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 | Madagascar.Places. |  |
| Madagascar has so many wonderful places to visit
that the best way
to see them all would be to go and live there for a year or two! We
have been to Madagascar three times now and have only managed to visit
a very limited area of this gigantic island. In 2001 we drove from
Antananarivo to Tulear via Isalo National Park on the way to a solar
eclipse. You could spend weeks exploring the Isalo area alone. Isalo is
famous for being the home of Benson's Rock Thrush, Monticola bensoni,
one of the rarest birds in the world. The International Union for the
Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the Benson's
Rock Thrush as being "nearly endangered" due to habitat loss, which is
a recurring problem in Madagascar. After we saw the solar eclipse in
Morombe on the west coast (see www.ecliptomaniacs.com) we tried to
drive north to Morondava with a view to seeing the famous Avenue de
Baobabs. However due to numerous technical and biological issues,
illness amongst the group to be precise, we had to abandon that idea
and retreat back to Antananarivo. So in 2004 I returned with a smaller group and after spending a magic laid back week in The Bamboo Club in Ifaty we traveled down the Tsiribihina river by boat and this time managed to see Morondava, The Avenue de Baobabs and Kirindy Forest. It was well worth the travel and only served to whet my appetite for more trips. In 2007 we returned with a larger group of nine people, armed with digital cameras this time, again traveled down the Tsiribihina river by boat but this time managed to get to The Tsingy de Bemaraha World Heritage site,the Manambolo Gorge, Kirindy and the Avenue de Baobabs with a few days at the very end of the trip in Chez Maggies in Morondava to recover, and I tell you we needed that rest. In 2007 the temperature was around 28-32 Celsius each day. We are just not used to those temperatures and combined with the humidity some of the group suffered a lot with the heat. Once we had returned to Ireland we began to reflect on what had been our best trip to Madagascar so far. Click on the links above left for more information and photos. |