Beyond the Horizon - Exploring Madagascar's Far North

A large island floats serenely in a rings of sapphire and turquoise. A larger body of green mountains lies some distance away, the mainland I assume as the aircraft banks away and and we see once more nothing but ocean though the starboard window we are sitting next to. A dhow appears with it’s blue sail, cutting towards a shoreline that is again becoming visible as we descend towards the water. The plane flares gently and palm trees whip by as we land on the ridiculously short run and trundle up to a tiny, but still international, airport building. A wave of wet heat washes over us as the stewardess opens the hatch door. Stepping out, a big sign with ‘Welcome to Nosy Be’ can be seen near the entrance to the building. We’re here. 

Children herding zebu cattle across a flooded estuary in the late afternoon near Maromandia

The first time I looked down from the plane over Madagascar as we crossed over the azure coloured reefs and tidal flats near Morondova, I remember wondering whether there would be a return to the brown hilly landscape below. We hadn’t even landed and I was wondering about the future. Silly in retrospect, but this was a step into the unknown for our nascent photographic travel company. Fast forward and I have been down the western coast and back up the spine of Madagascar to the sprawling capital of Antananarivo multiple times. Each time has been an extraordinary adventure. Each time several more portfolio images result. Each time I am blown away by this incredible country, so similar and yet so vastly different the large continental mass to it’s west. 

After a fantastic workshop in 2023, two photographers who had joined me said, ‘well if you ever decide to travel to the north, we’ll join! Challenge accepted and we started to work on an itinerary for Madagascar’s far north. For anyone who has travelled to the south and centre of the island, they know that moving about the country can be difficult and slow. The north is harder. Nosy Be is a tourist haven for the country, but few travellers venture beyond the island and its outlying archipelago. This becomes immediately apparent the moment you leave the small boat harbour at Ankify on the Madagascan mainland and travel away from the coast. Violent cyclones last year and the beginning of this year ravaged the road network and its bridges. In some places the resultant potholes are literally so large that vehicles descend into them via earth slopes while the other side of the road remains above the vehicle’s roofline. More sinkholes than potholes. Massive roadworks are taking place between Ambanja and Antsiranana though, repairing and upgrading effectively the main road between the principle towns of the north.  

Despite landing in Nosy Be, we quickly made our way to the mainland of Madagascar and worked our way south to Maromandia. On the edge of a large wetland area we were able to find the elusive ‘Blue-eyed Lemur’. So few tourists venture to this part of Madagascar that there is literally only one small locally owned lodge in the area. By lodge, I mean a grouping of small thatched huts. Showers are bucket showers and the scant electricity is courtesy of an overworked solar panel. The hosts are effusively welcoming and accommodating. It still feels a little bit like we stepping out of a UFO though as we pull into the small dirt parking area where we are staying. 

A local Malagasy boy revels in the waters of the bay at Vohemar on the east coast of the island

Part of the adventure of traveling in Madagascar is the fact that despite being a tourist, you meet and interact with the local people of the areas that you visit in a way that tourists often bypass. You aren’t molly-coddled in hotels, and ushered about by people who always speak the same language as you. There is a genuine sense of exploration and of discovery as you walk through the villages and engage with the people you meet. In this way we duck between hamlets and through small orchards as our guides, local farmers and fishermen, lead us to where the lemurs were last seen. 

These strange enigmatic creatures are of course one of the primary reasons for visiting the north of Madagascar. Although lemurs are found throughout the island, it is in the densely forested north that they really thrive. There are over 100 distinct species of lemur in Madagascar, with over a third being critically endangered. Just about all of them are found in small pockets where they are endemic not just to the island, but to the tiny area that they are found in. So we visited Maromandia in order to see the Blue-eyed lemur, Daraina to see the Golden-eared Sifaka and Nosy Komba to see photograph the Black lemur. The north with it’s wide variety of lemurs is a paradise for wildlife photographs wanting to create images of these inquisitive prosimians. 

Late afternoon light washes over the limestone massif known as a tsingy locally. Tricky to climb and access, these rock formations make for an incredible photographic subject.

From a landscape perspective it is the massive tsingy’s of the north that are a highlight. From Maromandia we traveled to the complex of limestone tsingy’s around the massive Ankarana. Although not unique to Madagascar, tsingy is the Malagasy name for limestone karst rock formations. They appear like a forest of sharp knives. Limestone, which is a sedimentary rock that has formed at the bottom of the sea over millions of years. When exposed over time these limestone plateaus become eroded through water erosion from above and below, creating extraordinary cave systems under the limestone surface, and forming the knife edge shards above. 

From previous experience in Tsingy de Bemahara in Madagascar’s south, we decided to avoid the large national park of Tsingy de Ankarana. As incredible as these locations are to visit, they are decidedly difficult to photograph due to the inability to get into the parks timeously. Gates open late, close early, and there is a decided lack of pace by park authorities in terms of getting to viewpoints for the best light in the early morning and the late afternoon. Instead, we headed towards the southern edge of the Ankarana complex to a smaller tsingy called the Tsingy Grigi e Grotta (the cave of eels tsingy). This small offshoot belongs to the local community that have teamed up with the owners of Iharana (the Malagasy word for tsingy) Bush Camp. From here we had privileged access to the tall peaks of the tsingy during the best light. In future we’ll even try for some milky way photography amongst the rocks, but access in and out of the limestone formation is always tricky and requires some physical dexterity. 

The Milky Way rises over the melted wax like structure of the Tsingy Rouge near the east coast of Madagascar

Certainly less physical dexterity and strenuousness is required to photograph the equally fascinating Tsingy Rouge. The Tsingy Rouge, or Red Tsingy, is a unique sandstone formation in northern Madagascar. That is eroded by water flow into the Irodo River. The red soil of the region is a type of laterite soil, meaning that it has a high mineral content (rich in iron oxides), and which which gives its distinctive reddish-orange hue. Rainfall, rivers, and wind have gradually worn away the softer parts of the sandstone, leaving behind the striking, melting wax like sculptural spires that make the Tsingy Rouge famous. 

One of the most extraordinary experiences here was making our way to the base of the one of the canyons to photograph the Tsingy Rouge with the rising band of the Milky Way above. The red limestone spires stood like silent sentinels, glowing faintly in the moonlight. We set up for long exposures and Milky Way images beneath the clearest of night skies. No wind, no hum of activity (save for a dog barking in some distant village)—just complete stillness, broken by the occasional murmuring of one of the photographers in our group. It’s hard to explain the feeling: somewhere between awe and serenity, as if the entire universe was leaning in to listen. Sitting there with nothing but the shutter’s quiet click and the Milky Way overhead is mesmerising! 

Before we had made our way to the Tsingy Rouge we had first visited the very far wind-swept northern shores of Madagascar at Diego Suarez. Here we encountered the extraordinary sculptural forms of the mangroves trees on the vast flats of the Baie Androvabazaha. This was an important bay in the second world war, now remembered through empty bunkers and massive gun emplacements that cover the limestone cliffs as they face the ocean. Now long dhows and smaller pirogues plough the waves of the bay’s opening, their sails cracking jokes at the rusting barrels of long-forgotten canons. 

Steve looking up through a skylight hole in the enormous bunker and naval canon emplacement on near Diego-Suarez.

The bustle and business of Antsiranana (the local name for the originally named Diego Suarez) stands as quite a contrast the slower rural pace of the villages. Market trade takes place on virtually every street corner with a riot of colour and smells. Garishly painted shop fronts complete with drab adobe walls and and hastily whitewashed wooden planking, now faded to yellows and and browns. The windows are wound down in the vehicles as we slowly move through traffic; pedestrian, zebu driven oxcart, old Renault 4s, cameras lean out of the windows as our group does a spot of ‘drive by shooting’, catching the life lived out on the street. 

The edge of town appears quite suddenly and we whisk past rice fields ranging from lime green to sun soaked yellow. The north with its warmth and higher rainfall means that the field produce two crops of the staple food a year. Double the yield obtainable through most of the south. A good thing too considering the vast amount of rice that is consumed annually by the island (apparently the average Madagascar consumes 136 to 153 kilograms of rice per). Although the diet is heavily influenced by European diet and foods, it is not uncommon to see rice being eaten three times a day. 

Angela photographing one of the ubiquitous Renault 4 taxis paked outside a hotel near the Parque Montagne D'Ambre.

The rice fields slowly start giving way to denser forest and hills. A layer of misty cloud hangs over a tall mountain ahead. Amber Mountain rises up from the agricultural fields as a densely forested peak, crowned in white cloud. The Parque Montagne D’Ambre is one of Madagascar’s richest biodiversity spots. After meeting up with our local guides (you pretty much need local guides at all of the protected areas) we immediately get shown a variety of species from leaf-tailed geckos to minuscule nano-chameleons that are no larger than one’s pinkie finger nail (the Mount d'Ambre leaf chameleon - Brookesia tuberculata). Meanwhile Sanford’s Brown lemurs leap from branches above in the forest canopy while we walk along damp leaf strewn paths towards Caskata Sakra (Sacred waterfall). With condensation occurring almost daily, the park is home to several beautiful waterfalls, several of which are considered sacred by the local communities. Red and white cloth hangs from a tree near the Caskata Sakra indicating its sacred stature, but we are still allowed to take photographs of the beautiful falls, and our guides quickly show us not only how to get to different angles of the falls by avoiding the sacred area (seemingly only near the cloth and directly in the spray of water), but also of the multitude of species in the undergrowth ad branches of trees near where we are shooting. No surprise considering the park is home to seventy-five species of birds, twenty-five species of mammals, and fifty-nine species of reptiles. 

Our whistle stop visit to the park is far too short before we have to head off to the Tsingy Rouge. Very quickly it’s realised that more time will be be necessary inside the park, so we leave knowing that following workshops to the north will include more time in this spectacular rainforest setting. 

From the wet forests and eroding tsingy’s we backtracked towards and Ambilobe and then cut eastwards towards the Vohemar on the east coast. If we thought that there had been few tourists before, we were stunned by the almost complete lack of outsiders now. Extraordinarily few tourists make their way to this portion of the island. Partly this is due to the poor road infrastructure. However, two year’s ago a new Chinese built road was completed between Ambilobe and Vohemar. It has cut the travel down from two days to two hours. Possibly more tourists will make their way here in future, but for the time being it was essentially us and a small group of Polish cyclists. Even in the town of Vohemar where we stayed at a hotel that looked like something out of a 1960s movie - the ‘Hotel Baie de Iharana’, their is scant evidence of tourism. The result being that local beachgoers look on quizzically as we wander down the sand towards the tiny one quay port to photograph pirogues as they set off to cross the bay in the evening.

A blue-eyed lemur stares back at us in the forests that surround the local rice-fields in Maromandia

What draws us to this truly far-flung corner of Madagascar is the Protected Loki-Manambato area. This is an enormous dry woodland biome that is home to the endangered Golden-eared Sifaka, as well as the almost mythical Aye-aye. We bump down a rarely used sand road along with our specialist guide to the foot of a range of hills. From hear we take an easy hike along a rarely used path into the forest, crunching over bone-dry leaves as we wend our way deeper. A faint sound like a high-pitched baby’s murmur and we see the rust tinged white of a Sifaka staring back at us from his perch a few metres above. A Long white tale, graceful limbs and a serious expression as the Sifaka stares languidly back at us. It’s still fairly early in the morning so the conspiracy (yes, that is indeed what a group of lemurs is called) is still fairly inactive, soaking up the morning sun rather than bouncing from tree to tree.

We leave the group and make our way deeper into the forest, stopping to photograph the occasional gecko, snake or scorpion. As with all the other forests we have seen, it is teeming with quiet life. All it requires is looking carefully to find something under the leaves, behind some bark, or straight out staring at you in the face from a treetop vantage. 

It isn’t just wildlife in this part of the world that is fascinating to encounter. After a quick snack and some more time spent with the now very active family of Sifaka, we made our way an artisanal mining site. Here, local miners dig deep pits, transport the soil and pan for gold along the winding river’s edge. ‘Bemused’ would probably be the best description of how they regarded us as we wandered into their camp. Our guide is friendly with the families working their and is able to explain what they are doing. A trade of install portraits gets some time with individual miners as they demonstrate how they methodically sift their way through the tons of slurry. A tiny medicine

A gold miner panning for gold in a pit filled with water by the side of a river where ore has been dug from the ground to be panned for gold.

jar with a few grains of the precious metal is evidence of a week of work. Photographing these people brings home the reality and dissonance between their meagre earning and that of mining executives sitting in high-rise buildings in Sydney and London. 

The disparity of wealth is evident wherever you travel in Madagascar. Travel opens the mind as the adage goes. What it really does is open the eyes to anyone who is prepared to travel with a questioning mind. Madagascar is achingly poor, yet the people are happy and content in most of our encounters. I would say far more so that a lot of other African countries that I have visited. There is glaring inequality between the rich and the poor, as there is in our own home country of South Africa. The difference is that in the latter there is a near constant discussion around the income disparity and the plight of the poor. There is significantly less of that seemingly on the Island. I say this not as a criticism, but more as an observation of a country left behind in many ways by the rest of the world. The antiquated Peugeot 404 pickups and Renault 4 taxis are partly testament to this. Remove the ads for Orange and Telma cellular services and you could quite easily be walking the streets of Madagascar in the 1970s, or even earlier. 

You are hurtled into the present once, more on the small tropical island of Nosy Be. Our last two nights are spent along the much visited strip of beach on the western side of the Island. Modern, white sided hotels vie for clientele from Europe. Pale-skinned tourists lie baking in the sun, occasionally turning over to obtain and even medium to medium rare bake. The sounds of French, Italian and Portuguese (as well as some English) drown out the Malagasy and French Patois of the islanders. 

The interior crater lakes of Nosy Be as seen from a drone near Mont Passot, the tallest peak in Nosy Be. The mainland of Madagascar can be seen in the distance.

Here we make our way in the late afternoon to the popular sundowner spot of Mont Passot. This, the tallest peak of a long extinct volcano is named after the equally long expired French Captain Pierre Passot who was responsible for the ceding of the Island to the French (as well as the acquisition of Mayotte to France during the ‘Scramble for Africa’ by the European powers - with scant disregard to the opinion of the locals of course). Mont Passot is a Mecca for the Nosy Be tourists; apparently THE place to watch the sun go down from the off-shoot island. An alien site to us after traveling across the north of Madagascar and barely seeing any other tourists. The busy thrum of buzzing bees marks the dozen or so drones that are launched into the air to capture the dying light as it sets over the Mozambican Channel. 

Despite the tourists, the sunset is indeed beautiful as we watch the great fiery orb dip slowly into the dark blue waters somewhere towards the Comores (not that we can see them of course). There’s a sense of disbelief as we wind our way back along the narrow road to our hotel near the small town of Dzamandzar. It’s been an extraordinary two weeks exploring Madagascar’s North. Embarking on the plane back to Johannesburg feels like we have left something unfinished. There’s more to see. There are more images to make, people to meet, landscapes to see. We’ve peeked past the horizon and discovered there’s a whole new world out there. We’ll be back! 

Join us on next year's Beyond The Horizon photographic workshop. Click on the link to find out more: Beyond The Horizon.