TourHQ. (https://www.tourhq.com/tours/78332/4-day-tour-of-tsingy-and-baobab-avenue-from-morondava). I flew from Tana to Morondava, where my guide met me at the airport for the drive north to Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park, where I stayed 3 nights. That tour ended last night when they dropped me off at my hotel here. And I booked one final night here before I head home.
First off, a review of the two tours: Both were 5 stars out of 5. Awesome guides, awesome itineraries. Any negatives (and there were a few) were no fault of either tour operator. They handled everything brilliantly.
I'll get the negatives out of the way:
- Infrastructure here is very poor. Road conditions are abysmal. Distances between locations were long, and made longer by the need to navigate massive potholes and interruptions in the asphalt. The drive from Morondava to Tsingy and back is not even on a road at all, but on a dirt track that is badly rutted. On some days we averaged under 20 mph, and when you're driving 160 miles, that's a long, jostling, grueling drive. Call it the Madagascar Massage. And there's just no way to avoid it if you come here, because there's no way to break up the trip into smaller segments.
- I encountered poverty at levels beyond anything I've seen anywhere else. Madagascar is somewhere around the sixth poorest country in the world based on GDP per capita. I never became inured to it. Every time we stopped at a viewpoint or a rest stop, throngs of local residents, mostly children, came running to meet us, hoping for some sort of handout. At tourist sites, vendors selling souvenirs (some of which were very nice, handcrafted stuff) were relentlessly persistent.
- Internet was very spotty on the road, and Wifi wasn't always good at hotels. Sometimes I had to go to the lobby or restaurant to connect.
- Hotels ranged from super luxurious 5-star quality to... well let's just say lower. Most did not have nightly housekeeping, no shampoo, just a tiny bar of soap. Showers sometimes had minimal hot water. There was no heat, and winter nights in some areas were quite chilly. Bedsheets were not the softest. But rooms were clean and comfortable.
I'll continue with the positive in the first comment.